Plant Lives

This chapter explores contemporary geographical engagements with plant life, clustered around three main planty elements: branches and trunks, seeds, and fruits. Starting from the central contradiction of how to value the lives and deaths of plants both on their own terms and for their utility to human life, each part delves into different spheres of plant-human interaction – from the production of place, food, and material to the creation of community and resistance. The chapter considers how scholars tell stories with and about plants, highlighting the necessity of multidisciplinary and multispecies perspectives when thinking with and about plants in a time of ecological crisis. Cultural geography is well placed to look beyond the uses of plants, populating the ground with spatially rooted stories of plant-human interaction which exceed disciplinary and species boundaries.