Books like Singing to the Plants

This recommendation, I’ll admit, takes as its premise the hope that your partner on this walk might be Eli, the protagonist and narrator of The Beaut’, who—if I know him—probably snuck in his first read of the Huxley some time between the single day that he is remembering and the day he decided to tell us about it.

The question was, was there ever an edition of The Doors of Perception that wasn’t coupled with its customary companion, Heaven and Hell? Turns out there was, making this a mere 38-page volume of charmingly recollected mind expansion, and the next best thing to being there, which you kind of would be on your walk.

More on the wacky side, and far more entertaining, is Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. For those who will never try “heroic doses” of psilocybin mushrooms deep in the Colombian jungle, this is a wild, vicarious ride, an amalgam of science, literature, myth, and exotica from an adventurer whose genuine inquisitiveness in things psychedelic goes hand in hand with mythomania—what an exuberant explosion of literary and philosophical high kitsch! If not persuaded, there follows the endorsement from The New York Times: “The polysyllabic sentences he lards with intellectual references are an attempt to lend credibility to the otherwise debunked subject of drugs.” Yes, a hatchet job from The New York Times could not make for a more valuable endorsement.

Psychedelic literature is unquestionably dominated by the white, male author. If, like me, you yearn to hear other voices and other perspectives, then this collection of essays couldn’t be more timely. The twenty-three chapters, from academic and non-academic authors, cover a range of perspectives, and while you may not agree with all of them, they’re refreshing nonetheless. It’s hard to single out any particular essay, but it’s always a pleasure to read Kathleen Harrison. Harrison, who was once married to Terence McKenna, spent years living with the Mazatec people, and treats us to her animistic vision of the world as something that’s alive and communicative. But the whole book contains riches and paves the way to a more diverse psychedelic literature.

If all my choices so far have been, in some way, about the psychedelic experience, this is a practical hands-on guide about how to occasion one yourself. Psychedelics can be consumed safely, but there are attendant risks, not least from their continued illegality in many parts of the world. Vayne, who has decades of experience as a psychedelic user and ritual technician, talks the reader through recommended ways to prepare for a psychedelic experience, how to navigate what subsequently unfolds, and how to integrate it afterwards. This is the indispensable guide for the psy-curious, and even better it comes with a cover designed by legendary British psychedelic comic artist, Pete Loveday. 

Monica Gagliano gives us a enchanting peek at the complexities, consciousness, and subjectivity of plants, as well as at her own story as a woman scientist, who is one of the pioneers in the field of plant intelligence. Weaving together her biography with the life of plants in a creative mix of “phytobiography,” the author shows how working “on” plants is also always working “with” them. We collaborate and communicate, Gagliano suggests, across species and biological kingdom boundaries, and it is on this unknown terrain that her scientific discoveries of plant learning or plant bioacoustics are made. Although Gagliano is not a philosopher by training, the account she offers in Thus Spoke the Plant opens new and exciting vistas in the philosophy of plants.

This gorgeous book by microbiologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery is as beautiful to read as it is to hold—in your hands, in your heart. We can’t stop thinking about Montgomery’s key lesson: if you have a plant that is struggling, you figure out what environmental changes it needs to thrive—more or less water or sunlight, better soil. When people fail to flourish, we’re quick to blame the individual. As an African American woman, Montgomery makes us think about society and how we approach problems (do we compete or do we build a collaborative effort for a holistic solution?). Humans have much to discover from our photosynthesizing world: how plants learn—from their own kin, their friends, and their foes—and Montgomery helps us to understand the nature (literally) of teaching and learning.

Plants feel things. Cleve Backster, an American detective who used lie detectors when interviewing suspects, discovered that plants made his detector needle swing wildly in response to thoughts he was having. Especially bad ones like that he might put boiling water on their leaves. He ran many experiments and found that plants also have memory, and react if people are lying about something in their presence!

Plants grow better for us when we treat them with love and respect. In return, they grow a warm and healthy look to their leaves which looks pleasing. We then appreciate each other in a loop of positive feedback. This book opened my eyes to what is possible when working with clients, and the fun we can have in helping them to express themselves.

Marder’s book is a brilliant exploration of plants in a philosophical (not a botanical) sense. It’s one of the most eye-opening (and accessible) philosophy books I’ve ever read, illuminating a swathe of life on Earth I honestly had never thought much about before.

Marder writes clearly and cogently about how we’ve thought about plants and how we’ve been wrong: we’ve been blind to plants; we’ve shaped them as our absolute opposite; we’ve treated them only instrumentally, exploiting them for what they can do for us. And then he makes a real effort to think through what plants are–what vegetal being actually is. One of the most mind-blowing things, he argues, in my view, is that we are much closer to plants than we think–we have our own buried “vegetal being.”

Marder’s elaboration of plant life–and how we’ve misunderstood and abused it–is literally the theoretical scaffold of all fiction and film… show more.

When I became interested in the relationship between Plateau tribal peoples and their cultural plants, everyone I spoke with directed me to a series of remarkable papers by British Columbia ethnobotanist Nancy Turner. One look at the photographs of elders who grace the introduction to each volume reinforces their individual knowledge and respect for the place where they have lived for untold generations. Turner’s work in southeastern B.C. eastern Washington, north Idaho, and western Montana have been distilled here into a handy field guide filled with both beautiful photographs and timeless information. 

This book is fairly new, by an Aussie environmental historian. I got hooked from the first page because, once again, it’s well written and I learned stuff about plants that I didn’t know already. The Wardian Case was a kind of travelling greenhouse designed by an English amateur naturalist named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in Victorian times. His simple invention made it possible to send plants around the world on the decks of sailing ships -and resulted in the huge array of species for sale in garden centres today. Beautiful plants that we now take for granted -like roses, rhododendrons, magnolias, wisteria, countless ferns, and more—travelled thousands of miles from their countries of origin in these unpretentious but surprisingly efficient boxes. A great story, with good photos.