Plants and Place: Cultivating Un/Belonging through Vegetal Tropes

When the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored the so-called Americas around 1800, he and his colleague Aimé Bonpland, along with many unnamed local people, famously collected a wide range of biological specimens but were especially interested in plants. It is a story of “exploration,” a term that describes a European becoming aware of a world that had existed quite well without their interference. As a result of his travels, Humboldt realized that plants grow in climate zones around the world—what will thrive at a certain latitude and elevation in one place will thrive at similar latitude and elevation in a different longitude—an observation that paved the way for ecological thinking. 

My own observation of this interconnectedness also required me to travel to a different climate zone. I grew up in Germany, and when I began graduate school at the University of Chicago, I observed small differences in the flora that did not seem very consequential. But when I moved to Arizona in the course of my career, I encountered an entirely different vegetation. Clearly, the climate of the Sonoran Desert could not sustain wild raspberries by the train tracks or daisies mingling with clover in front lawns, like in Chicago or Berlin. Only then did I begin to realize how specific my notion of nature was. The fact that it matched the landscape paintings in many museums was a sign of my Eurocentric experiences. 

When the Nazis introduced their idea of “blood and soil” over a century after Humboldt’s realization, they claimed that humans thrived only in their “endemic” environments.  This problematic idea resonates with the terminology of nativeness and invasion, which is applied to plants and people alike. One of their propaganda tropes was the notion of Jews as “desert dwellers.” They wanted to undermine Jewish belonging in Germany, and at the same time, they framed some of their own invasions as a “reclaiming” of their “native” territory.  “Blood and soil” became not just a shorthand for imperial conquest, but also a cultural mantra, as it led to a specific propaganda aesthetic that positioned Germans as “forest people.” This simplified genealogy connected Nazi Germany directly to the Germanic tribes, who, according to this lore, heroically fought the Romans in their forested lands, where they worshipped their Germanic gods beside clean streams under blue skies. A sense of ownership of the supposedly “German Forest” emerged that contrasted with the alleged barrenness of the desert-dwelling Jews.¹ Worse, as a diasporic people, Jews were not just presented as being in the wrong place, but as eternally homeless. The figure of the “Wandering Jew” became a counterpoint to German notions of Heimat, a complicated term denoting home and belonging.²

As a current desert dweller, I am acutely aware of just how wrong this conception of the desert as barren actually is. Biologists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler’s concept of “plant blindness”—in less ableist terms “plant awareness disparity”—is predicated on, among other things, our cognitive inability to see green on green well, especially when there are no quick and sudden movements.³ There is not much overlapping green in the desert, so every plant sticks out. The rarer the vegetation, the more you notice it. When the chollas, ocotillos, and saguaros start blooming, I cannot look away. After the monsoon, you can smell the distinctive scent secreted by creosote bushes, prompted by the rare rains. 

These plants are native to the Sonoran Desert, whether on its US or Mexican side, and they have developed fascinating ways to thrive under somewhat adverse climate circumstances. That makes desert dwellers resilient survivors—a botanical fact that has become a metaphor with complex implications. After learning about climate zones from Humboldt, I should not have been surprised that one of these plants in my Arizona backyard, the prickly pear cactus, is also very common in Israel and Gaza. In fact, it is a contentious symbol that has culinary and cultural meaning for people on both sides. Depending on whom you ask, Arabic sabr or Hebrew sabra (the prickly pear) stands for one of two things: Either the destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, as all that is left of many villages are the outlines of properties demarcated by prickly pear plants. Or the “ideal Israeli, who is born in the country, a sabra: tough on the outside like the thorny fruit, soft on the inside like its sweet flesh, and native to the soil like the plant.”⁴ Except the prickly pear has not always been native to this region. Its origins can be traced back to the so-called Americas, from where it arrived via Spain. Clearly, plant- and land-based discourses of belonging are quite complicated. 

 In the settler-colonial United States of America, we find a constellation of land and people that is particular to those environments. I wrote this chapter on the lands of the Tohono O’odham and the Pascua Yaqui, in the state with the most reservation land in the country. Acknowledging the stewards of this land, as is common practice at my institution, only gains meaning through corresponding actions. In their work, Indigenous studies scholars Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang remind us that “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” but rather about returning land.⁵ In postcolonial contexts, this has happened to some degree, but in settler-colonial contexts, it is much more difficult. While the complications of all this—including reparations—are up for debate, it remains clear that there is an understanding of nativeness operative in settler-colonial contexts that ties identity and land inextricably together. Belonging is belonging to the land, and that extends to people, animals, and plants. 

In my graduate courses in Transcultural German studies, with students from Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, China, India, and other countries, this raises complicated transcultural and multilingual questions about settlers, colonizers, belonging, and the land we are on. Students who grew up in a postcolonial nation might ask, why is it ok to connect native belonging to land in the US, but not in the same way in Germany? There are no easy answers. They are right; if I were to speak in Germany of “German natives belonging to the land,” I could potentially be flagged for a hate-speech violation, since the one restriction on free speech in Germany is about resurrecting Nazi slogans, ideas, and paraphernalia. Yet acknowledging those to whom the land has belonged since time immemorial might have consequences in the current political climate of the US too. As a white European immigrant to this country, it reminds me that I am a settler. With the privilege of dual citizenship, I have added the responsibility for the US past and present to my obligations regarding Germany’s history. 

I am reflecting on the complex cultural and historical relationships of plants and people to place here because they are mediated through language. For example, the German word Blatt, for “leaf,” means not only the plant part, but also the page we write on. This connection exists in other languages too, with feuille in French, or the English term “folio,” through which we “leaf.” Such a trope is a poetic way of speaking, a term that can be used both literally and metaphorically at the same time, with layers of meaning across different contexts.⁶ Taking on additional meanings is a specialty of poetic language, and webs of intertextual cross-referencing can imbue seemingly simple terms with a host of meaningfulness. 

A famous German plant trope comes from Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 poem “An Die Nachgeborenen,” or “To Those Born After.” It begins: 

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo 

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist 

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!

 

What times are these, in which 

A conversation about trees is almost a crime 

For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing! ⁷

Brecht wrote the poem on the eve of the Second World War, when the persecution of so many people in Germany—Jews, communists, queer and disabled folks—had been ongoing for years, and parallels between this time and our own have been drawn not infrequently lately. And here I am having “a conversation about trees,” or writing about plants, in a time of “much wrongdoing.” Is it a crime? And what is “almost a crime”? Who determines that these days? 

In 1991, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, as the Cold War was ending, and against the backdrop of the filmed police brutality against a Black man, Rodney King, that led to the Los Angeles riots, American poet and feminist Adrienne Rich wrote a poem that responds to Brecht’s. In Rich’s “What Kind of Times Are These,” the speaker of the poem takes us to 

a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill 

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows 

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted 

who disappeared into those shadows. 

Here, the speaker has been 

picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled 

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, 

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, 

its own ways of making people disappear. 

The speaker will not tell us where this place, “this leafmold paradise,” is because she already knows who wants to “buy it, sell it, make it disappear.” So why is she telling us anything, the speaker asks? This is where Brecht reappears, and we might read the answer as one both to the speaker’s own titular question and to Brecht: 

because in times like these 

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary 

to talk about trees.”⁸

Why is it necessary to talk about trees in times like these? Why is it not “almost a crime” in Rich’s poem? These trees are not just trees—they are both trees and a trope that associates something more. Without knowing the botanical names of the trees in Rich’s poem, we nonetheless know that they are Brecht’s trees. As a trope, they express an experience and a feeling that cannot be freely or easily discussed. “Talking about trees” can mean, for instance, teaching whatever topic is on the syllabus in my German literature class for the day, amid “so much wrongdoing,” as Brecht put it. On the one hand, then, “talking about trees” is shorthand for ignoring more pressing concerns, but of course in the age of climate change, trees have come to represent this pressing concern themselves. On the other hand, “talking about trees” is not ignoring these wrongdoings at all. When we turn to history, culture, language, art, religion—whatever it is that you teach or turn to—we cannot help but find traces everywhere of those before us who are pointing to the fact that “times like these” have been here already, repeatedly. 

Even though Brecht’s poem suggests that there have been many iterations of dark times in the past, the speaker remains optimistic for a different future: 

Ach, wir
Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit
Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein.

 

Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird
Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist
Gedenkt unsrer
Mit Nachsicht.

 

We 

Who wished to lay the foundation for gentleness 

Could not ourselves be gentle. 

 

But you, when at last the time comes 

That man can aid his fellow man, 

Should think upon us 

With leniency. 

In these final lines, “Those Born After,” to whom Brecht’s poem is dedicated in its title, are asked for leniency—a term denoting understanding and perhaps forgiveness. My reading of this poem has fundamentally changed of late. While I once, perhaps naively, thought we had arrived in times where we were the ones to extend such understanding, my comprehension of the anguish Brecht expresses now no longer feels distant and removed. This different level of understanding is what must have compelled Rich and other writers to return to Brecht’s words too, to his powerful trope of the “conversation about trees.” 

So what can plant studies provide “in times like these,” or what can plants teach us? Like Rich, I am convinced that “it’s necessary to talk about trees” in times like these “to have you listen.” In the conclusion to my recent book, Animal, Vegetal, Marginal, I had to explain, not for the first time, how I can talk about the treatment of plants, animals, and marginalized human beings in the same breath.⁹ Have people not been dehumanized by comparisons to animals, nature, and wildness to legitimize their oppression—from chattel slavery to cattle cars? Yes, and precisely because such dehumanizing tropes continue well into the present, we need solidarity among all life. When a human being is called a beast or an invasive species is given a nationality, it negatively affects humans, animals, and plants alike. Their suffering has been mutually reinforcing, and understanding the history of such entanglements can attune us to how they shape the present. 

Notions of naturalness work in a similar way, as I discuss in the book. Just think of how declaring something unnatural relegates it to the realm of deviance—an age-old trick of the morality police that raises big questions about nature and culture. Looking at plants and studying the ways we interact with them in history, culture, religion, literature, art, and so forth can therefore equip us with a critical lens onto the tropes that shape our realities. Understanding how ideas about nature, landscape, climate, plants, and animals have been instrumentalized across the ages—from Humboldt’s time via the Nazis to today on both sides of the Atlantic—can give us a sense of the recurrence of “times like these,” and how “talking about trees” might be both “almost a crime” and a necessity in response. These examples also make a particular case for the importance of poetic language, here in the forms of poems, which sharpen our analytical tools and provide new forms of expression “in times like these.”¹⁰ As a literary and cultural plant studies scholar, I therefore invite you to consider reading or writing more, doing so with others perhaps, to find ways of “talking about trees” in times like these. 

1. See, for example, Johannes Zechner, “Politicized Timber: The ‘German Forest’ and the Nature of the Nation 1800–1945,” The Brock Review 11.2 (2011): 19–32. [Return to Section]

2. For the history of this term, see Thomas Benjamin Fuhr, “Eternal Return? Revisiting Heimat in Contemporary German Literature” (PhD Dissertation, University of Arizona, 2023), 23–84. [Return to Section]

3.  James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, “Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness,” Plant Science Bulletin 47.1 (2001): 2–9; Kathryn M. Parsley, “Plant Awareness Disparity: A Case for Renaming Plant Blindness,” Plants, People, Planet 2.6 (2020): 598–601. [Return to Section]

4. Miriam Berger, “The Prickly Symbolism of Cactus Fruit in Israel and Palestine,” Atlas Obscura, April 12, 2019, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-sabra-mean. [Return to Section]

5. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012): 1–40. [Return to Section]

6. In German, Tropen refer to both literary tropes and the geographic tropics, further connecting climate zones and place with poetic expression. Joela Jacobs, “Plant Parts: Vegetal Tropes and their Phytopoetic Resonances Across Botany and Culture,” Plant Perspectives 1.2 (2024): 276–92. [Return to Section]

7. Scott Horton, “Brecht ‘To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,’” Harper’s Magazine, January 15, 2008, https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/. [Return to Section]

8. Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times Are These,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51092/what-kind-of-times-are-these. Michael Marder describes an encounter between a Ukrainian woman and Russian soldiers after the 2022 invasion in a similar spirit. She gives them sunflower seeds to put in their pockets, saying that the Ukrainian national flower will grow where they fall. In Marder’s words: “Not only will the bodies of soldiers stimulate plant growth, but also a part of them will survive in and as the flowers, rooted in the earth they treaded in tanks. Their vegetal afterlife will partly atone or compensate for violence and destruction wrought in their human incarnation.” Michael Marder, “Vegetal Redemption: A Ukrainian Woman and Russian Soldiers,” The Philosophical Salon, February 26, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/vegetal-redemption-a-ukrainian-woman-and-russian-soldiers/. [Return to Section]

9. Joela Jacobs, Animal, Vegetal Marginal: The German Literary Grotesque from Panizza to Kafka (Indiana University Press, 2025). [Return to Section]

10. For a definition of poetics in relation to plants, see the introduction to Joela Jacobs, Isabel Kranz, and Solvejg Nitzke, Plant Poetics: The Literary Forms and Functions of the Vegetal (Brill, 2025). [Return to Section]

11. In Joela Jacobs, “Phytopoetics: How Plants Shape Literature and Culture—and Why They Matter in Times of Crisis,” Thinking with Plants and Fungi Initiative blog, November 18, 2024, https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2024/11/phytopoetics-how-plants-shape-literature-and-culture-and-why-they-matter-times-crisis. I recommend Ross Gay’s Book of Delights (Algonquin Books, 2019) and Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023) for this purpose. Interested scholars are also invited to join the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network at https://plants.arizona.edu. [Return to Section]

Jacobs, Joela. "Plants and Place: Cultivating Un/Belonging through Vegetal Tropes" 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.  https://doi.org/10.70423/0003.10