I’m hoping you’ve begun reading the book by now. If you have, something has probably unsettled you. Maybe it was the fern with swimming sperm that sabotages its competitors. Maybe it was the realisation that every thought you’ve ever had was built from glucose manufactured by a plant. Maybe it was Theophrastus—that fork in the road Western philosophy didn’t take, where plants might have remained “autonomous beings with desires” rather than instruments at the bottom of Aristotle’s ladder.
Or maybe you’re still deciding whether any of this matters.
Here’s what struck me: Schlanger writes that botanists “were learning that plants are capable of” things that are “reshaping the meaning of ‘plant’ before our very eyes.” The field is “eating itself alive with contradictions.” This isn’t a book about what we know—it’s a book about watching a scientific field realise the limits of what it thought it knew.
Which raises a question I want you to sit with:
What happens when the frameworks we use to understand something turn out to be too small?
This isn’t just about plants. It’s about what we do when our instruments for measuring intelligence, consciousness, agency, or meaning prove inadequate to what’s actually there. Schlanger points out that we only recently granted consciousness to animals—dolphins, parrots, octopuses got their certificate in 2012 from Cambridge. Before that? They were Cartesian machines. Reflexes without experience.
The history she traces is damning: from Aristotle’s scala naturae (plants at the bottom, rational men at the top) to live dissection of dogs in amphitheaters because they couldn’t really feel pain, just reflexive responses. These weren’t fringe positions. These were scientific consensus. Supported by the best minds of their time. Defended by evidence.
And then they changed.
So what does it mean that plant science is now in that same moment of rupture? That one camp of botanists insists plants are intelligent, even conscious, while another camp says those are “distinctly animal-centric notions” that do “a disservice to their essential plantness”?
Maybe the question isn’t which camp is right. Maybe the question is: why do we need to recognise something as “like us” before we take it seriously?
Theophrastus understood this in 300 BCE. He used the metaphor of “heartwood” not because he thought trees had hearts, but because “it is by the help of the better known that we must pursue the unknown.” He was trying to meet his readers where they were, using their language to point toward something entirely other. He knew the comparison was just a bridge. He knew plants were their own category of being.
But Western thought went with Aristotle instead. A ladder. A hierarchy. Intelligence defined by how close something is to rational (male) humanity.
When Schlanger traces the history of plant science, she goes: Aristotle → Theophrastus → (2000 year gap) → Descartes → Darwin → contemporary botany.
That gap kept nagging at me—it’s not like that in the so-called Middle East nothing was going on between Theophrastus and Descartes . So I went looking more closely.
In the 13th century, while Europe was still mostly copying ancient Greek botanical texts, there was this guy Ibn al-Baytar from Málaga who spent years travelling from Spain through North Africa to Syria, directly observing and collecting plants. Over 1,400 of them. Including 200 that had apparently never been documented before.
His teacher, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, had been doing something that sounds a lot like what we’d now call empirical method—actually testing things, separating “I heard this” from “I observed this.” Ibn al-Baytar’s book (Kitab al-Jami fi al-Adwiya al-Mufrada) was apparently a major botanical reference in both the Islamic world and Europe until the 16th century.
Schlanger doesn’t mention him. Or any of that tradition.
I’m not trying to catch her in some gotcha moment. The book is good. But I keep wondering: what does it mean that this entire tradition of botanical science—centuries of it—just disappears from the story? Not because she’s malicious, but because the framework itself seems to make certain knowledge traditions invisible?
Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But it feels relevant to what we’re doing in the course.
I started wondering about how different languages handle these concepts.
In biblical Hebrew, apparently there was no word for “nature.” The term teva (טבע) showed up later, maybe under Islamic influence. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what it means to not have that separation linguistically. Like, if your language doesn’t divide “natural world” from “divine presence,” does that actually change what you can perceive?
In Arabic, the word for “plant” is nabat (نبات), which comes from a root about growth, sprouting—the emphasis seems to be on becoming rather than just being a thing. And I learned that Arabic has 11 different words for stages of love, and the most common one, hubb, shares its root with the word for “seed.” Seed as in: that which has the potential to grow into something.
I don’t know if this is just interesting trivia or if it actually matters. But when Schlanger writes that plants “sense things we can’t even imagine, and occupy a world of information we can’t see”—she’s describing the limits of human sensory apparatus, sure. But maybe also the limits of how our language lets us think about sensing, knowing, responding?
Like, can you even have a concept of “plant consciousness” in a language that never separated consciousness from plant life in the first place?
I fell down a rabbit hole reading about Kabbalah again. There’s this thing called the Tree of Life, which isn’t just a metaphor but like… a diagram of how divine energy flows through creation? The idea seems to be that material reality and spiritual reality aren’t separate—they’re connected through what gets called a “law of correspondences.” Plant intelligence, divine intelligence, human intelligence—all part of the same emanative structure.
I don’t fully understand it. But it made me wonder: is this “mysticism”? Or is it just a different epistemology—one that never needed to “prove” plant consciousness because it never assumed plants lacked it?
I also remembered that in Islamic thought, the word ‘ilm (علم)—usually translated as “knowledge”—doesn’t really map onto Western concepts. It’s not just information. It’s more like… knowledge plus understanding plus the action you take because of that knowledge? All integrated. And there’s this Arabic proverb: “A man remains knowing as long as he searches for knowledge. When he thinks he knows, he has become ignorant.”
Which feels impossible to fit into a framework where knowledge means certainty, completion, mastery.
Maybe that’s the point?
Even as I write “Islamic botanical knowledge” or “Jewish mysticism” or “Arabic linguistic structures,” I’m aware I might be imposing categories that distort the thing I’m trying to describe.
Because these traditions emerged in a region where Jewish scholars studied with Muslim teachers who were translating Greek, Persian, and Indian texts. Christians and Muslims and Jews worked in the same translation houses. Arabic was a shared intellectual language regardless of religious identity. Ibn al-Baytar learned from teachers across different traditions. Maimonides wrote in Arabic. The Kabbalah developed through conversations with Sufism.
So when we say “Middle Eastern epistemologies,” what are we even talking about? Religious traditions? Linguistic families? Geographic proximity? Resistance to Western categories?
I honestly don’t know. And maybe that uncertainty is useful.
Prompt for this week:
Look again at Schlanger’s argument. So far into the first 50 pages or so, she presents it as: “(Western) science finally catching up to what plants can actually do.”
But what if the problem isn’t that science was slow to catch up? What if the framework itself—the whole apparatus of “proving” intelligence, “demonstrating” consciousness, needing Cambridge scientists to certify that animals are conscious—what if that entire structure is what’s too small?
I keep thinking about Ibn al-Baytar walking around collecting plants, testing them empirically, not getting stuck in philosophical debates about whether they had souls. And about these epistemologies that never needed to separate plants from consciousness because they organised knowledge differently from the start.
What would a botany look like that took both seriously? Not as nostalgia for some imagined past, but as a genuine alternative to the impasse Schlanger describes—where one camp insists plants are intelligent and the other camp says that’s anthropomorphic, and nobody can escape the terms of the debate.
So here’s what I want to think about together:
If intelligence is defined by those who already hold power, what forms of intelligence remain invisible? What becomes visible if we change the framework? What traditions of knowing about plants—not despite their difference from us, but through their difference—have been erased from the story we tell about botany?
I don’t have answers to these questions. That’s why I want to talk about them.
See you next session later in November.