I am so thrilled to be in the inaugural issue of the awesome new open access journal Plant Perspectives, edited by John C. Ryan and his amazing team. It’s beautiful! And full of a variety of ways to think, write, and do research with plants.

In my article, I use the framework of companion planting, to read together three short stories in three languages – Sofie Isager Ahl’s ‘Naboplanter’ (‘Companion Plants’, 2018), Can Xue’s ‘鸡仔的心愿’ (‘Chick’s Heart’s Desire’, 2020) and Audrey R. Hollis’ ‘Seedlings’ (2018) – that translate between the botanical and the human realms and use vegetal voices to challenge gendered social conventions, linguistic preconceptions and lingering anthropo-centrism.

By reading with plants and humans as literary companions, a trans-versal perspective arises from human narrators that are either trained, inspired, or even transformed by, plant protagonists. Anthropocentrism is not eliminated but recast in a context where it represents just one perspective among many, translated into one human language among many. Read together, these three stories serve to remind us of the linguistic and corporeal situatedness of their human authors and readers, as well as the plants that trained and inspired them. But they also emphasise that their very position is the product of continued co-evolution and cross-species communication.

Read the full article here.