Relational Transilience in the Garden: Plant–Human Encounters in More-than-Human Life Narratives

2.1 Mark Cullen, Escape to Reality (2018)

Escape to Reality (2018) is a collection of vignettes in which Mark Cullen looks back on 40 years’ worth of experience as a plantsman in Canada and reflects on how human-plant relations have changed in his lifetime.^[11] The book, co-written with his son, illustrates the workings of symbiotic transilience in all but the name: it opens on the health benefits of plant encounters and maps the rise of a more-than-human mentality as Canadian gardeners develop an “interest in attracting pollinators, creating biodiversity, and pursuing the social benefits of the gardening experience through community gardens, social media and even farmers’ markets” (Cullen & Cullen, 2019, p. viii). Cullen frames the garden as a space from which to grow a prosperous future. He traces more-than-human interconnectivities from the various critters at work in the soil through relations between human gardeners, farmers and urban planners before “Sowing a Vision” (Cullen & Cullen, 2019, p. 113) in times of climate change. The book gently raises ecological awareness as Cullen covers trends relatable to garden lovers across the country and beyond and imparts practical tips. It is not until halfway through the book, in an epistolary chapter titled “Dear Garden, I have changed,” that Cullen reveals himself to be “a cancer survivor” (Cullen & Cullen, 2019, p. 77). Here, plants, trees in particular, come to the fore as agents he seeks out to process his diagnosis:

The day the doctor gave me the bad news I drove slowly, in search of some green space. I found a small park…with one large tree growing on the margin of the parking lot. I sat on the cool green grass, looked at the tree, and began asking questions. When I arrived home, I sat on the front porch and watched the feathered wildlife while I continued to ask questions, this time directing them to no one in particular. But the big oak tree in our front yard seemed to be listening. (Cullen & Cullen, 2019, pp. 78–79).

The passage is quite literally anthropo-central, yet it illustrates that human centrality does not equal coming first. Its tentative and exploratory tone stands out from the rest of the text. Until this point, Cullen conveyed his message with a degree of authority, enlivened by anecdotes, backed by quotations and statistics. Here, by contrast, a frontier of human knowledge is reached and plants take over. The epistolary chapter heading is telling: while the human is doing all the talking, trees are depicted as active listeners. Any answers given are non-verbal and do not easily translate into the conversational temporalities of “human doings”.

As documented by the existence of the book, Cullen develops transilience: he adapts to his new circumstances and changes his pace to combine healing with learning. Prompted by the example of trees, he embraces a fallow period of non-moving, sketching a recovery period spent observing, listening and dreaming as he processes the plants’ subtle lessons on change. Cullen’s plant encounter engenders a greater appreciation of the present, with a commitment to more mindful behaviour, to actively listen, observe, create, nurture and detach from goal-directed actions: “I will get off the ride-on mower and spend more time wandering through my apple orchard without any specific purpose, other than just doing it” (Cullen & Cullen, 2019, p. 79). His list is consistent with the process of “gardening the mind” as envisaged by Stuart-Smith in which the “protected physical space” of the garden allows “[i]deas that have been lying dormant [to] come to the surface and thoughts that are barely formed sometimes come together and unexpectedly take shape” (Stuart-Smith, 2020, p. 13). “Escape to Reality” as outlined by his book thus involves a dialogue between hard facts and histories on the one hand and new ways of making space for emergent ideas and practices.

2.2 Debi Goodwin, A Victory Garden for Trying Times (2019)

Debi Goodwin’s Victory Garden for Trying Times (2019) begins as a record of her mission to grow healthy food in order to help her partner, fellow author and producer Peter Kavanagh, fight cancer. Throughout the bulk of the narrative plants are recruits in this project: between describing doctors’ appointments and other day-to-day experiences, Goodwin plants vegetables and explains which health benefits justify a particular plant’s inclusion in her victory project. But then Peter passes quickly due to unforeseen complications, before the garden gets its chance. With no more victory in sight, the narrative shifts to recounting how the garden helps the author grieve. She recounts a more-than-human epiphany in the garden which breaks the paralysis of shock when she comes across what turns out to be a “mourning cloak butterfly” on a maple her late husband specifically asked her to plant (Goodwin, 2019, p. 167). Esoteric in tone yet practical in effect, this encounter redirects Goodwin to self-care, with plant care acting as a mediator that helps her realise she needs to do something to adapt to her changed circumstances: “The next day, I decided I had to get back to the garden” (Goodwin, 2019, p. 167). Goodwin’s experience illustrates a process described by Stuart-Smith to illustrate how interacting with plants fosters a belief in continuity: “Melanie Klein alludes to this in one of her papers on the subject of mourning where she writes “The poet tells us that Nature mourns with the mourner.” She goes on to show how, in order to emerge from a state of grief, we need to recover a sense of goodness in the world and in ourselves” (Stuart-Smith, 2020, p. 19). As Goodwin alternates between the bureaucracy of death and getting the garden back into shape, she learns to process the linearity of human death with the help of the plants’ cyclical rhythms of regeneration: victory is not a moment but a rhythm. In this relational braiding of human and plant lives, it is a food crop which marks a subtle shift towards embracing futurity:

As I carried out the garlic I’d grown in my Victory Garden, I told myself I was just doing a job on a list. I reminded myself that grief, like writing or keeping a garden, is step by step, clove by clove. Besides, if I were alive the next year, I’d still have to eat. But as I knelt on the ground, some of the old magic came back. Not a thrill, exactly, like I was birthing new plants or anything that profound. But a spark of faith that the cloves I was dropping into the soil would survive buried in the darkness; that once again they would slowly transform into fat roots and healthy shoots (Goodwin, 2019, p. 189).

The memoir shows multiple exchanges in which human and non-human voices and lives, singularities and polyphonies overlap, detach and reconnect in a shared dynamic where the voice that ultimately aids the narrator’s recovery is non-verbal. In the process of comparing her fate to the vegetables she is planting Goodwin depicts herself in a live diorama in which seed, root, garden and gardener blend together: “as I stood in the peace of our yard, listening for the songs of birds and a single voice that had disappeared, I knew that somewhere inside me I had … a will to push myself into the light again” (Goodwin, 2019, p. 189). Like Cullen’s trees, Goodwin’s garlic helps her adjust to change, eventually recognising motion as progress: “The garden had no clear answers for me that fall day; all it could do was allow me the quiet and the space to jump from despair to hope to despair” (Goodwin, 2019, p. 190). In this interweaving of thought, emotion and embodied actions, Goodwin ascribes the improvement of her mental condition to a chemical response enabled by gardening: “I couldn’t put my finger on what I was feeling until later, when I read some research that claimed that mere contact with Mycobacterium vaccae, found in soil, releases serotonin in the brain” (Goodwin, 2019, p. 190). The experience of what Donna Haraway terms “becoming with” other species (Haraway, 2016), in this case, mostly with plants, and the reciprocity Goodwin experiences in the garden eventually produce the relational act of claiming victory by writing about the garden and thereby reaching out to a future beyond her own.

2.3 Rosie Kinchen, The Ballast Seed (2023)

According to Henry Mitchell, “no gardener needs reminding that life depends on plants.” (Mitchell, 1999, p. 3). But not everyone is a gardener, as exemplified by journalist Rosie Kinchen: “Gardening had never interested me in the slightest. Quite the opposite, in fact” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 50). So for her to discover a correlation between her own well-being and plants, and to write a book about this, makes for quite a transformation. Kinchen’s story also lends support to my argument that reading about plants and mediatised plant–human relations can enhance empathy for more-than-human lives: the author’s study of plants is in part motivated by a visit to the Marianne North gallery in Kew and subsequent perusal of North’s plant-hunting memoir.

Whereas Goodwin finds her life derailed by death, The Ballast Seed (2023) depicts a crisis caused by a birth, an unplanned and difficult one, of a newborn who turns out to suffer from food intolerances. The book outlines how Kinchen overcomes her postnatal depression with the help of plants and horticultural therapy. Connections between motherhood and the growing of plants have recently gained critical and popular attention,^[12] but in practice, Kinchen’s pregnancy jeopardises her professional identity and social status, confirming her belief that motherhood is not “the right job” for her (Kinchen, 2022, p. 12). If the early stages of her narrative see her roaming London’s green periphery with her pram, consigned to the margins by biology and resenting it, her isolation sends her on a journey of discovery of the plant world. The surprise recovery of a drowned aloe makes her feel like a legitimate caregiver when nothing else does: “The plant was indeed alive – happy, even. I had saved it from its dismal fate” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 49). The “lift” this results in mainly comes from the notion “that some sort of communication had taken place. I had always liked plants but I thought of them as decoration… Now I realized that they were sentient; they could tell me things, they could react and respond” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 49). Plants help Kinchen resolve her body and mind dichotomy, notably during a visit to Kew Gardens as the atmosphere in a greenhouse, reminiscent of her time in the Caribbean, has a restorative effect both on herself and her baby. Prompted by a site “built to show man’s triumph over nature” where “nature had won” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 35) she begins to unpack her maternal family’s entanglements with the colonial spice trade and confronts her dislocation as “the white baby” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 13) in an ethnically mixed family of migrant and peripatetic backgrounds.

The narrative shows Kinchen grow transilient through plant discoveries and the various layers of more-than-human embeddedness they lead her to explore, from befriending a deceased imperialist to noticing landmark plants and eventually joining a horticultural therapy group and signing up for a course on botany. Plant care helps Kinchen come to terms with her doubts about maternal and other forms of care in the human sphere. The eponymous ballast seed she aligns with epitomises such detachment from self-determination: “trade vessels carried ballast… In among this ballast were seeds, tiny stowaways hitching a ride from port to port. These seeds remained dormant until the ballast was dumped on heaps outside harbours, often clandestinely to avoid taxes. … ballast heaps were thriving habitats. Some [seeds] are still lying there, waiting for the right conditions in which to grow” (Kinchen, 2022, p. 1). In the spirit of making room for such wider temporalities she begins to regrow the creativity that eventually leads her to commit her plant relations to print, integrating her plant learning and her writing persona.

2.4 Alice Vincent, Rootbound. Rewilding a Life (2019)

Compared to Kinchen’s troubles, a painful breakup in one’s 20s as detailed in Rootbound: Rewilding a Life (2019) might seem a minor inconvenience. But in times of precarity and gentrification, it can cause a complicated uprooting. For a millennial adept at collaboratively processing personal experience via social media (such as the author’s now-defunct blog, Noughticulture), this is a subject for a minute redrawing of the boundaries between private and public spheres.^[13] Since Alice Vincent is a passionate urban gardener, the resulting narrative blends dissolving her household with passages supplanting groundedness via plant and garden history. In a study on plants, place and movement, Edward Casey and Michael Marder assert that plant encounters can supply connectivity to the way we think: “The sensuous experience of the vegetal world reawakens in us another kind of thinking resistant to abstract and decontextualized thought” (Casey & Marder, 2024, p. xiii). If we grant that Vincent’s nomadic commute between couch surfing and her green balcony counts as something like the peripatetic exploration Casey and Marder discuss, Rootbound illustrates semi-embodied becoming-with plants as the narrator adopts plant-like sensibilities: plants “feel-think on the periphery of their sentient bodies, akin to plants that cognise the world on the outer edges of their extension (at the root tips, unfurling leaves, meristems promising future growth, etc.)” (Casey & Marder, 2024, p. xiii). Over the year it takes Vincent to settle into a new relationship, potted plants supply the eponymous rootedness as she identifies with their negotiations of limitations:

A rootbound plant will push at its boundaries, come to take on the shape of the container it inhabits, even pushing out at the holes in the bottom where water is supposed to flow. They need more – more nutrients from more soil; more space to expand – in order to reach their full potential. (Vincent, 2020, p. 94).

This is one of many instances where the narrator’s identification with plants reroutes a struggle to come to terms with a period of growth that feels like a regression. Plants open a vista of a different life and growth that induces her to rethink her relation to surface markers of success and progress. Similarly to the learning or healing processes depicted here, transilience eventually involves shifting focus to frame plant–human relations in more interdependent terms, as Vincent questions her own role in plant–human reciprocity: “if we only expect nature, or our gardens, to heal us – to make us feel better, to provide a balm or solace from our daily problems – how reciprocal can our relationship with the earth really be?” (Vincent, 2020, p. 54). The positive transformation that characterises transilience encompasses shared adaptation:

The more I garden and the more time I spend paying close attention to the weather and the life cycles of the plants I grow, the more aware I am of the climate crisis. I feel drought, heatwaves and strange, warm winters all the more fiercely because I see their effects in the garden. In looking blindly to gardens as spaces only to heal ourselves, we ignore the suffering we’ve inflicted on the earth in taking from it so relentlessly for centuries – and the opportunity we have to tread more gently. (Vincent, 2020, pp. 55–56).

As exemplified by this environmental widening of the lens, Rootbound records multiple learning processes, and it continues live acts of communication with the author’s online followers via platforms such as Instagram. While Vincent’s personal drama eventually resolves itself, her research into plant lives and the history of plant–human relations produces an awareness of a situation where no happy ending is in sight. We are nowhere near closure where environmental challenges and plant–human relations are concerned. But multimedia communities are becoming actively involved in raising awareness of plant perspectives. Not least due to the COVID pandemic, plant–human encounters have spread into cyberspace, especially in social media: platforms such as Instagram or Substack, relying on visual storytelling, photographs and videos, have proved fruitful sites for the proliferation of plant narratives and the formation of communities devoted to exploring human and plant entanglements. In view of this, the last garden narrative discussed here branches out into online media.

2.5 Joey Santore, Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t (2010ff)

The guerrilla gardening channel titled Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t, run by Joey Santore (aka Tony Santoro) takes more-than-human knowledge practices beyond the garden gate, or even house plant ownership, not just metaphorically.^[14] Santore affirms Stuart-Smith’s assertion that “gardening is… an intrinsically hopeful act and it is a reparative act but, particularly in the world today, it can also be a defiant act” (Stuart-Smith, 2020, p. 61).^[15] Delinquency is part of the persona this botanist assumes, along with an exaggerated accent, a narrative that jumps between socio-political rant and botanical lecture, and a style which derives its infotainment value from the unwonted contrast between expletives and scientific terminology. Many videos take the shape of rambles about the countryside, often in neglected fenced off areas, where Santore greets plants like old acquaintances, zooming his camera in to explain the plant’s adaptive advantages and morphology. Taxonomic details and botanical terminology are supplied in captions, belying the random nature of the enterprise. With self-deprecating titles designed to deride privilege in favour of a scatological style of protest, Santore’s channel embraces the aesthetic of a criminally flavoured subculture that despises present-day neoliberalism and capitalism at large, giving street cred not only to plants, but also to caring for and about them.^[16] Sharing a widespread passion for (true) crime the channel mobilises interest in restoring justice to the more-than-human downtrodden. Plants highlighted are usually native, often small and unassuming or disregarded as weeds. Imported and cultivated showier specimens such as those planted by city councils are pointed out only to gloat over how badly they fare, and invasive species are denounced as marauding enemies. Santore does not have much time for established institutions, so concluding an academic discussion with a glimpse of his work plants hope for killing the lawn within academia to make room for a future knowledge culture of active and creative plant thinking and doing.^[17] Highly articulate and knowledgeable, Santore downplays official qualifications and makes reference to his own ADHD, delinquent past and other items no one in their right mind would list in their CV. Describing himself as a college drop-out he aligns himself with the “weeds” he highlights while demonstrating a degree of expertise and communicative skills many tenured colleagues might envy, cogently explaining the complexities of the ailing ecosystem while seemingly ranting about bad city planning.

The law-breaking theme the channel invokes is grafted onto the message that what should actually be deemed illegal are the extractivist practices of the western world with its destruction of biospheres. These are epitomised by the chief target of Santore’s criticism, summarised by the slogan “kill your lawn.” His “Somewhat Verbally Abusive “Kill Your Lawn” Instructional Video Nice” (Santore, 2022) derides lawn maintenance as misguided and harmful, and he asks viewers to obtain a sag cutter from “home despot”, with bonus points for stealing rather than purchasing the tool. As the information box indicates, this comic stance has a more serious goal, which is to “kill the lawn within yourself”, making room for systemic change. Santore’s school of practical defiance makes ecological challenges accessible and entertaining to individuals around the world, breaking the apathy and crisis fatigue which is currently affecting most larger social and political systems. Santore’s channel pioneers a knowledge culture that takes Anthropocene concerns and plant science beyond the academic sphere.

Like the print narratives of plant encounters examined above, Santore’s channel demonstrates a quality of transilience which not only indicates an ability to cope with trying circumstances but to creatively transcend them with the help of plants, cultivating new media and rewilding science communication. His channel breaks boundaries, not only when he cuts through wire fences to trespass onto neglected properties, but also conceptually as it blends humour with education and practical hands-on activism. Liberating plants is symptomatic of liberating information and enabling people to rediscover local flora. Santore’s case highlights that if we are to collectively develop transilience and break the impasse of climate change fatigue we might need to adopt some of the non-hierarchical behaviours demonstrated by plants.

Through their more-than-human narratives, the writers discussed in this essay take their transilient developments beyond the private sphere of their individual tribulations, raising awareness of the fact that plants not only support people in and through crises of different kinds but may prompt and certainly deserve more response-ability, respect and reciprocity from human beings. Directing attention to emergent notions and letting other-than-human temporalities unfold rather than imposing human frames, such writings contribute to the advent of a more exploratory attitude towards environmental challenges which approaches on-going change with a willingness to make space for the more-than-human and search for more relational benefits.