# Notes on Narration: Species, Ecosystems, and Scale in Environmental Storytelling ## Notes on Narration: Species, Ecosystems, and Scale in Environmental Storytelling Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference 2025 Jessica J. Lee, *Writer and Author of "Dispersals"* ![](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2026-02/pink-01.png?itok=MTGWp1a9) My earliest plant memory is of my grandfather’s bonsai tree. It sat in a shallow rectangular pot on a smoked-glass consul table in the dining room of his home in Niagara Falls. At the time, I could not have told you what kind of tree it was. I knew only how the light filtered through the lace curtains to leave dappled shadow on its leaves. And that my grandfather tended the tree so carefully—with a tiny teapot to water it, and tiny scissors for trimming. I knew I wasn’t allowed to touch it—it sat among trinkets and picture frames, the sorts of things that even as a child I knew were for display only—and I had a feeling that this little tree represented quite a lot. My grandfather died 20 years ago, and to this day I do not know what happened to the bonsai. But I know that it sat in my mind like a call to remembrance: of that early connection with plants, of family, and of culture. ![Fukien Bonsai Tree](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/Bonsai%20tree.jpg?itok=VSBlJiJL) A few years ago, I asked my mother if she remembered what the tree was, and she said it was likely a Fukien tea tree. The Fukien bonsai tree became the first entry in a column I wrote for *Catapult Magazine* called “Non-Native Species,” which would later develop into the basis for my book *Dispersals*. Because I knew so little of the tree, it presented an invitation to research: both the specificities of my grandfather’s journey with the tree, and the wider cultural context in which my grandfather became someone who tended a bonsai tree. He was born in China, then moved to Taiwan at the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and then moved to Canada in the 1970s. He had lived through war with Japan, and had been part of a wave of Chinese nationalist colonization that followed on the heels of Japanese colonization in Taiwan. So my grandfather’s cultivation of a bonsai tree in Canada carried cultural significance, connecting him and my family to several cultural legacies. But the Fukien tea tree—known to science as *Ehretia microphylla* or *Carmona retusa*—also had stories beyond these personal, familial, and even political, cultural, and national scales. How had the tree arrived? What conditions had enabled that tree to emerge, and how did it continue to thrive within the tiny world my grandfather created for it? As a writer who has largely focused on plants, I think a lot about how we might tell stories in which humans are not at the center. How can we write stories about plants that aren’t simply stories about ourselves? And why bother trying? These questions present challenges for storytellers and nature writers like me. They are not merely abstract or philosophical; they are matters of craft. What new forms of writing might their answers require? What models exist and what novel constructions are waiting to take shape? I want to unpack these questions in a few ways: by inviting reimagining the traditional “nature” narrative, considering metaphor and its possibilities, borrowing and playing with structures from plants and fungi themselves, and lastly encouraging a many-tendrilled, hybrid approach to writing. ### Rethinking the Nature Narrative Like many readers, my first brushes with nature and environmental writing included the Romantics, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson, among others. Nature writing’s roots in early travelogue, map-making, botanical works, and natural history, however, meant I could not ignore its links to empire and notions of exploration. These roots have been meticulously unpacked by ecocriticism scholars in recent years. They call for critical engagement with the genre’s links to eighteenth-century notions of the picturesque and the sublime—and the poetic and artistic movements that dealt in such terms—and to demands that writers reimagine the natural historical, imperial, and nationalist tropes common to nature writing over the past century.[1](#references) From critically reimagining what the poet Kathleen Jamie has termed the “lone enraptured male” trope to improving representation for disabled writers and writers of color, nature writing in our present moment has become a space fraught with tension and new possibility.[2](#references) At the heart of these concerns lies a notion that traditional nature writing reinforced a framework wherein, as NYU professor Mary Louise Pratt explains, “naturalist revenants remind us that the Anthropocene chronotope leaves humans, modern, Occidental humans, at the center of the narrative.”[3](#references) In this framework, plants become just another thing to order in a world under human dominion. No wonder, then, that the British nature writer Richard Mabey defines weeds as “plants out of place.” As he explains, “Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, or our tidy maps of the world.” At the same time, “If you have no such plans or maps, they can appear as innocents, without stigma or blame.”[4](#references) It is to this possibility—of an unordered, or perhaps differently ordered, nonhierarchical, messy, patchy world—that I want to appeal as an alternative and a challenge for us to communicate as plant (and fungal) thinkers and writers. And humans are not exempt from this messy new order, though we often try to exclude ourselves. As the cultural critic Raymond Williams reminds us in his 1972 essay on the idea of nature: “One touch of nature may make the whole world kin, but usually, when we say nature, do we mean to include humans?”[5](#references) In the past decade, and particularly under the current conditions of polycrisis, authors and critics have posed fundamental questions about the genre of nature writing in both its historical and contemporary forms.[6](#references) The first is whether nature writing has an ethical imperative at its heart: whether we have an ethical obligation to write crisis, and write *with* the more-than-human world—plants, fungi, animals, the more-than-human world broadly speaking—at the center of our stories. Assuming we do have such an ethical imperative, writers are presented with the creative challenge of *how* best to write about or account for the perspectives of the more-than-human world: Essentially, how do we write beyond our human experience? Can we imagine ourselves out of the frame, and ought we to? In response to the shift away from the traditional modes of nature writing—away from modes premised on discovery, imperial science, and narratives of conquering wilderness—and with these questions of ethics and ontology in mind, I argue that we must challenge storytelling conventions that have long shaped the genre. Perhaps it no longer makes sense to use a language of self-and-other, or of a single-voiced narrator, first or third person, hero, sole perspective. And what of linear narrative? What does a story structure look like in this swirling, interdependent mode where the world is almost wholly cognizant? What would it mean to reach toward plants themselves in our writing, and can we, with the linguistic tools we have at hand? In the opening pages of *Weeds and Wildflowers*, the poet Alice Oswald and artist Jessica Greenman answer this question evocatively*:* “\[T\]he plants come right up to the edges of their names and then beyond them.”[7](#references) ### “Fragile groupings” and Metaphors The Canadian-British-Japanese writer Kyo Maclear, who works across nonfiction, children’s literature, and illustration, offers an entire opus of works whose innovative hybridity grasps at this world’s complexity. In her book *Unearthing* she learns that her father is not her biological father, and subsequently seeks to regain lost stories and memories of him from a gardening mother with dementia. *Unearthing* offers the starkness of a world in climate crisis intertwined with, rather than simply as backdrop to, personal crisis. In one passage, Maclear describes a short group residency she undertook to study plants: “Fragile groupings. Perhaps that is what we are… Eight unrelated organisms briefly entwined, positing ‘tiny plant joys’ as proof of a wakeful, turning earth against the global roar of fascism; apocalyptic news of floods and storms and imminent ecological collapse.”[8](#references) Here, and throughout *Unearthing*, Maclear invites the reader to consider plant stories as a strand to be held together with the human. She likewise considers plant stories at multiple scales, weaving among elements in a fragmentary style that allows relation across scales to creep into the text: > In my residency room, the phone rings through the night, every few hours or minutes. Twenty-two straight calls. My mother is unanchored by my absence. Her voice tumbles into the quiet in the form of random questions and statements. Wake up. At 4 a.m., unable to settle back to sleep, I blurrily scroll through my phone—a whiplash of content that does nothing to soothe my twitching mind. The salty chocolate pudding is very good. Australia is burning . . . . > > Blood-orange skies and pink Martian suns. Blazing forests and trees reduced to charcoal poles. It is an otherworldly scene. > > *Omnicide* will be the word used by Danielle Celermajer, a professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, to describe the previously unwitnessed horror of Australia’s 2019–2020 bushfire season. ‘Humans, animals, trees, insects, fungi, ecosystems, forests, rivers (and on and on) being killed . . . in recent years, environmentalists have coined the term ecocide, the killing of ecosystems—but this is something more. This is the killing of everything.’ *Wake up.* > > . . . > > I return home to find my mother has jerry-rigged a complicated scaffold for our amaryllis with chopsticks and twist ties. The full moon tampers with our hearts. Across the city, the moon gleams over the greenhouse and somewhere inside it, pressed to glass, are five amaryllis keening for their cousins in Australia. All those plants down under are gobbling up the poison in the sky. Amaryllis can survive fire but how much fire and for how long?[9](#references) Maclear’s is a world where omnicide, dementia, familial stories, and houseplants exist interpenetrated by one another. She uses the page to reflect this: leaning into fragment, image, short chapters that offer vignettes followed by braided essays that weave between the personal and vegetal. The story moves between scales—together and at once—entangled. Plants are given equal weight on the page alongside the human: Indeed, they become a way in which she fundamentally *relates* to the other humans in the text. Where Maclear frames human- and plant-constellations as fragile groupings, she also tells us that “metaphor is a way of making family out of seemingly unrelated things.”[10](#references) So we have one more possibility for how we might tell these stories: the persistent haunting spirit of this volume, metaphor. Metaphors aren’t straightforward, and as biologist Andreas Hejnol reminds us, they “are always a double bind: they at once allow us to see and stop up our abilities to notice.”[11](#references) Metaphors, when too strongly adhered to, can limit our abilities to think with plants and fungi as they are. But Hejnol also concludes, “We need many metaphors—rhizomes and corals as well as bushy, gnarly trees.”[12](#references) He encourages us to borrow these images from the more-than-human world in our storytelling and thinking: rhizomes, webs, mycelium, ecosystems. How might we engage—perhaps even literally—with these shapes on the page? ### Meanders, Fractals, and Other Shapes As a creative writing lecturer, the question I’m most often asked by students is how to structure a work. And I often give a likely maddening reply, as I hand my students a giant roll of paper, a pad of Post-it notes, and a package of colorful markers, asking: What shape does your subject matter want to take on the page? ![Rhizome](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/rhizome.jpeg?itok=FRL3T7DZ) Scholars rarely consider the question of structure with as much freedom as creative writers. Academic conventions often take precedent. But if form should reflect content—and as a writer, I strongly believe it ought to—I propose we look to our subject matter, in this case plants and fungi, to inspire new structures. Jane Alison’s book *Meander Spiral Explode* offers some potential shapes to consider. Though it focuses on narrative structure in fiction, it is relevant to nonfiction—especially to those of us writing the more-than-human—in that she appeals explicitly to storytelling forms borrowed from the natural world: the conventional arc or wave, but also the story as spiral, as meander, as fractal, cell, or explosion.[13](#references) Each is patterned on existing phenomena: branching water courses, complex honeycombs, cellular leaf structures. In addition to these borrowed shapes, I would add structures like lists, marginalia, notes, or qualifications—forms that disrupt the subject-object dominance of the conventional page and encourage a more distributed or decentered mode of presenting information. We’ve seen this, for example, in Anna Tsing’s *Friction*, where she uses margin notes to add whole ecosystems back into the narrative along with qualifications and explanations.[14](#references) By engaging these structures, the worlds we write become incrementally less linear, more constellated. This play with the page invites us as writers, scientists, and communicators to loosen the strictures and conventions to which we’ve grown accustomed: to literally or metaphorically draw, sing, dance, or sculpt our work into a shape that feels representative of the story we are trying to tell. To bring the plants and fungi we are engaging with to the page. ### Many-Tendrilled Reaching Inspired by the shape of natural organisms, I argue in favor of multiple angles of approach in attempting to write a plant or fungal story: story told as weave, as braid, as fragment, as graft, and as gap. This is broadly speaking the approach I take in my book *Dispersals*, and one increasingly employed by nature writers who engage with hybrid forms. For example, the British-Kenyan poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s book *Twelve Words for Moss* weaves together personal reflection in traditional paragraph structures—bordering between conventional nature reporting and personal memoir—with sections of poetry responding to the species of moss she encounters in her journeys. In one section, she considers the heath star moss, *Campylopus introflexus*, in a poem titled “Merlin”: > Sea-hill, soil-hair, > > hoar-leaf, swell-swear > > an oath in a fertile pocket > > an inflorescent promise > > gathered in violets and torn > > from fretted rhizoids born > > in trailing burst of low stars > > where the milk tooth flowers > > *call it a spell or a longing* > > *call it a debt or a song* > > *in a language hidden* > > *from sight, call it birth-right* > > *in bubbling undercurrent* > > *its trembling powers*.[15](#references) Burnett precedes this poem with a short section of prose about walking through Avalon Marshes, and treats the mosses she encounters as exactly that: encounters. She writes, “With its distinctive white trailing hair, \[heath star moss\] is hypnotic.”[16](#references) She allows the mosses to invite sense impression and association, but does not impose terms from other (human) realms of inquiry, like science or history. The result is a meditative, sensory text that allows the reader to encounter a moss without much framing. The speaker’s perspective is not neutral or without context; Burnett is our guide throughout the memoir elements of the book. Rather than adding elements like history or science, she dwells largely in sensation. By writing with a focus on her encounters with the mosses, Burnett reaches toward the gap in how we account for a particular moss’s existence in our world: We experience it, draw out our associations. In moving between generic elements—from poetry to memoir-style prose and back—Burnett paints a picture of the moss that is uncertain, shifting, conjectural. Hybrid forms, prose-poetry, fragments, gaps, all help us in this act of reaching toward a plant on the page. By contrast, in *Dispersals,* when writing about the same species—considered in Europe and North America to be a significant invasive (to borrow the unhappy language of invasion ecologies) —I approach the moss not simply from my sense impressions but from a range of disciplinary angles—the historical and the ecological, particularly as it is presently understood by conservationists across Europe. I trace the heath star moss’s first recorded sighting in Britain, as well as the futile attempts of conservationists to eradicate it from dune habitats, where it is outcompeting local flora. The species is widespread, and because it a very small moss that spreads by spore and clonal reproduction, is now presumed by many to be impossible to eradicate. Tracing this story as a braided narrative of the plant’s bryological history, movement, range, and our human perceptions of it—as invasive, as passenger, as agent—alongside my personal connection to it, I conclude that this plant demands we think at a scale to which we are unaccustomed. I write: “More than any I have encountered, this is a species whose movements cannot be held at bay. To do so would require us to think and act beyond a scale to which we are accustomed. We do not know how to live at the scale of a moss fragment. Let alone a spore. How then can we learn to live with the heath star moss?”[17](#references) Both my text and Burnett’s engage with the moss in a many-tendriled way: through a range of generic forms and disciplinary enquiries. In writing of flora and funga, this mirroring of material form—tendrils, aerials, rhizomes, and roots—feels insistent. I frame this often as a methodological *reaching toward*. Where we cannot account for the plant or fungal mind as it is in the world, I propose we get ourselves as close as possible. Reaching serves to address the ethical calls for plant stories that decenter the human, while also honoring how our subject matter may engage in a range of ways of being in the world—ways that exist independent of us, and may defy our knowledge and telling. But in taking multiple approaches, telling many stories at once, often on the same page or at the same time, we leave room for possibility. *The story* becomes *a story*. In this act of reaching toward, we may tell human stories that are only possible because of plants. We may tell the scientific stories that try to strip back that humanness. We may engage with the silenced stories, the conjectural or imagined ones, and we may look for the overlaps. We may move between forms: poetry, fragment, prose in turn. We may tell as many stories as possible in a single work because somewhere in the gap between those stories we might find ourselves getting closer to the floral and fungal on the page. When it comes to plants and fungi—and so much else in the more-than-human world—we need a storytelling of plurality rather than sole truths; stories instead of story. We must get comfortable with writing where we cannot be definitive. What I’ve offered here is a methodology of writing open questions, where we cannot force argument or conclusions, but where formal innovation can help reflect that messy, living reality. ### Author Biography Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing, *Turning: A Year in the Water* (Hamish Hamilton, 2017), *Two Trees Make a Forest* (Hamish Hamilton, 2020), and *Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging* (Catapult, 2024), the children’s book *A Garden Called Home* (Tundra Books, 2024), and co-editor of the essay collection *Dog Hearted* (Daunt Books, 2023). She has a PhD in environmental history and aesthetics. Jessica is the founding editor of [*The Willowherb Review*](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__thewillowherbreview.com_&d=DwMF-g&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=SK9VpxgQKe1oymGlIJHb0bMABvf132PhLvXXtYcDdTs&m=6njALgeRZktANYkk4kgRzxGtOzFSEG_hopXic_w1a0uDUP2hw0OL0-8sc86lUUUZ&s=_T2DLgnMBj0LXjl1Ot0zuvanQK1ha7U9kohbEWfJjc4&e=) and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and the University of King’s College. ![Jessica J. Lee Headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2024-11/1PhotoCredRicardoRivas.JPG?itok=VHPI1c2X) #### Footnotes 1 See, for example, Michael P. Branch, “Before Nature Writing: Discourses of Colonial American Natural History,” in *Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism*, eds. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (University Press of Virginia, 2001) 92–107; and Jos Smith, *The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place* (Bloomsbury, 2017). [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 2 Kathleen Jamie, “A Lone Enraptured Male,” *London Review of Books* 30.5, March 6, 2008, . [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 3 Mary Louise Pratt, “Coda: Concept and Chronotope,” *Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet* (University of Minnesota Press, 201), G173. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 4 Richard Mabey, *Weeds* (Profile Books, 2012), 1. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 5 Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” *Problems in Materialism and Culture* (Verso, 1980), 67. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 6 See for example, Mark Cocker, “Death of the naturalist: why is the ‘new nature writing’ so tame?” *New Statesman*, June 17, 2015, ; and Catherine Buni, “Toward a Wider View of ‘Nature Writing,’” *LA Review of Books*, January 10, 2016, . [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 7 Alice Oswald and Jessica Greenman, *Weeds and Wildflowers* (Faber & Faber, 2009), iii. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 8 Kyo Maclear, *Unearthing* (One, 2024), 79. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 9 Ibid., 288–289. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 10 Ibid., 363. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 11 Andreas Hejnol, “Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors,” in *Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet*, eds. Anna Tsing et al. (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G87. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 12 Ibid., G100. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 13 Jane Alison, *Meander Spiral Explode* (Catapult, 2019). [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 14 Anna Tsing, *Friction* (Princeton University Press, 2004). See particularly the chapter “This Earth, This Island Borneo.” [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 15 Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, *Twelve Words for Moss* (Allen Lane, 2023), 50. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 16 Ibid., 48. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 17 Jessica J. Lee, *Dispersals* (Penguin, 2024), 171. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) #### Suggested Citation Lee, Jessica. "Notes on Narration: Species, Ecosystems, and Scale in Environmental Storytelling" in *Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World*, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026.