| archaeology and memory
ANOTHER GREEN WORLD
BOOK REVIEW: PLANTS AS PERSONS: A PHILOSOPHICAL BOTANY
Review by Michael Little
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| “Plants as Persons” critiques long-held Western views of plants as mere resources, in contrast to indigenous and Eastern perspectives that recognize plants as sentient beings. The author presents revealing scientific research and advocates ecological restoration as an act of healing the divide.
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My work as a landscape architect began by growing plants. In my early twenties, I managed a 150-year-old walled kitchen garden for Brockwood Park School set in an old estate in Hampshire, England. For a couple of years, I rotated crops, pruned fruit trees, and grew salad vegetables in glasshouses. What I loved most was getting on my hands and knees, prying the rich soil to unearth a gaggle of yellow potatoes amidst the earthworms and feeder roots.
When I entered my master’s program in Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts I was shocked to learn the name of our first course: “Plant Materials”. Here we studied everything about the form, texture, color, and growing habits of the plants that would soon be animating our designs. Learning to recognize the winged seeds of the Norway Maple, or the sweet scented dry leaves of the Japanese Katsura was an exciting inroad into the world of plants – but the question still lingered: were plants really “materials”? I couldn’t quite think of plants in the same way as granite, brick, steel, and concrete.
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