How Can We Talk About Plants

Kinship and the Limits of Human Language

 

One of the first words to appear in the workshop notes is kinship, which is perhaps the most generative and troubling concept of the day. Why? Kinship implies a relationship of closeness and mutual recognition. When we speak of kinship with plants, we suggest that we belong to the same family of living beings in some way. However, what kind of kinship is possible when our modes of communication, languages, and ways of being in time and space are so different?

 

This "tension" was at the heart of the workshop's opening reflections. We arrived with human language, a tool shaped by millennia of human social organization, hierarchy, and meaning-making. We tried to use this tool to speak about beings whose communication is entirely different. Plants communicate through chemical signals, root networks, and the timing of their flowering in response to temperature and light. Their "language" is not symbolic; it does not separate sign from thing. Yet, as Subramaniam and Bartlett point out, the history of botany has been the history of translating plant life into human symbolic systems. We have projected onto plants not only human categories of sex and gender but also entire social narratives of marriage, desire, hierarchy, and reproduction.

 

The question of kinship is not just sentimental. It is also epistemological and political. Can we claim kinship with plants while describing them with a language that erases their unique characteristics? Is there a form of kinship that does not require sameness and that can embrace radical difference without reducing it to a familiar human image? The concept of naturecultures, coined by Donna Haraway and referenced throughout the article, offers a potential framework. It rejects the binary between nature and culture and allows us to understand living worlds—bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals, and humans—as interconnected, non-human worlds. In this sense, kinship does not mean resemblance. It means entanglement.

 

Do We Actually Know Plants?

 

Consequently, one of the next questions became clear to us: Do we actually know plants, and how do we know them? This question appeared in my notes from the workshop and points to a structural problem identified by Subramaniam and Bartlett: our knowledge of plants is largely mediated by a human language and conceptual framework that is "very different from how plants communicate." We formulate our understanding through analogy, comparing plant biology to human biology.

 

However, in doing so, we import the cultural and ideological baggage of Western, colonial sexuality into botany. As the article argues, the vocabulary of plant reproductive biology "is not about an evolutionary connection" but rather "a metaphorical one," rooted in the historical entanglements of science, empire, and gender hierarchy (Subramaniam & Bartlett, 2023).

 

Thus, the question remains: How can we talk about something we don’t truly understand? Do we have the right to do so?

 

Binaries, Hierarchies, and the Colonial Legacy of Botanical Language

 

We then discussed a key theme running through the article and Anne’s main point: the vocabulary of plant biology is based on binaries such as male/female, active/passive, and productive/useless. These binaries are not neutral scientific descriptors, but rather reflect a "colonialist legacy." Subramaniam and Bartlett trace this back to Carolus Linnaeus. In the 18th century, he organized all plant life around a sexual classification system modeled on heterosexual human marriage. His nomenclature introduced andria (from the Greek for "husband") and gyne (from the Greek for "wife"), with class (male) ranked higher than order (female), essentially writing patriarchal and colonial norms into the grammar of natural science.

 

The group found this connection between scientific language and ideological violence particularly resonant. The terminology we use does not simply describe a neutral reality; it shapes what we see, what we value, and what we erase. As one group participant noted, this vocabulary is based on binary and black-and-white thinking that extends well beyond botany into ableism, racism, and the broader structures of colonial categorization.

 

Thinking by Analogy

 

We talked about "thinking by analogy," which "creates the problem in biology." Describing plant reproduction using human categories misrepresents plants and naturalizes and universalizes Western, colonial ideologies. Subramaniam and Bartlett call for "disrupting analogy thinking," arguing that binary frameworks cannot capture the variation, fluidity, and complexity of plant reproduction. Rather than having a fixed identity, plant sexuality is better understood as a quantitative, ecological, and relational phenomenon.

 

During our discussion, this topic evolved into a broader one: Can plants themselves be understood as queer?

 

Sedgwick defines the term as "an open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, and resonances" that cannot be made to signify monolithically (Sedgwick, 1993, as cited in Subramaniam & Bartlett, 2023). Plants, with their extraordinary reproductive diversity, may offer us a way to think outside the binary. As we highlighted during the discussion, this is an in-between space "that can open up in multiple ways."

 

Why Do We Want to Speak About Plants? 

 

Why is it helpful to speak from this perspective? Is language necessary when speaking about plants? What is the role of language, and how can it be made more approachable and less extractive and hierarchical? Less human? 

 

These questions did not have neat resolutions. Instead, our small groups reflected on the tension between the need to communicate knowledge about plants (for the posters, seed saving, and community education) and the risk that any language we use will carry its own ideology. Misha and Anne noted that the posters were always intended as pedagogical tools. This distinction opens space for language that is more imaginative, humble, and honest about the limits of what we can know about plants through human frameworks.

 

Open and Shared Reflections 

 

At the end of the workshop, we engaged in a collective reflection after splitting into small groups. We discussed the language we use regarding plants, its necessity, and whether other types of language could facilitate interspecies relationships by truly listening to the nature of plants before our own.

 

One way of communicating with and speaking about plants may be through direct listening. We should first reconsider what language is and why we think it belongs only to us. We should consider movement and the language of bodies, as well as the wind, and go beyond commonly spoken language.

 

The language we know—the spoken, written, and symbolic language—is not neutral. It is built for and around us; it is human-centered and in service of very specific power structures. Plants have been named, sexualized, and placed in a hierarchy, not to understand them better, but to insert them into a world order that we have already decided upon. We do this to have power over them as well.

 

So, perhaps the question is not only how we speak about plants but also who has the right to speak, on whose behalf, and with what purpose. Entering into a real interspecies relationship means questioning this, too. It means recognizing that our language is a form of appropriation and that truly listening requires relinquishing the need to translate everything into human terms, even if only for a moment.