Phytopoetics: How Plants Shape Literature and Culture—and Why They Matter in Times of Crisis

By Joela Jacobs / Edited by Rachael Petersen

Plants impact human life in countless ways: oxygen, medicine, food, and much of what we wear, build, and use in our daily lives is owed to vegetal matter. But how have plants shaped culture, history, and the arts? Plants constitute both the material and conceptual bases of writing and are hence integral to the production of literature: from the tree that becomes paper and the plant ingredients of ink to the folio we “leaf” through and the page that shares its name with the leaf in many languages (such as the German Blatt and French feuille). 

As a scholar of literature, I study how the influence of plants extends beyond these foundations into language, storytelling, and poetics. Following on the heels of animal studies, the turn to plants and fungi in the humanities writ large and the field of literary and cultural plant studies in particular has changed the way we understand the vegetal in literature. No longer reduced to symbols and ornaments, plants are considered agents and actors in their own right. What changes when we read the rose in a love poem not as mere metaphor but as a living being with distinct capabilities? 

One outcome of taking this approach is the realization that plants have immense agency across literature, culture, and human history (if you want to see that for the rose specifically, look for my contribution to The Mind of Plants). In the context of my work, I have developed the notion of phytopoetics to describe the impact of plants on the human mind and imagination that is evident in both artworks and shifting cultural currents. But why phytopoetics?

Poetics, from the Greek term poiesis or “making,” describes the rules of writing, laid out since antiquity in works like Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. Just consult these works and you will know which literary form is best for which content. With the advent of modernity, this rule-based approach to literature has given way to experimentation. We now expect that authors innovate and develop their own poetics within familiar frameworks. 

In this vein, Jacques Derrida coined the term zoopoetics to describe Franz Kafka’s distinct writing about, or perhaps rather with, animals. Drawing on this concept in animal studies and taking into account Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis, or “making-with,” phytopoetics describes the co-creation of literature with plants. In other words, my research shows how plants impact human thought and writing to co-create culture phytopoetically. 

What does this look like concretely? One of the most salient examples of phytopoetics that I identified shows how discoveries about plant reproduction have shaped  modern ideas of gender and sexuality since the eighteenth century. In this context, advances in thebiological understanding of reproduction, such as the discovery of pollination, positioned plants as sexual beings. Eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus popularized a taxonomy that divided plants into twenty-four categories by type of sex distribution and reproduction, and literary authors like Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) responded with satire. The former symbol of chaste passivity, the flower, became representative of promiscuous sexuality in the literary texts of the time, and Enlightenment ladies were subsequently barred from botany (no matter how much Mary Wollstonecraft argued against it).

These anxieties returned in the nineteenth century, when the emerging scientific study of sexuality coincided with renewed fears about the ability of plants to contain both sexes at the same time, reproduce with themselves, and change sex. Charles Darwin’s and Ernst Haeckel’s work on evolution placed plants and animals in closer proximity to humans and ultimately prompted curriculum censorship in German schools around 1900. This botany ban was meant to prevent school children from learning about plant reproduction and evolutionary theory to keep them from discovering the possibilities of their own sexuality. Once again, literary texts responded with satire, including gems such as Oskar Panizza’s masturbating plants in a London park—code for men meeting each other for sexual encounters after dark.

In all of these contexts, what is natural endangers what is considered moral at the time (see similar cases with animals in the twentieth century). Indeed, same-sex desire has been called “a crime against nature” in legal paragraphs in many countries—a term that is invoked to this day by opponents of marriage equality. Whenever the fear of vegetal eroticism emerged throughout history, it was satirized in literary texts that were often censored to undermine a further proliferation of the imagination about plants (see my book for more detail). Phytopoetics thus shows the potent role of both plants and literature in these wide-ranging cultural shifts.

Today, we see a surge in discourses about “queer mushrooms” that highlight the many ways fungi can reproduce (they are even more versatile than plants, though of course sexuality does not simply equal reproduction). Accordingly, we might add mycopoetics to the list of ways in which human ideas of gender and sexuality continue to be shaped by discoveries about plants and fungi. By throwing human assumptions about what is moral, natural, or normal into disarray and shifting ways of thinking, phytopoetics is ultimately distinctly political. 

That is also the case in Black American poet-gardener Ross Gay’s writing, where I have most recently encountered phytopoetics, but in a very different way. Every five years, from birthday to birthday, he writes daily, by hand, about small encounters that delight him (click here for more tiny powerful things). His short essayettes are compiled in The Book of Delights series (2019, 2023). Many of these delights are about plants, and even in examples where the vegetal does not feature centrally, its presence is all over the margins: a squirrel dunking for seeds in a decaying Halloween pumpkin, a glove stuck to a tree branch as if it were waving, a neighbor who gifts freely from his fruit tree. 

Beyond his awareness of plants, I was struck by Gay’s particular style of long, stream-of-consciousness sentences that are only occasionally interrupted by a small sequence of rapid-fire short ones. The semantic and syntactic choices of his very short prose texts, so I argue, are phytopoetic because they attune us to plant time: they present a growth of associations and thoughts that requires us to slow down while reading, to return to the beginning in order to understand, and they add layer upon layer of meaning when re-reading (for historical precedent, see Goethe’s vegetal poetics). In other words, Gay’s phytopoetics resonate with the growth, cyclicality, and seasonality of plant time, as philosopher Michael Marder has put it. 

In drawing our attention to delights in the everyday, Gay slows us down and attunes us to a different way of experiencing time: that of the dandelion returning every spring; the deep time of the tree on our street; or the seed that stays dormant, only to grow when the time is right and be nourished by the decaying bodies of its ancestors. In a world faced with overwhelming challenges, such as an environmental crisis and war, rampant racism and misogyny, a global pandemic and other health emergencies, the focus on dandelions not ceasing to bloom anew each spring or the many events a tree has weathered intact during its life might make us look at our own lifetime differently. In a world of distractions and diminished attention spans, slowing down to focus on something we might otherwise rush past might alter how we engage with the world around us. 

Reading Ross Gay’s phytopoetics allows plants to impact how we see our environment, and it might sustain us or contribute to our resilience in difficult times. In this way, Gay’s phytopoetics is akin to a spiritual practice of political resistance. His approach resonates with impactful texts like Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 Hope in the Dark, which became a bestseller in 2016 again for featuring transformative victories in the history of activist struggle; or with Olga Tocarzuk’s reflections on “The Tender Narrator” in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which makes the case for a new narrative position of tenderness that accounts for the world as a whole—animals and plants included. All of these approaches take literature seriously, as a meaningful place to turn to in moments of crisis and a tool for change that connects the individual with the collective. In this vein, Ross Gay’s delights help us see the world from a different perspective, and his phytopoetic writing attunes us to what plants have to say to us in our current time.  

Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and the founder of the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network. Her research focuses on the intersections of 19th-21st century German literature and film with Plant and Animal Studies, Environmental Humanities, Jewish Studies, the History of Sexuality, and the History of Science. Her upcoming books include the monograph Animal, Vegetal, Marginal (Indiana University Press, 2025), a collected volume on Plant Poetics (Brill, 2025), and a German Cultural Studies Companion to Plants (Metzler, 2025).