Reflections & Interviews
The initiative published scholarly and creative essays from authors across a range of disciplinary backgrounds and career stages, as well as reflections from practitioners and artists.
Thinking with Plants and Fungi Blog
Botanical Alchemy: The Blaschka Glass Flowers and the Vegetal Humanities
By Pauline Shongov | Edited by Rachael Petersen Between 1886 and 1936, Leopold and his son Rudolph Blaschka completed over 4,300 glass models, representing over 750 species of plants (along with some fungi and algae), for the Harvard Botanical Museum...
Corn and Beans
By: Matthew Battles / Edited by: Russell Powell Corn and beans, corn and beans, the refrain of childhood summer drives into the country, up out of the folded town, up and out of the river valley, up into an Illinois dizzy with its endless contours, its...
Exploring the Parafloral: Mediumship and Plant-Human Entanglement
By Emily Leon / Edited by Rachael Petersen Spiritualism is a system and a movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, asserting a spirit world alongside our reality. Followers believe this realm can be accessed through mediums, who function as...
No Greater Magic: A Conversation with Writer and Mycophile Maria Pinto
Maria Pinto is a writer, mycophile, and educator based in the Boston area. She was born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida. She is the author of the forthcoming book Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison...
"Phantom Tree" Exhibition and Opening Reception Photos
Postdoctoral fellow Elitza Koeva presented her artwork at "Phantom Tree," an exhibition at 92 Seattle Street in Allston, MA as part of the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference. The exhibition and the conference explored how plants and fungi help us...
Lifting the Green Veil with Vanessa Chakour: A Practitioner’s Perspective
Evenings at the Wolf Conservation Center of New York were always marked by the howling of the 30-odd wolves under the non-profit’s care. After a long day of plant identification and foraging, our group would gather around the campfire, beside a garden...
Phantom Tree: Dryad Tales and Storytelling Through the Looking Glass
A previous version of the text was published as: “Divinity Tree: Dryad tales and storytelling through the looking glass” in Remediations, Hors-Sujet, Zurich, CH, 2023 Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, vision and the visual have held a central place in...
Why We Should Care About Houseplants
By Giulia Carabelli / edited by Rachael Petersen In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, fortunate to be working from home, I lived for extended periods of time alone with many houseplants. This changed my relationship with them dramatically. I...
Delightfully Paradoxical: Finding Science at the Divinity School
Before his residency at MIT as a 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism Fellow, Aaron Scott (not relation to Natalia Schwien Scott) hosted the podcasts Short Wave from NPR and Timber Wars from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Aaron also joined the recent Thinking...
Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Celebrating the Voices of the More-Than-Human World
When hundreds gathered at the Harvard Divinity School in May for a three-day conference on the sentient lives of plants and fungi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and generations of Indigenous people may not only have recognized...
