Phase 1

The history of human beings is inextricably entwined with plants. Plants constitute 80% of all the biomass on Earth (Sheldrake, 2022, p.9) and the lives of almost every other living organism depend on their unique ability to convert sunlight into sugars. Plants are the means by which human becomes human being. The naming of plants, the knowing, storying and understanding of plant-life, and their use as medicine, food and materials were fundamental to almost all human societies throughout history.

Unsurprisingly, plants have featured in humans’ visual lexicon for as long as humans have been drawing. However, the development of botanical illustration in accordance with our definitions was contingent on the development of botany as a modern science.

In order to begin our process of composting, it is necessary to break down the structures that uphold these epistemological hierarchies and in doing so quietly expose the systems of oppression that they continue to perpetuate. Our microbial acquaintances have already been decomposing away and one coccus bacterium by the name of Val Plumwood has identified some of the dualisms upon which these epistemological hierarchies rest.

The first of these dualisms sprouts in the work of Plato, one of the Ancient Greek philosophers in whose work modern botany begins to germinate. Plumwood writes:

This dualism resonated through centuries of Western thought and was crucial to the fruition of modern science in the 15th century. It took no great leap for this hierarchy to be extrapolated out from the theoretical and applied to human beings.

Hence it is of no coincidence that the 15th century also saw the birth of colonialism and imperialism. Through what Sylvia Wynter terms a “root expansion of thought” (Wynter, 1995, p.19), white Europeans asserted their superiority over the inhabitants of ‘newly discovered’ lands, with rationality and scientific reason forming one of the vanguards of colonial rule.

Frantz Fanon describes how the classification of both humans and non-humans sowed the seeds of colonialist expansion; “[W]hen you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species.” (Fanon, 1963, p.40).

Microbial co-conspirator, Vallus plumwoodaeus.

“Platonic philosophy is organised around the hierarchical dualism of the sphere of reason over the sphere of nature, creating a fault line which runs through virtually every topic discussed, love, beauty, knowledge, art, education, ontology. . . . In each of these cases the lower side is that associated with nature, the body and the realm of becoming, as well as of the feminine, and the higher with the realm of reason.” (Plumwood, 1994, p.81).