Poetry as Plant Script: Interspecies Dialogue and Poetic Collaboration in the Northern Tablelands Region of New South Wales

Abstract

Advances in the science of plants increasingly reveal the sensitivities of vegetal life. Although characterised as contemporary neuro-botany, research into botanical percipience can be traced back at least to Charles Darwin and Jagadish Chandra Bose. Bose developed novel instruments to make visible the endemic semiosis of vegetal life, or what he termed plant script. Despite the thinking of Bose and Darwin, however, a prevailing zoocentric ontology continues to marginalise the capacities of vegetal nature and, what is more, contributes to aspects of climate change, species loss and biocultural disintegration. Set within the New England Tablelands of Australia and invoking principles of interspecies dialogue and poetic collaboration, this article investigates the potential of the creative arts to engage, evoke and elicit plant sensitivities. Rather than constructing them as objects of representation, I consider the possibility of creative exchange with plants in which plant script intergrades with the production of a text. Extending the notion of collaboration in the environmental arts to include vegetal being, the article draws in particular from ideas of agential realism to explore the potential of writing practices to initiate new social, biological, political and imaginative perspectives on flora.