Thoreau’s Botany: Thinking and Writing with Plants

By James Perrin Warren

Thoreau’s last years have been the subject of debate for decades, but only recently have scholars and critics begun to appreciate the posthumous publications, unfinished manuscripts, and Journal entries that occupied the writer after Walden (1854). Until now, no critical reader has delved deeply enough into botany to see how Thoreau’s plant studies impact his thinking and writing. Thoreau’s Botany moves beyond general literary appreciation for the botanical works to apply Thoreau’s extensive studies of botany—from 1850 to his death in 1862—to readings of his published and unpublished works in fresh, interdisciplinary ways. Bringing together critical plant studies, ecocriticism, and environmental humanities, James Perrin Warren argues that Thoreau’s botanical excursions establish a meeting ground of science and the humanities that is only now ready to be recognized by readers of American literature and environmental literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9780813949499

James Perrin Warren

James Perrin Warren is the S. Blount Mason Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Warren specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, and literature of the environment. His books include John Burroughs and the Place of Nature, Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America, and Walt Whitman’s Language Experiment.

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Cover Page for Thoreau’s Botany

Thoreau’s Botany

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities

Serenella Iovino, Kate Rigby, and John Tallmadge, Editors

Michael P. Branch and SueEllen Campbell, Senior Advisory Editors

Thoreau’s Botany

Thinking and Writing with Plants

James Perrin Warren

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2023 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2023

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Warren, James Perrin, author.

Title: Thoreau’s botany : thinking and writing with plants / James Perrin Warren.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2023. | Series: Under the sign of nature : explorations in environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023003604 (print) | LCCN 2023003605 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813949475 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813949482 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813949499 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Knowledge and learning. | Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862—Criticism and interpretation. | Botany in literature. | Plants (Philosophy) | Ecoliterature, American—History and criticism. | Botany—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PS3057.N3 W37 2023 (print) | LCC PS3057.N3 (ebook) | DDC 818/.309—dc23/eng/20230411

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003604

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003605

Cover art: Background, Thoreau’s Journal, Charles W. Jefferys, 1896 (courtesy of Anthony Allen); book, Julia Tsokur/shutterstock.com; leaf and acorn design, BTSK/shutterstock.com

To Julianne L. Warren

One day in a row

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Thoreau’s Botanical Turn

Part I: Reconstructing the Botanical Excursions

1. The Two Botanical Excursions of The Maine Woods

2. Cape Cod and the Seven Excursions

3. Walden as Botanical Excursion

Part II: The Broken Task and the Faithful Record

4. Thoreau’s Kalendar: Reading the Journal through Plants

5. The Dispersion of Seeds and the Writer’s Faithful Record

6. Wild Fruits and Transformative Perceptions

Epilogue: Walking in the Anthropocene

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Plants

Index of Subjects

Preface

In February 2018, I visited my friend Barry Lopez at his home in Finn Rock, Oregon. The visit came about because I was reading drafts of Barry’s big book, Horizon, a work of nonfiction that he had been researching and writing for nearly twenty-five years. It also came about because I knew that Barry was approaching the end of a seven-year journey with prostate cancer. As it turned out, this would be my last chance to sit with him and talk—about his work, about wild animals, about travel into remote places, and about his love for the McKenzie River and the Douglas fir forests he had made his home for fifty years.

For three days, we sat together, talking, sometimes with recording equipment running, sometimes off the record. Barry was in deep pain, physical pain. Sometimes he called it knee-buckling. But he insisted that we sit and talk, and in those three days he never complained about his life being cut short, the projects he envisioned for the future coming to a sudden halt. Mostly he was worried about Horizon, that the book wouldn’t live up to what he wanted it to be. He could darken in talking about it, and then he would brighten when we talked about a projected road trip from Key West to Prudhoe Bay, about roads and vehicles, or about encounters with wolverines.

The visit taught me a lesson about how a dedicated writer might face the certain end of writing. In Barry’s case, he kept going. He continued planning new projects, learning new material, working his prose, honing his sentences, experimenting with rhythms and images. He kept his eye on the river and on the woods. With the constant support of his wife, Debra Gwartney, he kept going, placing his faith in his many writing practices.

Insights from that visit have stayed with me the last four years, during the main work of researching and writing Thoreau’s Botany. Thoreau’s final decade is fascinating and admirable, not least for the faith he placed in the work he found himself doing. It could not have been obvious where the botanical studies of the 1850s were going. They would enter his writings, to be sure, as Thoreau’s Botany presents in detail. But for what purpose, with what actual goal? As it turned out, they became all absorbing, the main work of every day, the desire taking him into the woods and fields and swamps and streams within a ten-mile radius of Concord, Massachusetts. As the excursions proliferated, they grew in significance. His idea was to make wholes out of the parts, to see the ways in which the world was a whole and how it was often being taken apart. Plants became the signifying center of his days.

Thoreau was hard at work on several related botanical projects when, in December 1860, he went out into the woods in cold, wet weather and caught a cold, which descended into his chest and ultimately led to his death, at age forty-four, in May 1862. As his sister Sophia could attest, he worked especially hard at preparing essays for publication in the final months, and he was working on the last section of The Maine Woods to the very end. When he was no longer able to make his botanical excursions, friends brought flowers and fruits to his sickbed.¹

Thoreau’s last years have been the subject of debate for decades, and in the past thirty years scholars and critics have begun to appreciate the posthumous publications, unfinished manuscripts, and Journal entries that occupied the writer after Walden (1854). One problem with the works of the final decade is that few readers have seen how Thoreau’s plant studies impact his thinking and writing.² Instead, we have general literary appreciations for the botanical works in the name of Thoreau’s attention to material reality and his focus on the concrete details of nature. The botanical works are much deeper than these basic accounts, and they deserve to be analyzed and discussed fully. Thoreau was a first-rate field botanist and a prescient student of forest ecology and evolutionary theory. At the same time, he was Thoreau—a critical, intelligent, faithful thinker and literary writer.

In the introductory chapter, Thoreau’s Botanical Turn, I chart how Thoreau’s dedication to botany takes on a dramatic literary life. The pages of Thoreau’s Journal are full of records, especially of the writer’s excursions around Concord. In 1850, the Journal changes from a literary workshop for drafting material to an independent writing project. At the same time, during the winter of 1850, Thoreau begins the disciplined, focused study of botany that he develops through 1851. He had worked on plants earlier, but in 1850–51 he begins studying botany systematically. He studies the botany manuals of Jacob Bigelow and Asa Gray, along with the works of older botanists like Carl Linnaeus, André Michaux, and François André Michaux. Beginning in 1850 and continuing for over a decade, the Journal entries record the plants observed, described, collected, and identified on the nearly daily walks that Thoreau made. In addition, the entries are records of ways of knowing, reflections on science and poetry, and reflections on his own practices as a writer, a walker, and a traveler. They are faithful accounts of his emotional life and of his doubts concerning the meaning of his life; he interrogates himself constantly, asking himself hard questions about the state of the world and his vocation as a writer in the world. He finds faith near the ground and in the plants, in their recurring processes of growth and reproduction.

In part 1, Reconstructing the Botanical Excursions, three chapters show the role of botany in Thoreau’s daily walks and extended travels. Already in his first published essays and in A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, Thoreau offers travel narratives that he called excursions. An excursion narrates a journey, usually out to a previously unknown place and then back home. This creates a dynamic of crossing a boundary into the new and unknown, then returning home to the familiar or newly unfamiliar place of origin. The dynamic pattern of the excursion provides a window into Thoreau’s writings, since he is preeminently a traveler, even in Concord. He is a writer who travels.

In published works, the search for a faithful record that we see in the 1850–51 Journal leads toward the botanical excursion as a narrative form that brings culture and nature into productive, dynamic relationships. This type of narrative engages the first-person narrator/character, the place being experienced and explored, and the ways of knowing the place. There are limits to these writerly elements, and Thoreau is constantly experimenting with them to expand his ways of knowing and representing the world. He is always asking how he can be a faithful traveler and writer, how he can bring plants and humans into meaningful relationship. The three chapters of part 1 focus on the published works The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Walden, arguing that the botanical excursion becomes a defining form of narrative in the mature works of the 1850s. This form develops through successive, overlapping, multiple excursions; multiple versions of a text; and multiple ways of knowing and experiencing a place.

In part 2, The Broken Task & the Faithful Record, the late natural history projects appear in recently discovered and edited form. The first of three chapters focuses on Thoreau’s Kalendar project as a way of reading the Journal, showing how the Kalendar and Journal function together as faithful records of Thoreau’s botanical excursions in the immediate region of Concord from 1852 to his death. The entries in the Journal connect Thoreau and Concord to the seasonal world and make the world of Concord into a more-than-local place. The Journal creates openings for Thoreau, giving him new possibilities for writing and recording his experiences.

The second chapter discusses the manuscript edition of The Dispersion of Seeds and the writing process as practices of succession and dispersion. The ecological process of succession provides the means for developing themes of spatial dispersion and temporal succession. Together, dispersion and succession explain how landscapes change, how one species of forest tree replaces another. Patterns of succession are in turn affected by human agency, by the landowners and their practices of cutting, burning, planting crops, and allowing the forests to regrow. Thoreau’s faith in his own work lies in phusis, the in-dwelling dynamism of the earth, because he sees his writing as part of the dynamic processes all around him.

The third chapter suggests that the edited volume Wild Fruits is a dynamic, performative hybrid of many fragments, an experimental form of writing based on repeated excursions and observations of plants. It gives the most developed example of how Thoreau’s botanical work of the last decade delivers new thinking and writing, and it is the best indication we have of how his seasonal thinking yields a written set of botanical excursions and reflections. Thoreau’s botany proposes a more intimate relationship between human beings and the land they occupy, manage, and cultivate. Wild Fruits is persistently unsettling, merging wild and cultivated fruits to develop fresh ideas of growth and transformation.

In the epilogue, I reflect on the importance of Thoreau’s botany and his botanical excursions for readers in the Anthropocene, especially during the two full years of the coronavirus pandemic. The epilogue is meant to suggest directions that our reading of Thoreau’s botany might take in the present and immediate future.

Even though Emerson characterized Thoreau’s final years as a broken task, Thoreau’s Botany describes the faithful practices of a mature, original writer and thinker. In that regard, Thoreau reminds me strongly of Barry Lopez, working resolutely and brilliantly under the certainty of pain and death. Both are writers who travel; both focus on ethics and landscapes; both seek to understand all the inhabitants of a landscape as spirited, living neighbors and teachers; both face a sudden catastrophic end with faith and conviction. Both keep going, even now.

Acknowledgments

This book began in the woods of western Virginia. My good friend and colleague John Knox, an expert teacher of field botany, allowed me to audit a six-week spring course with him in 2005. For five more years after that, he and I cotaught a spring course, Field Biogeography: Science and Literature. We spent our days identifying hundreds of flowering plants and trees in the field, discussing the discipline of biogeography, and reading works by Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, and Robin Kimmerer. Along the way, we became coteachers in a deep sense. Since that time, John has kept me going with our friends Kirk Follo, Larry Hurd, and Helen I’Anson, colleagues at Washington and Lee University and intrepid walkers.

The students in those spring courses were a constant, refreshing inspiration. We also welcomed fellow walkers in Robin Kimmerer and Barry Lopez. To have Robin teach us a three-hour lab on mosses was unforgettable. To have Barry walk with us for two weeks, remarking on the hard-used landscapes of Virginia, was a way of seeing our world with new eyes.

Friends from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) were supporters long before botany became my primary focus. John Tallmadge, John Lane, and Michael Branch have maintained a steady interest in my work for decades, an interest that has continued to this book as well. ASLE has been an intellectual home for me since 1997; without it, this work would have never been conceived, much less brought to fruition. Through ASLE, I’ve been blessed with friends like Kurt Caswell, Rochelle Johnson, Lauren LaFauci, Mark Long, Ian Marshall, Annie Merrill, Jake McGinnis, Lance Newman, and David Taylor. Many more ASLE friends deserve my gratitude, too, but I especially want to single out Amy McIntyre, who has shepherded the organization expertly for years.

This book owes deep debts to Thoreau scholars, past and present, most of whom have no idea how much they have meant to my studies. I have been grateful for encouraging words and editorial help from Jeff Cramer, Kathleen Kelly, John Kucich, Alex Moskowitz, and François Specq. At the 2018 Thoreau conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, organized by the unflappable Henrik Ottenberg, I was inspired by generations working on Thoreau, from elders like Robert Sattelmeyer and Joseph Moldenhauer to younger scholars like Rochelle Johnson and Kristen Case. Then there are scores of Thoreau critics, many of whom I’ve never met, whose work has led me expertly: Ray Angelo, Branka Arsic, Lawrence Buell, Cristen Ellis, William Howarth, Lance Newman, Daniel Peck, Sandra Petrulionis, David Richardson, David Robinson, William Rossi, Robert Thorson, Elizabeth Witherell, to name the most prominent. Without the editorial genius of Bradley Dean, the task I set myself here would be broken. Thoreau scholars, named and unnamed, can be proud of the community they have forged.

The most direct inspiration for this study is Laura Dassow Walls. Her early books on science in Thoreau and Emerson brought interdisciplinary scholarship on science and literature to vivid life. Then she brought us Alexander von Humboldt, and, after that, Thoreau, in the definitive biography and in a host of precisely and generously reasoned articles. Always, Laura has shown and shone a light on Thoreau, in his own time and in ours.

I thank the librarians at Washington and Lee University, especially Elizabeth Teaff, for loaning me the scholarly edition of Thoreau’s Journal—a godsend, truly.

I am grateful to Angie Hogan, Acquiring Editor, to Ellen Satrom, Managing Editor, and to the other personnel at the University of Virginia Press. To the two anonymous referees, many thanks for excellent advice in improving the manuscript. For expert copyediting, my thanks to Emily Shelton.

Finally, and always, I am most grateful to my partner, Julianne, whose example leads me forward, every day and for many days in a row.

Abbreviations

CC Henry David Thoreau. Cape Cod. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Corr Henry David Thoreau. The Correspondence. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, and Lihong Xie. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013–.

EEM Henry David Thoreau. Early Essays and Miscellanies. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander Kern. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Exc Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Faith Henry David Thoreau. Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds, and Other Late Natural History Writings. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. Washington, DC: Island, 1993.

J Henry David Thoreau. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. 14 vols. Edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. New York: Dover, [1906] 1962. (Volumes indicated by roman numerals.)

MW Henry David Thoreau. The Maine Woods. Edited by Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

PJ Henry David Thoreau. Journal. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell, Robert Sattlemeyer, and Thomas Blanding. 8 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981–. (Volumes indicated by Arabic numerals.)

RP Henry David Thoreau. Reform Papers. Edited by Wendell Glick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.

W Henry David Thoreau. Walden. Edited by J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

WF Henry David Thoreau. Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript. Edited by Bradley P. Dean. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Wk Henry David Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edited by Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Thoreau’s Botany

Introduction

Thoreau’s Botanical Turn

Critical Plant Studies and Plant-Thinking

Over the past thirty years, students of critical animal studies have developed new ways of discussing the relationships between the human and more-than-human world. More recently, the interdisciplinary wave has emerged in critical plant studies. The philosopher Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013) stands as a seminal text in the field. Among many writing projects, Marder is editing a new series of interdisciplinary publications called Critical Plant Studies. In addition to philosophical and literary studies, such recent popular works as Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory (2018) and David George Haskell’s The Song of Trees (2017) attest to the power of new approaches to plants. Perhaps the best example is Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (2021), a book that combines personal narrative, three decades of scientific research, and startling insights into the subtle networks that form forests. These works bring the question of our relationship to plants to a new tipping point.¹

In Plant-Thinking, Marder defines his principal concept of plant-thinking in four ways: 1) "the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants" (10); 2) human thinking about plants; 3) human thinking as altered by its encounter with the vegetal world, becoming less human and more plant-like; and 4) the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants (10). In the combination of these four senses, plant-thinking is above all an encounter with the vegetal other. As a sequence, the four definitions create an implicit narrative of contact, intersection, and transformation. By taking account of the mode of thinking proper to plants and then by altering our thinking to bring it into accord with that vegetal mode of thinking, we humans can create the ongoing symbiotic relationship with plants that will transfigure our lives and our futures on the planet.

There is ample evidence to support the proposition that Henry David Thoreau engaged in all four modes of plant-thinking in his writing, especially in the work he produced after he turned to the rigorous study of plants in 1850–51. Thoreau’s botanical turn was decisive, and it continually deepened his thinking and writing until his death in 1862. This period of some twelve years coincides with the beginning of his organized collecting of specimens for an herbarium and with his increasingly detailed and knowledgeable observations about flowering plants and trees in Concord and beyond. It matches the timing of his deep reflections on the relationship between science and poetry as ways of knowing and as modes of expression. It overlaps with the last revisions of Walden, the drafting of Cape Cod, and the incomplete drafting of The Maine Woods. It underpins the works we think of most capaciously as the Kalendar project, including Bradley Dean’s editions of The Dispersion of Seeds and Wild Fruits. Finally, it may add telling details to enrich our interpretive sense of Thoreau’s empirical holism and his growing interest and respect for Native American ways of knowing.

Marder’s argument in Plant-Thinking is in two parts. Part 1, Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics, is a posthumanist deconstruction of the Western philosophy of the plant. The deconstruction also takes place in two parts. The Soul of the Plant recounts the history of Western metaphysics as a resolute misreading of vegetal life as an other and therefore lesser state of existence. For example, Aristotle sees the plant as incomplete because it is not goal directed, while Marder reads incompleteness as meaning open-ended, so the quality becomes a positive attribute (23–24). In a later phase, Hegel privileges the interiority of the animal and human soul, so that the fundamental exteriority of the plant leads to its spiritual instrumentality, always understood as subservient to the needs and uses of human beings (24–30).

In reading Western metaphysics, Marder argues that the plant—or vegetal being—is a synecdoche for nature itself, phusis, which is defined by a fundamental and elusive vitality. Although the history of Western philosophy renders vegetal life as inert and mute matter, Marder suggests that the contemporary philosophical defense of plants "bears upon all of phusis, without running the risk of replicating the abstract, general, and indifferent metaphysical thinking enamored with totalities, such as nature or indeed the environment" (31). Marder specifically revises the ancient concept of phusis to define nature as dynamic, as marked by change and becoming. This idea of vegetal being as an embodiment and figure for phusis, the fundamental vitality of nature, will be of signal importance to understanding Thoreau’s plant-thinking. Indeed, Thoreau’s plant-thinking develops over the course of the last decade of his life in many dynamic, powerful, and elusive ways. In that sense, Thoreau’s botany is a forerunner for the new approaches to the human relationship with plants we see in our present time.

For Marder, the deconstruction of Western metaphysics is also reconstructive and instructive. For instance, he reads vegetal desire as nutritive, suggesting a provisional status for Aristotle’s concept of the vegetal or nutritive soul, which Marder then uses to argue for specific aspects of commonality with animals and humans in the processes of nourishment, growth, and procreation (48). In the second part of Marder’s deconstruction, The Body of the Plant, he argues that the plant silently undercuts the idealism of Western philosophy, enacting the deidealizing of human thought and existence that we associate with materialism (60). Nietzsche and Heidegger come strongly into play in this section of the argument, for the Nietzschean transvaluation of values leads Marder into a nonanthropocentric phenomenology that explicitly critiques the idealizations of Heidegger’s Dasein. Throughout part 1, Derrida is the clear inspiration for Marder’s strategies of reading and argumentation.

In part 2, Marder develops three aspects of vegetal existence: time, freedom, and wisdom (or intelligence). In the chapter on temporality, Marder discusses seasonal changes, growth, and cycles of repetition and reproduction. In the (very dense) chapter on freedom, he undermines the truism of the plant’s fixedness, suggesting ultimately that the plant’s freedom from need, the mark of vegetal indifference, grounds a playful exuberance that is most akin to the material freedom of imagination (146). Despite such hopeful conclusions, this is a difficult argument to make, and Marder admits that plant liberation requires persistent plant-thinking piercing through layer after layer of the idealist repression weighing upon it (148). Finally, under the theme of wisdom, Marder gives versions of unconscious memory, intentionality of nourishment and reproduction, and a form of thinking (it thinks rather than I think) that embraces life processes more broadly conceived than consciousness; the works of Henri Bergson, Gregory Bateson, and Gilles Deleuze underpin these arguments. The upshot is that Marder sees plants as fitting within their surroundings in ways that conjoin the plant and its other in a harmonious unit of survival, rather than an antagonistic relation of self-conscious subject and distant object.

In a brief epilogue, Marder proposes ten ethical offshoots from his arguments. The most important is the first: that plant-thinking is plant-doing. . . . All plant-thinking actively takes the side of the plant and works for the sake of the plant (181). Ethics, Marder contends, is an offshoot of vegetal life and of plant-thinking; vegetal life deserves respect from human beings in all our relationships with it. In becoming more consonant with plant-thinking, our ethics will become more attuned to the ways in which plants form communities and engage with organic and inorganic others. Such an ethics creates a place for an open-ended temporality, a continuing learning from plants that does not drive toward final conclusions. Once again, we can imagine that both this ethical aspect and the open-ended temporality it creates will become essential in a reading of Thoreau’s botany.

The nagging problem with plant-thinking, as with much Derridean philosophy, is language. Marder treats the language of plants in chapter 2 (74–90), but his account of how vegetal life expresses itself without resorting to vocalization (75) seems to sidestep the problems of representation and the difference between human language and nature. If, as Marder suggests, plants express themselves materially, how would human language become more consonant with this aspect of vegetal life? The alienations of thought and language are not a convincing answer to that question, but they tend to fill the pages of Plant-Thinking.²

Marder finds a more positive answer in the leaf as the very embodiment of supplementarity (81) and the seed as a singular plural of Derridean dissemination (89). But these paradoxical images only hint at Marder’s embrace of a decentered, disseminating theory of language. Later, in the chapter on the time of plants, Marder returns to the leaf and seed and to the subject of expression. The result, however, is a deferral, a figuration of the plants’ proto-writing (116). When Marder considers Heidegger’s humanist, metaphysical critique of plants and animals as lacking a world because they lack language, he asks whether the spatial forms of plants may constitute their free opening unto being right within their environments (129).