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Cultural Botany: Toward a Model
of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, and
Poetic Research into Plants
John C. Ryan
ABSTRACT
Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increas-
ingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides
the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes
a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing litera-
ture addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The nature-
culture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory dis-
junction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between
objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive,
artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of
taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, eth-
nobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensory-
limited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday
embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of
cultural ecology, “cultural botany” provides a transdisciplinary research ap-
proach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge
through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies.
KEYWORDS
cultural botany, cultural ecology, ecocriticism, transdisciplinarity, embodi-
ment, landscape
Introduction
It may appear singular, but yet it is not the less correct, to attempt to con-
nect poetry, which rejoices every where in variety of form, color, and char-
acter, with the simplest and most abstract ideas. Poetry, science, philosophy,
and history are not necessarily and essentially divided; they are united wher-
ever man is still in unison with the particular stage of his development, or
whenever, from a truly poetic mood of mind, he can in imagination bring
himself back to it.
Wilhelm von Humboldt (cited in Walls 1995: vii)
Cultural botany poses an alternative to the scientific paradigm for re-
searching the many interdependencies between plants and humans
Nature and Culture 6(2), Summer 2011: 123–148 © Berghahn Journals
doi:10.3167/nc.2011.060202
from multisensorial perspectives. As outlined in this article, its theo-
retical frameworks adopt from critical interdisciplinarity, transdiscipli-
narity, the environmental and ecological humanities, ecocriticism,
and cultural ecology. These fields mediate the “two cultures” split, a
rupture between the humanities and sciences identified and responded
to by such figures as literary critic Snow (1993), philosophers Heideg-
ger (1977), Berlin (1979), Prigogine and Stengers (1984), Serres (1982,
1995), Serres and Latour (1995), Serres and Zournazi (2002), and eco-
logical thinkers Giblett (2004), Leopold (1987), Thoreau (1993, 2000),
and Seddon (1988, 2005). Due to their technical orientations, environ-
mental studies, ethnobotany, and economic botany offer limited theo-
retical promise for embodied and poetic research into human and plant
interactions. As a consequence, I expand upon contemporary literature
in ecocriticism and cultural ecology to present the possibility of cultural
botany as a transdisciplinary research context highlighting everyday hu-
man bodily engagements with flora. Within the envisioned paradigm,
specific philosophical and poetic pathways for research open toward il-
luminating commonplace cultural interactions with plants.
The Technicized Plant in the Laboratory of Nature
…cancel first the living spirit out:
The parts lie in the hollow of your hand,
You only lack the living link you banned.
This sweet irony, in learned thesis
The chemists call naturae encheiresis.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust (1801) (cited in Berthold 2004: 209)
Translated as “nature’s laboratory,” Goethe’s naturae encheiresis ex-
presses early nineteenth-century European disenchantment with the
increasingly reductionistic view of nature in which the living body is
dissected into constituent parts, each analyzed and compartmental-
ized into new disciplines of knowledge. The “sweet irony” is the sep-
aration of intellectual investigation and bodily presence, and the seg-
regation of epistemologies congruent with the evisceration of bodies
in the laboratory. In 1790, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a polymath
accomplished in both plant poetics and botanical science, originally
published the long poem, The Metamorphosis of Plants, prior to his
more acclaimed Faust (see Goethe 2009). In The Metamorphosis,
Goethe proposes what Miller (2009: xi) describes as, “a fuller integra-
tion of poetic and scientific sensibilities that would provide a way of
JOHN C. RYAN
124
experiencing nature both symbolically and scientifically, simultane-
ously.” In this excerpt from Faust, Goethe critiques the structures of re-
lation between human enquiry and the living objects of study that
have been systematized by taxonomic botany since eighteenth-century
Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, formulated his hierarchy of plants.
The purpose of scientific taxonomy is to establish standardized
methods of nomenclature to reference the large number of plants
worldwide and to show evolutionary relationships between species
(Clarke 2008: 57). Goethe’s verses provoke the critical question: how
has Linnaean taxonomy affected the sensuous relationship between
people and plants, when at one time the visible parts of a plant along
with its gustatory, auditory, tactile and olfactory qualities character-
ized human perception and knowledge of flora? Bearing Linnaean lin-
eage, a modern botanist engages with plant life through the use of
taxonomic keys and tools of magnification that enlarge, to the eye,
the minute parts of plants in order to aid classification. In contempo-
rary plant science, DNA technology further ensures that the code of
plant knowledge is transmittable to a worldwide audience of special-
ists (Clarke 2008). As technical research, the rigorous investigation of
flora tends to engage the structuring methodologies of visual taxon-
omy. Science, and, more specifically knowledge in service to technol-
ogy, provides the empirical underpinnings for research into plants in
contemporary settings.
Before the seventeenth century, knowledge of plants was inti-
mately linked to the human body through herbal medicine. As multi-
sensory phenomena, plants were studied for and classified by their
curative virtues, which had direct bearing on human health and sus-
tenance. The therapeutic properties of roots, leaves, or flowers en-
compassed a sensuous system of human corporeal engagement with
flora. Before species of plants were systematized into hierarchical,
sexually-based Linnaean taxonomies, herbal texts categorized plants
according to their uses, specific locations, physical properties, the
season at which their optimal therapeutic value could be attained,
and their method of preparation and administration. As Schiebinger
(2004: 14) stresses, “knowledge of plants at this time was local and
particular, derived from direct experience with plants.” Pre-Linnaean
knowledge of flora was more syncretic, culturally integrated and sen-
suously heterogeneous. Foucault (1972) postulates that, after the eigh-
teenth century in particular, natural observation became pinned to
visually perceptible knowledge, excluding taste, smell, touch and
“hearsay” for their subjective variability, whereas earlier it had been
CULTURAL BOTANY
125
that “to write the history of a plant or an animal was as much a mat-
ter of describing its elements or organs as of describing the resem-
blances that could be found in it, the virtues that it was thought to
possess, the legends and stories with which it had been involved, its
place in heraldry, the medicaments that were concocted from its sub-
stance, the foods it provided, what the ancients recorded of it, and
what travelers might have said of it. The history of a living being was
that being itself, within the whole semantic network that connected it
to the world” (Foucault 1972: 140).
In 1653, physician Nicolas Culpeper published The Complete
Herbal, a heterogeneous text about flora, preceding Linnaean taxo-
nomic classification but proving commensurate vigor in its attention
to the practice of discerning between plants through a sensible con-
ceptual framework (Culpeper 1981). The text is a compendium of
knowledge about the medicinal virtues of European flora and their
preparation with technical descriptions especially laden with multi-
sensory information linking human bodily experience to the attain-
ment of practical knowledge of the natural world. For instance,
Culpeper (1981: 313) cautions the user of herbs to exercise sensory
powers in discerning between beneficial and deleterious root medi-
cines: “Of roots choose neither such as are rotten or worm-eaten, but
proper in their taste, color, and smell, such as exceed neither in soft-
ness nor hardness.” Moreover, non-visual visceral cues signify unity
between the powers of human sense faculties and the therapeutic
value of the plants: “Yet you may know when they are corrupted by
their loss or color, or smell, or both: and, if they be corrupted, reason
will tell you that they must needs corrupt the bodies of those people
that take them” (Culpeper 1981: 312). Enfolded within bodily experi-
ences and physical needs, knowledge systems of plants emerged from
multisensoriality along with the stories and “hearsay” of regional lo-
cales and seasonal particularities of nature and culture. In sum, plant
epistemologies were situated, variable, self-determined, and corpore-
ally affective.
The post-Renaissance botany of the eighteenth century ushered in
abstracted universalized methods of classifying plants based on em-
bedded notions of gendered power-relations. Linnaeus first outlined
his sexually based system in Systema Naturae (1735), Fundamenta
Botanica (1736), and Classes Plantarum (1738) by identifying differ-
ences between the male and female parts of the flower (Blunt 2004).
The organizational system, known as binomial nomenclature (or genus-
species designation), sets out to compartmentalize plants according to
JOHN C. RYAN
126
morphological differences between sexual organs (Schiebinger 2004).
Linnaeus’s emphasis on sexual morphologies, where the male parts of
the flower determine higher classification categories along the taxo-
nomic chain, encipher and reinscribe the gender hierarchies of eigh-
teenth century Europe (Schiebinger 2004). Additionally, Linnaeus’s
system served his “physico-theological” ambitions of promoting the
development of Swedish nationalism through natural history (Miller
and Reill 1996: 8).
Botanical science universalizes the flora of a region by dis-assem-
bling the organic unity of plants into coded blocks of information that
transcend cultural, regional, and linguistic specificity. Elements of tax-
onomic science, such as Latinate names for genus and species and
the modern usage of biochemical assays, technicize the study of flora.
For example, a contemporary of Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Leclerc, di-
rector of the Jardin du Roi, criticized binomial nomenclature for its
abstraction and its basis in the miniscule morphological details that
would require a field naturalist to employ a microscope to identify a
plant through the hegemony of vision (Schiebinger 2004: 28). In other
words, Linnaean taxonomic botany operates successfully on a global
basis because it formalizes research into plants, abstracting living be-
ings from the specific temporal, geographic and ecological conditions
of complex habitats. Another contemporary of Linnaeus, Swiss natu-
ralist Albrecht von Haller, argued for the role of geography in under-
standing flora and that temporal changes over time are as crucial as
morphological anatomies fixed in a single synchronic moment of per-
ception (Schiebinger 2004: 16). In other words, the technical abstrac-
tion of plants is a-temporal in character.
The universalization of plants, through classification and removal
from the temporal flux of biotic systems, is further linked to the ocular
framing of plants. As the major legacy of Linnaeus, taxonomy struc-
tures life into visual arrays consisting of reproductive organs. Multi-
sensorial features are excised to create exportable images for world-
wide circulation. The core practices of the science of plants exemplify
the ordering power of what Latour (1999) refers to as the “synoptic
tableau.” Latour (1999: 38) asserts that “once classified, specimens
from different locations and times become contemporaries of one an-
other on the flat table, all visible under the same unifying gaze.” Sci-
entific images and nomenclatural names are signifiers of the living
bodies of nature. These forms move around the world as “circulating
references,” enabling the global construction of knowledge systems
(Latour 1999: 38). The locality, particularity and materiality of a plant
CULTURAL BOTANY
127
in its environment are reduced to an impulse for compatibility, stan-
dardization and circulation of scientific knowledge. Visual represen-
tations linked to classificatory sexual hierarchies following Schie-
binger’s argument, may obscure actual, temporal, and mutable plants
in the field, as well as human sensory experience of those plants.
Rather than flora’s multisensorial manifold, form and color come to
determine the structure of authentic knowledge.
In Heidegger’s terms, science and philosophy both constitute knowl-
edge of the world. Part of his larger project is the interrogation of the
epistemological exceptionalism of scientific knowledge production as
separate from creative, poetic, or artistic forms of knowing. Further,
Heidegger problematizes the dangerous technical preoccupation of
modern scientific enterprise. “Enframing” (Ge-stell) maintains the
imagistic rationality of science by correlating the systematic domina-
tion of the natural world to scientific objectivity and visual knowledge
production (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 32). According to Glaze-
brook (2000: 246), Ge-stell refers to the “challenging of nature to re-
veal itself in a determined way” through a priori assertions about
reality. Scientific objectivity determines the “age of the world picture”
(Glazebrook 2000: 246). As if in a two-dimensional portrait, taxon-
omy enframes the natural world, inducing snapshot perception of a
plant and instantiating a living organism in space and time. In the es-
say “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger (1977) de-
scribes enframing as a kind of ordering or structuring of the visible,
standing in contrast to poie¯sis, which broadens the possibility of sen-
sory revealing or unfolding. On the one hand, enframing sets forth the
rigorous ordering of the world, through the atemporal visual denom-
ination of structures. On the other hand, the poie¯tic revealing of the
world entails the culmination of the senses in temporal movement,
which is seasonal, specific, relational, and multi-sensory, or open-
ended. Heidegger (1977: 311) contends that “enframing, in a way
characteristic of a destining, blocks poie¯sis.” As the dominant empir-
ical mode of interacting with wild plants, taxonomic Linnaean science
centralizes the enframing of plants in a culture-free visual paradigm.
Reconciling the “Two Cultures” Schism
The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two
galaxies, so far as that goes—ought to produce creative chances. In the his-
tory of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came.
JOHN C. RYAN
128
The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, be-
cause those in the two cultures don’t talk to each other.
Charles P. Snow (1993: 16)
Following Heidegger’s critique, the enframing of plants entails their
removal from the cultural influences that determine their conditions,
as significantly as biological or ecological factors. Since Linnaeus, the
technicized plant parallels the larger story of the standoff between sci-
ence and the humanities. In his 1882 essay, “Science and Literature,”
presented initially as a lecture to the Senate House in Cambridge, Eng-
lish poet Matthew Arnold (1882: para. 14), a highly influential literary
and social figure in Victorian England, argued that literature “may
mean everything written with letters or printed in a book. Euclid’s El-
ements and Newton’s Principia are thus literature.” Arnold envisaged
literature as an inclusive term for writing that conveys knowledge of
the world, as both belles-lettres and technical treatises. In Arnold’s
view, science and literature need not be the incompatible domains
constructed during the Newtonian revolution of natural science, but
are rather parts of the well-rounded education of the nineteenth-cen-
tury citizenry. Nearly eighty years later, novelist and research scientist
Charles P. Snow would return to the theme of conciliation between
the arts and sciences at the same lectern. Identifying a growing dis-
cord between the “two cultures” of scientists and intellectuals, Snow
(1993: 61) argued that productive connections could be made across
the humanities and science divide.
In contemporary thought, the epistemological disjunctions be-
tween science and the humanities are further emphasized by Nobel
Laureate and physical chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle
Stengers, who argue for a “new alliance” between disciplines. In the
view of Prigogine and Stengers (1984: xxix), “traditionally science has
dealt with universals, humanities with particulars.” Concerning tem-
porality, the authors observe a binary “between the atemporal view of
classical science and the time-oriented view that prevails in a large
part of the social sciences and humanities” (Prigogine and Stengers
1984: xxviii). On the “two cultures” split, historian and philosopher
Isaiah Berlin (1979: xxvi) echoes Prigogine and Stengers, identifying
several qualitative disciplinary oppositions: “The specific and the
unique versus the repetitive and the universal, the concrete versus the
abstract, perpetual movement versus rest, the inner versus the outer,
quality versus quantity, culture-bound versus timeless principles.” Char-
acteristic of the humanities, in Berlin’s assessment, are the specific and
the concrete (as compared to the abstracted sexualized hierarchies
CULTURAL BOTANY
129
suggested by Schiebinger), perpetual movement and the internal (as
compared to Heidegger’s time-arresting principle of enframing), and
quality and culture-bound principles (as compared to Latour’s culture-
independent concepts of the circulating reference and synoptic tableau).
The work of French philosopher Michel Serres provides an apoth-
eosis of the vision of science as enculturated and of humanities as sci-
entifically inclusive and conversant. According to Girard (cited in
Harari and Bell 1982: xi), Serres’s central interest lies in countering
“the prevalent notion of the two cultures—scientific and humanis-
tic—between which no communication is possible.” Serres (Serres
and Latour 1995: 29) observes that “philosophers with a good knowl-
edge of the hard sciences and of the classics—armed with rigor and
culture—will never be taken in by folly or ideologies.” Envisioning a
“two cultures” dialogue, Serres in (Serres and Latour 1995: 27–28) ar-
gues for greater exchange between the sciences and humanities: “The
questions fomented since the dawn of time by what we call the hu-
manities help rethink those asked today, about and because of the
sciences.” Moreover, for Serres, knowledge “transcends academic dis-
ciplines and artificial boundaries” (Girard cited in Harari and Bell
1982: xi). Amongst other terms, the rapprochement is synonymous
with “connectedness,” “cross-fertilization,” “cross-breeding” and “mu-
tual enrichment,” approaches embodied by Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius,
Leibniz, and Pascal through a kindred kind of syncretic perspective of
knowledge (Serres and Latour 1995).
As I have been suggesting, the reconciliation of the “two cultures”
rift has consequences for the human relationship to the biosphere. In
The Natural Contract, Serres (1995: 44) deploys the symbol of the
“Northwest Passage” to refer to the place of convergence between sci-
entific and humanities-based knowledge forms. The text itself is stylis-
tically enigmatic and transgressive, eliding categorization as either a
discursive treatise or a poetic rumination. For Serres (1995: 44), a new
contract between humanity and the Earth would entail a shift in
power structures such that “the natural world will never again be our
property, either private or common, but our symbiont.” As with Ser-
res, the opening of dialogue between disciplines toward ecological
justice and sustainability are themes adopted by other writers on the
science and humanities disconnect. Cultural theorist Rod Giblett
(2004: 41) asserts that “greening the humanities and the modern con-
dition is an urgent intellectual and political task whose aim would be
to establish an ecologically sustainable relationship with the earth.”
The “greening of the humanities” would engage a more ecologically
JOHN C. RYAN
130
conversant literati and, conversely, scientific professionals who are
more sympathetic to the methods and perspectives of the humanities.
Similarly, environmental theorist Verena Andermatt Conley (1993: 77)
suggests the need for a green or ecological humanities: “Ecology has
been studied primarily in areas of biology, meteorology, geography,
and demography. Less has been said on the subject in the humanities,
where its mention is generally parenthetical.” For Serres, Giblett, and
Conley, therefore, greater cohesion between the sciences and the hu-
manities will produce higher integration between human cultures and
the natural world.
Toward Transdisciplinary Ecological Knowledge
Science has been about a search for translation, convertibility, mobility of
meanings, and universality—which I call reductionism, when one language
(guess whose) must be enforced as the standard for all the translations and
conversions.
Donna Haraway (1991: 187)
In 1637, René Descartes in Discourse on Method advanced a method
of scientific enquiry based on the processes of deduction and reduc-
tionism, the former involving the progression toward logical conclu-
sions and the elimination of all illogical assumptions and the latter
involving the breaking up of the world into its constituent parts
(Moran 2010). Hence, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, me-
chanical metaphors explaining the human body as a machine or an
engine proliferated along with discrete scientific disciplines, each as-
signed to study the separate aspects of the world and the body. The
twentieth century brought about scientific revisioning of Cartesian
dualism, especially with Feyerabend and Kuhn’s ideas of scientific
constructivism and epistemological anarchism, which situate science
within political and cultural contexts and challenge claims toward
impenetrable universal truths, respectively (Moran 2010). During this
time, the division between science and the humanities, which upheld
the distinction between objective truths and subjective interpretations
of the world, became more deeply under question.
However, admonitions about epistemological specialization and
the potential for a two cultures dualism have occurred since ancient
times, well before the rise of Cartesian dualism, Newtonian mechan-
ics, or the industrialization of science in the twentieth century. For ex-
ample, the Roman doctrine orbis doctrinae reflected the belief that an
CULTURAL BOTANY
131
educated person surveys disciplines, while Cicero propounded the
concept of doctus orator, someone who combines extensive knowl-
edge of the sciences with broad experience of everyday life (Klein
1990). Contemporary attempts to redress the gulf are represented by
two related, but discrete, forms of thought: interdisciplinarity and
transdisciplinarity. The works addressed thus far, which argue for rap-
prochement between the two cultures of science and the humanities,
could be further characterized as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
in focus. Especially when applied to the study of the environment,
these fields of enquiry attempt to challenge the distinctions between
objective and subjective knowledge of nature, as well as the prioriti-
zation of the empirical reasoning of science over the qualitative con-
structivism of the humanities.
A term first used in the social sciences in the mid-1920s, interdis-
ciplinarity is a field of convergence that reflects a larger contemporary
movement to confront the epistemological anxiety of Snow’s two cul-
tures dilemma in which the compartmentalization of disciplines con-
strains the development of integrative knowledge. Endeavoring to
address the restrictive consequence of specialization, especially within
the academy, and also harkening back to an older, pre-disciplinary
state of unified knowledge, “interdisciplinarity” refers to the employ-
ment of more than a single discipline when following a research en-
quiry. The major premise of interdisciplinarity is that the disciplines
together form the foundations of interdisciplinarity; the individual dis-
ciplines maintain their discrete identities within its theory and prac-
tice. Interdisciplinarity, in which multiple disciplines collaborate to
produce integrated knowledge streams, here will be distinguished from
transdisciplinarity, which looks toward enquiry-driven research ges-
tating syncretic bodies of knowledge. As I will suggest, the dividing
line between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity is not fixed and
depends on definitions. The two are not mutually exclusive; transdis-
ciplines will always need the methods established in disciplines, and
disciplines require thought that is quintessentially transdisciplinary to
expand the delimitations of the discipline. The previously discussed
works of Michel Serres, for example, exemplify some of the possibilities
of transdisciplinary thinking in the disciplinary context of philosophy.
Interdisciplinarity is defined variously according to the degree of
integration between disciplines and the role of the research enquiry
itself. Some definitions of interdisciplinarity verge on transdiscipli-
narity. Moran (2010: 14) defines interdisciplinarity as “any form of
dialogue or interaction between two or more disciplines.” Most fun-
JOHN C. RYAN
132
damental to interdisciplinarity, according to Klein (1990: 13), is a
“dispersion of discourse” marked by the inclination to place research
activities within a broader conceptual system or an expanded field of
knowledge. Repko (2008: 6) describes the space between disciplines
as “contested terrain.” In Repko’s view, interdisciplinary research gains
cohesion through a central, guiding enquiry dealing with questions or
problems that amalgamate multiple disciplines cooperatively. Soulé
and Press (1998: 399) emphasize that interdisciplinarity is only feasi-
ble through engaged formal and informal interactions between disci-
plines. Interdisciplinarians need to understand the languages of other
disciplines as an essential premise in creating cooperative research.
Interdisciplinary research that is enquiry-driven synthesizes diverse
epistemological bases toward new forms of knowledge.
One of the primary theoretical concerns of interdisciplinarity is
whether the knowledge produced is the proximation, integration, or
transcendence of discrete disciplines. For Barthes (cited in Moran 2010:
15), interdisciplinarity is more than disciplinary knowledge streams
situated side-by-side or collaboratively producing new epistemologi-
cal forms toward practical problem-solving, but rather the dissolving
of disciplinary classification entirely: “Interdisciplinarity is not the
calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere
expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines
breaks down.”
The term “interdisciplinarity,” along with the intellectual terrain it
interrogates, is itself contested and, depending on definitions, may be
conflated with transdisciplinarity. Repko (2008) identifies three major
forms of interdisciplinarity: instrumental, conceptual and critical. In-
strumental interdisciplinarity is a pragmatic approach to research and
methodology that seeks to remedy actual, technical problems. Con-
ceptual interdisciplinarity is similarly pragmatic in focus but tends to
amplify a critique of disciplinary perspectives through its research
process. Critical interdisciplinarity goes beyond problem solving
through disciplinary cooperation and seeks to dismantle the bound-
aries between disciplines as an impetus of essential transformation in
knowledge production. In this third sense, critical interdisciplinary re-
searchers approach both Barthes’s requisite “dissolution” and the
transdisciplinary project of creating independent knowledge forms,
not limited by disciplinary borrowing for the purposes of real-world,
technical problem solving. As Soulé and Press (1998: 399) argue, “the
identity of all disciplines relies in part on a consensus on the body of
authoritative works that practitioners consider to be fundamental.”
CULTURAL BOTANY
133
Therefore, a discipline is identifiable through its canon, and a trans-
discipline will be trans-canonical or deconstructive of the canon.
At the heart of transdisciplinary research is critical reflexivity on
the theoretical and practical processes of enquiry. Expanding interdis-
ciplinarity beyond its disciplinarity allegiances, the neologism “trans-
disciplinarity” appeared in the 1970s in the works of such scholars as
psychologist Jean Piaget, sociologist Edgar Morin, and astrophysicist
Erich Jantsch to indicate the transgression of knowledge boundaries
(Nicolescu 2002). In the nineteenth century, English polymath William
Whewell’s concept of “consilience” was a precursor to transdiscipli-
nary thought and signified the interweaving of knowledge into a new
cohesive unity “where disciplines are not juxtaposed additively but
integrated into a new synthesis” (Walls 1995: 11). Borrowing from
Whewell’s earlier call for knowledge integration, Consilience: The
Unity of Knowledge by biologist E.O. Wilson (1998) adumbrates a
contemporary interpretation of synthesis within biological disciplines
and between science and the humanities. Wilson (1998: 8) defines
consilience as “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the
linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a
common groundwork of explanation.”
Reflecting the concept of consilience, transdisciplinarity responds
to the fragmentation of knowledge by disciplinary strictures and is dis-
tinguished from—but not antagonistic to—interdisciplinarity and
multidisciplinarity, which, in Nicolescu’s view, always remain within
disciplinary frameworks. Repko (2008) identifies a critical distinction
between interdisciplinarity, which relies on the disciplines for their
theories and methods, and transdisciplinarity, where a problem or
theme becomes the core focus of research and the disciplines are ef-
fectively transcended through a diverse battery of methods. Hence,
the knowledge forms emerging from transdisciplinary studies are ap-
plicable to a broad spectrum of research problems. According to
Repko (2008: 15), within the humanities during the 1990s, transdisci-
plinarity often was referred to as the “critical evaluation of knowledge
forms.” Central to the transdisciplinary project is a poetics of the
world that reconciles the dualisms of the two cultures divide: “If mul-
tidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity reinforce the dialogue between
the two cultures, transdisciplinarity permits us to envisage their open
unification” (Nicolescu 2002: 100). As such, transdisciplinarity is a
contemporary response to the increasing compartmentalization of
knowledge, foreshadowed by Arnold and Snow in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
JOHN C. RYAN
134
An example from my research into popular aesthetic attitudes to-
ward the indigenous flora of the Southwest corner of Western Aus-
tralia may further clarify the above exposition of transdisciplinarity
(see Ryan 2009, 2010). Questions of nature aesthetics are most typi-
cally constrained to the disciplines of philosophy and art history.
However, in researching the aesthetics of flowering plants as pre-
sented in written and spoken colonial and contemporary representa-
tions, I found it necessary to query botanical science, philosophical
aesthetics, regional historiography, language theory, ethnography,
arts-based research, and ecocritical theory. My methodology, “bo-
tanic field aesthetics,” draws from ethnographic interviewing with
wildflower tourists and botanists, poetic enquiry as autoethnography,
and the praxis of field walking at sites of botanical biodiversity. Guided
by the central question of aesthetics but using a transdisciplinary ap-
proach, it has become clear to me that aesthetic perceptions of flora
are omnipresent in popular culture and academic literature alike. In
this context, transdisciplinarity parallels the broader complexity of the
world in which research is situated; it engenders in the researcher a
constant critical awareness of how disciplinary boundaries might in-
hibit the following of a research circuit that weaves into the fabric of
the world. I assert that transdisciplinarity is inherently more than the
assemblage of disciplinary methods for real-world problem-solving; it
is a priori a theoretical and methodological approach for expanding
the bounds of research toward indeterminate patterns and trends
rather than fixed answers.
Interdisciplinary studies of the environment and ecological issues
characterize the field of environmental studies, which focuses on the
study of human interactions with the environment, but the question of
transdisciplinary environmental knowledge remains open for interpre-
tation and further theoretical elaboration. The field of environmental
studies gained popularity in the 1960s as a result of the conservation
movement, spurred by such works as Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County
Almanac (1949/1987) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962/1982)
in the United States, which warned of impending environmental ca-
tastrophes and advocated a greater unification of human and ecolog-
ical concerns. Academic environmental studies programs responded
to the realization that ecological problems are “fractious, refractory,
and expensive” (Soulé and Press 1998: 398) and defy purely scientific
or technical approaches. The interdisciplinarity of environmental studies
tends toward instrumental and conceptual approaches, as outlined
above, where practical concerns of conservation or policy-making re-
CULTURAL BOTANY
135
quire the perspectives and methodologies of different disciplines.
Within environmental studies, the tensions of identity crisis and diver-
gent ideologies aroused by interdisciplinarity have resulted in great
variety amongst academic programs, stressing variously the fields of
environmental science, policy and planning, and cultural studies. At
the core of the debate are the differing theoretical and methodologi-
cal stances of the two major fields of environmental studies: social
criticism and natural science. Soulé and Press (1998: 400) claim that
“the second major group—natural scientists—rarely equate intuition
(or narrative) and knowledge.” Just as environmental problems them-
selves are fractious, so is the field of environmental studies internally
fragmented by “two cultures” ideology.
The inter- or transdisciplinary study of plants, rather than environ-
ments as a whole, has been mainly confined to the fields of economic
botany or ethnobotany. The transdisciplinary potential of botanical
enquiry is limited by the technicization of these fields through scien-
tific methodologies. Ethnobotany uses both qualitative and quantita-
tive strategies drawn from anthropology and botany to understand the
usage and perception of plants by human cultures. In 1895, the Amer-
ican botanist John William Harshberger proposed “ethnobotany” as
the study of plants used by traditional people (Cotton 1996). Ethno-
botany borrows interdisciplinarily from social science and botanical
science for researching human-plant interdependencies (Martin 1995).
Martin’s Ethnobotany: A Methods Manual (1995: 3) enumerates the
affiliated fields constituting ethnobotany as botany, pharmacology, an-
thropology, ecology, economics, linguistics, and conservation science.
In Martin’s assessment, these six related fields strive toward four major
objectives: documentation of botanical knowledge; quantitative eval-
uation of the use and management of botanical resources; experimen-
tal assessment of the benefits derived from plants; and applied projects
that seek to maximize the value that people derive from the botanical
knowledge. Economic botany is a specific subset of ethnobotany that
stresses the economic benefits of local plant knowledge and botani-
cal conservation (Martin 1995: 172). Clarke (2008: 150) discerns be-
tween economic botany as focused on industrial uses of plants and
ethnobotany as concerned with indigenous people’s interactions with
plants. At the center of economic botany may be the prerogative for
local, indigenous medicines to achieve status as global commodities.
The progression in the interdisciplinary study of plants and the en-
vironment has involved the second field—including cultural studies,
social criticism, literature, and philosophy—branching off into what
JOHN C. RYAN
136
has been referred to as the environmental or ecological humanities.
In these fields, integration between science and the humanities is re-
alized outside of the dictums of scientific discourse and the inherent
dualisms of constructing a technical object of knowledge. The envi-
ronmental humanities, as defined on the program page of the Univer-
sity of Utah, which in 2007 launched one of the first graduate pro-
grams dedicated to the emerging field of study, engages “broad-based
understanding of social, cultural, ethical, historical, communication,
and literary perspectives…with a focus on how these humanities per-
spectives intersect with and influence public policy, scientific, legal,
industrial, and corporate concerns” (Environmental Humanities Grad-
uate Program 2010). The environmental humanities assert that eco-
logical problems have resulted, in part, from thinking that posits the
environment as external to culture. Inherent to the environmental hu-
manities is a critique of classical science’s replication of dualistic
thinking in its approach to ecological issues.
Within Australia, the environmental humanities have taken the
more theoretically fleshed out form of the ecological humanities, first
outlined by Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin. The ecological hu-
manities set out to ameliorate the arts and sciences divide toward
greater ecological sustainability. According to Rose and Robin (2004),
the ecological humanities address “the great binaries of western
thought” and ecological issues are “situated across the nature/culture
divide.” An ontology centered in connectivity synthesizes Aboriginal,
embodied, and postmodern feminist knowledge, as well scientific
discourse emerging from researchers such as Prigogine who cross-cut
the science and arts distinction toward connectivity and uncertainty.
Griffiths (2007) outlines three techniques of humanities research that
enhance the scientific study of environments and ecological issues:
scales of space and time, storytelling, and science as subject. In sum,
the humanities augment the scale of science toward “human-scale ge-
ographies” and bring narrative forms toward a self-reflexive process of
research (Griffiths 2007). In the ecological humanities, environmental
transdisciplinarity is nascent.
Poeticizing Plant Research: Floral Poetics
Science is often like the grub, which, though it has nestled in the very germ
of the fruit, and so perhaps blighted or consumed it, has never truly tasted it.
Henry David Thoreau (2000: 242)
CULTURAL BOTANY
137
A poet follows fleeting insight into the natural world, insight that may
be unrepeatable and is often non-linear and unstructured. Science is
thought to embody empirical reason, whereas the humanities deal
with highly variable subjective states of culture. Such epistemological
dichotomies, articulated by Snow, face the ecological transdiscipli-
narian. A fruitful framework encompassing the dialogue between
botany and the humanities, and particularly between plant research
and poetry, is offered by ecocriticism. According to Moran (2010), ec-
ocriticism is a field that melds the concerns of cultural and literary
criticism with those of the natural sciences and geography toward the
purpose of ameliorating the conceptual differences between nature
and culture. Glotfelty (cited in Garrard 2004: 3) defines ecocriticism
as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment … ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to lit-
erary studies.” The field focuses on the interconnections between cul-
tural forces and natural phenomena, but also on the appropriation of
nature by human activities and the proliferation of hierarchical power
dynamics between non-humans and humans.
Yet, ecocriticm may serve literary disciplinarity rather than the en-
quiry-driven, transdisciplinary study of plants. Beyond ecocriticism’s
auspices, several writers evidence a fuller integration of poetics and
botanical science through what might be called, borrowing Berthold’s
term, “floral poetics” (2004: 206) that exceed disciplinary boundaries
and becomes a transgressive vision of the environment and plants in
which science and poetics, as conventionally quarantined disciplines,
intermingle. This section describes three major writers who sought, as
Serres says, both “the scientific ideal and literary temptation” (Serres
and Latour 1995: 29), especially between botanical science and po-
etry. The writers featured here include the philosopher and ecologist
Henry David Thoreau, the prose writer and conservation biologist
Aldo Leopold, and the Western Australian essayist and polymath
George Seddon.1Thoreau, Leopold, and Seddon evidence literary ap-
proaches to plants that are guided by research questions themselves
rather than the demands of their disciplinary alliances. Their works
exemplify both poetic and scientific visions of the environment and
flora that go beyond the fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany,
economic botany, and even literary ecocriticism.
Nineteenth-century American philosopher and naturalist Henry
David Thoreau, in his floristically-minded, posthumously-published
works Faith in a Seed (1993) and Wild Fruits (2000), evidences a po-
etic vision of plants that culminates his transdisciplinary Humboldt-
JOHN C. RYAN
138
ian view of science and literature. Walls (1995) characterizes Thoreau
as a paragon of post-disciplinary practice who sought transcendental
consilience amongst disciplines through the medium of language.
As Walls (1995: 13) eloquently argues, Thoreau’s writings are partic-
ularly embodied versions of botany in which the author “celebrates
not the crash of metaphysical dualisms but the murmur of multiple
voices and actions, not the ecstasy of transcendental disembodiment
but embodiment’s perilous and bittersweet joys.” Thoreau produced
a salient transdisciplinary metaphysics of plants through embodied
poetic approaches incorporating vivid sense-rich experience, over
the seasons and grounded within a place: the environs of Concord,
Massachusetts.
Meticulous observation of broad, diachronic multi-sensory pat-
terns of flora in Thoreau’s botanical works position him as an apothe-
osis of the poet-botanist literary genre. Bradley Dean (2000: xi)
comments that “the observations he recorded in his journal ranged
from the most purely objective and scientific to the aesthetic and
highly subjective.” Thoreau’s aesthetic-poetic interpretations of plants
intersect with the botanical knowledge of his day to produce accessi-
ble works that simultaneously enlarged the boundaries of botany and
situated the human body within the inquiry. Importantly, Thoreau pre-
ferred the “natural” system of botanical classification, developed by
Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and publicized in 1831 through John Lind-
ley’s An Introduction to the Natural System of Botany, over the Linnaean
“artificial” system, the former using a broader spectrum of character-
istics to define botanical groups and the latter focusing on sexual
anatomies, especially stamen and pistil numbers (Walls 1995).
Thoreau is exemplary of a cultural botanist, a transdisciplinarian
who invokes literary metaphor, cultural analysis, and experiential
context in the expansion and occasional critique of the science of
plants. His botanical oeuvres suggest that the edges between poetics
and science, rather than antagonistic or mutually exclusive, overlap.
Thoreau’s later works crystallize his achievements as both an amateur
botanist and a writer of poetic prose, reconciling the “two culture split
between literature and science” (Richardson cited in Nabhan 1993:
xii). Thoreau’s writings further evidence the early germination of “lit-
erary ecology” in North America (Nabhan 1993: xii). His writings
foreshadow the opening of a transdisciplinary space for exchange be-
tween the arts and science in the study of plants, whereby that which
can be tasted, heard, touched, or smelled is not subordinated to that
which can be seen.
CULTURAL BOTANY
139
Perhaps as a reaction to the increasingly technical science of plants,
Thoreau’s field approach is ostensibly multi-sensory and bodily-present,
with ruminations on the olfactory, audible, gustatory, palpable, and
visual qualities of the Concord flora. Non-visual sense experience
constitutes a “bodily eye” (Thoreau 1993: 26). The olfactory faculty
perceives plants for their trademark smells, with white pines possess-
ing a “strong spirituous scent, almost rummy, or like molasses hogshead,
which would probably be agreeable to some” (1993: 39). Thoreau
records audible particularities of plants, as hickory forests echo “even
in August…the sound of green pignuts falling from time to time”
(1993: 143). The sense of touch reveals information about a cranberry
plant: “I was obliged with my finger carefully to trace the slender
pedicel through the moss to the vine, where I would pluck the whole
together, like jewels worn on or set in these sphagnous breasts of the
swamp” (2000: 167). Additionally, Thoreau (1993: 87) attends to the
intermixture of the sensory qualities of plants, for example, with the
thistle, whose inner silky seed capsules are guarded by a prickly ex-
ternal involucre: “It is a hedge of imbricated, thin, and narrow leaflets
of a light brown color, and beautifully glossy like silk.” His prose blends
scientific acumen with nuanced poetic perception, and, as works of
cultural botany, Thoreau’s writings are poie¯tic expressions of plant life
over the seasons.
Thoreau’s embodied transdisciplinary investigations heralded ad-
vances in the disciplinary field of plant ecology. Faith in a Seed, for
instance, is concerned almost wholly with the dispersal mechanisms
of seeds, and, with Wild Fruits, forms part of his larger unfinished
project, the “Kalendar,” in which he aimed to record all the events of
natural history that took place in Concord during a calendar year
(Dean 2000). Representations of plants express Thoreau’s inherently
seasonal approach to studying them, gathering and articulating di-
verse sense impressions and discursive deductions over time, rather
than fixating on visual instances of apprehension based solely on
form and color or reproductive isomorphisms. Thoreau assembles a
whole life pattern of flora, instead of isolating events in the broader
cycle of plants. Through this fusion of careful empirical observation
and tonal sensory experience over time, Faith in a Seed provided ev-
idence to contradict the prevailing nineteenth-century belief in the
spontaneous generation of plants, and demonstrates, to the contrary,
that the distribution of seeds occurs through a variety of subtle mech-
anisms by birds, quadrupeds, wind, and the actual bursting forth of
the seed from its pod.
JOHN C. RYAN
140
Along similar lines, twentieth-century American biologist and au-
thor Aldo Leopold’s seminal work on landscape conservation, A Sand
County Almanac, published first in 1949, outlines a poetic and meta-
physical view of science and nature, and, with a tone of urgency, an
imperative that science must assume an increasingly poetic and less
reductionistic interpretation of conservation. In the structure of the
text, A Sand County Almanac reflects Leopold’s attempt to integrate
poetic and scientific understandings of the natural world. Part I pre-
sents a series of essays sequenced according to the twelve calendrical
months, while Part II gives a series of geographically organized dirges,
elegies, meditations, and more scientifically grounded proclamations.
The book culminates in Part III with a series of analytical essays set-
ting out Leopold’s concepts of land ethics, wilderness, and aesthetics.
Berthold (2004: 207) observes “the odd structure of the text—its shift-
ing styles and tones, its unsettling pattern of self-translation and self-
transfiguration—is in fact central to Leopold’s project of developing a
style which would mirror his vision of a transgressive integration of
science and poetics.”
In Part II, the essay “Song of the Gavilan” demonstrates that at the
heart of Leopold’s poetic science is the elision of subject-to-object
structures between culture and nature. In the opening of the essay,
Leopold distinguishes trenchantly between the song of the river and
the instruments of science, which have yet to either disturb or appre-
ciate the river’s natural glissando. The river exists in an idyllic, pre-
scientific state in which the non-human denizens of the Gavilan are
the original botanists of the river, performing empirical studies of its
composition: “Open the crop of a fat little Mearn’s quail and you find
an herbarium of subsurface foods scratched from the rocky ground
you thought barren” (Leopold 1949/1987: 151). Whereas the quail re-
veals the fecundity of the ecosystem “you thought barren,” science in-
terrupts the cadence of the world through “an ironbound taboo which
decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science,
while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets” (1949/1987:
153). Rather than be attuned to the melodious river, science is preoc-
cupied with the “process of dismemberment.” That the health of the
river partly depends on the “perception of its music” is a reality not
yet validated as part of an objective and empirical position (1949/
1987: 153–154).
Berthold (2004) characterizes Leopold’s acerbic position on sci-
ence as a call “upon science to open itself to a metaphysics—a way
of seeing beyond or above the characteristics of things as self-
CULTURAL BOTANY
141
enclosed phenomena.” His metaphysics is a poetics of fauna and flora
in which seeing becomes “an inherently aesthetic act” (Berthold 2004:
212). For Leopold, seeing is not merely a visual act of apprehension
but begins with the other perceptual faculties, those that elude sci-
ence. The scientific vision of Leopold is fundamentally an embodied
sojourn through the senses in which the distinctions between humans
as land managers and nature as managed object blur indeterminately.
Leopold prompts the question, “Who is managing whom?”
On the other side of the world, twentieth-century essayist and
polymath George Seddon’s landmark study of Western Australia, Sense
of Place (1988), is a transdisciplinary exegesis on place as a fusion of
the geography, geology and botany of the Swan River region in which
Perth is situated. Seddon’s vision of science and the humanities takes
the form of an inquiry into West Australian place as both a center of
human commerce and geophysical expansion, as a field of natural
and cultural history and non-human interdependencies. Tyrrell (2005:
752) observes that “place and identity are of key importance in Sed-
don’s work...He has strong affinities with local landscapes, as histori-
cal interactions of people and land.” Seddon’s The Old Country:
Australian Landscapes, Plants and People (2005) provides interpreta-
tions of elements of regional botanical science, including the vast
Banksia genus, but imbues these factual recitations with cultural his-
tories that unearth the embedded poetics of plant names. Hence,
while Seddon’s works exclude the overt scientific poetics of Leopold
or Thoreau, they do suggest greater unities between science and the
humanities. Moreover, Seddon is concerned with the multi-sensory
dimensions of the flora that can only be communicated in a prose
rather than a scientific form. He begins with “scents, sights, sounds—
all can stir memories” (Seddon 2005: 128), and then recounts, in po-
etic fashion, an aspect of the ecology of local acorn banksia:
As I write, in the scorching February of a Perth summer, Banksia prionotes is
in flower along road and rail reserves, and in odd pockets of bushland and
park. The inflorescence is at first a creamy white, but as the individual flow-
ers open, moving up the cob, their brilliant orange colour is revealed, show-
ing the reason for the popular name, the acorn banksias. (129)
For Seddon, plant ecology is linked, to quote Serres again, to “lit-
erary temptation,” aesthetics, poetics, naming and first-person experi-
ence. His writings provide regional examples of a trained scientist
who bridges the rift between the two cultures in the tradition of Tho-
reau and Leopold.
JOHN C. RYAN
142
Cultural Botany: Bridging Two Cultures,
Building on Cultural Ecology
I have attempted to assert that a less fragmented research paradigm
into human and plant interdependencies is not to be located within
the models of environmental studies, ethnobotany, economic botany,
or even in the form of interdisciplinarity where disciplines cooperate,
but retain their identities and consequently restrain the enquiry with
methodological ideology. Cultural botany is a transdisciplinary model
that attempts to fuse the arts and sciences divide, offering the possi-
bility for enquiry-driven research into plants to attain embodied, poetic
character; such research enables poetry and the human multisensor-
ial faculties to infuse the way in which humans perceive plants. In its
most general form, cultural botany encourages exchange between the
arts and sciences to expand knowledge bodies. Cultural botany em-
braces knowledge bases and techniques of enquiry into plants that in-
tegrate cultural contexts of living flora. As the transdisciplinary study
of plants, cultural botany seeks the approaches of literature, poetry,
the visual arts, cultural studies, and the humanities as a whole.
Dialogue between poetic language and taxonomic nomenclature,
science and the humanities, and aesthetics and techniques provides the
groundwork for mutually reinforcing efforts amongst researchers of the
cultural dimensions of plants, rather than the time-worn debate of dis-
ciplinary difference. As the term “plant” itself is a product of the scien-
tific vision, researchers into flora will necessarily be confronted with
taxonomic discourse. In recognition of the possibility of consilience,
cultural botany evokes botanical science, employing its technical terms
and acknowledging its limitations, while the science of plants pursues
an increasingly poetic and enculturated view of the world. Cultural
botany furthermore strives to reconnect with the diverse knowledge sys-
tems of plants that have been subordinated to a universalized model of
plant life. These include Aboriginal and folk understandings.
Recent efforts in cultural ecology—the study of the interactions
between human societies and landscapes—offer a promising prece-
dent from which the cultural botany research platform can be ad-
vanced. Research into the cultural ecologies of plants points to this
possibility of cultural botany as an approach for exploring embodied
engagements with wild flora. This literature suggests the use of trans-
disciplinary methods for articulating human interdependencies with
cultivated flora. Head (2007: 843) proposes the use of “a battery of di-
verse methodologies” for researching the cultural interstices between
CULTURAL BOTANY
143
plant communities and humans. Hitchings (2003) employed ethno-
graphic methods to understand the perceptions of the materiality of
cultivated plants in London public gardens. Hitchings and Jones (2004:
8) also used mobile interviews—interviews and field observations
performed while strolling with the public amongst living flora. Mobile
ethnographic practice facilitates bodily interaction with plants that in-
troduces taste, smell, touch, and sound into floristic research, or what
I have called a transdisciplinary practice of cultural botany. Head and
Atchinson (2009: 239) detail several studies in which interviewing
methods allow people to “talk about or demonstrate everyday em-
bodied interactions with plants.” The accounts of corporeal involve-
ments are more intimate and multisensorial than those offered by
empirical biogeographic or social science methods (Head and
Atchinson 2009).
To summarize, embodied and poetic research into conceptual
and practical issues concerning human and plant interdependencies,
such as the appreciation of wild flora, calls for a context building
upon research into the cultural ecology of plants. The prevailing mod-
els for plant-human research are largely contained within ethnobot-
any or economic botany. Yet the limitations of those models highlight
the need to synthesize trends in critical interdisciplinarity, transdisci-
plinarity, ecocriticism, and cultural ecology toward inquiry-driven plant
research (see Table 1). The research context of cultural botany will
JOHN C. RYAN
144
Table 1 Tenets of Cultural Botany. Cultural botany situates
knowledge of plants across time-worn disciplinary fissure between
the sciences and humanities to foster botanical research that is
transdisciplinary, cultural, poetic, imaginative, and narrative.
Tenets of Cultural Botany
•Inquiry Driven
•Critically Transdisciplinary
•Culturally Embedded
•Poetically Made
•Sensorily Rich
•Temporally Positioned
•Narratively Expressed
•Connectivity Based
•Botanically Imaginative
•Epistemologically Situated
draw closely together the ethnographic and spatial methodologies of
the social sciences, the analytic and textual strengths of the humani-
ties, and the taxonomic and ecological understandings of botanical
science toward a more-rounded and multi-faceted articulation of the
knowledge flows between human cultures and plants. This article has
aimed to circumscribe the theoretical underpinnings of cultural
botany, particularly understanding how it might be positioned in the
strata of environmental disciplines, such as the ecological humanities
and ethnobotany, that address the science and humanities binary.
Having drawn the circle widely, a specific example of cultural botany
research would be the subject of further enquiry.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Aus-
tralia for the International Postgraduate Research Scholarship granted
to me to support this research, as well as my Principal Supervisor, Dr.
Rod Giblett, and Associate Supervisor, Dr. Lekkie Hopkins, for ongo-
ing support and constructive feedback.
John C. Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate at Edith Cowan University in Western Aus-
tralia. His dissertation, Plants, People and Place: Cultural Botany and the
Southwest Australian Flora, invokes the writer-as-botanist tradition of John
Clare, Henry David Thoreau, and Pablo Neruda to create poetic interpreta-
tions of the indigenous flora of the Southwest of Western Australia. He is a
graduate of the University of Lancaster’s M.A. in Environmental Philosophy
program, and his research interests include ecosophy, landscape writing, hu-
man-plant interdependencies, and the conservation of medicinal and edible
plant species. In 2011, John published a collection of poetry, Katoomba In-
cantation. Address: P.O. Box 175, Inglewood, WA 6932, Australia, e-mail:
jryan9@our.ecu.edu.au.
Notes
1. A more extended treatment of the subject would include such figures as
the German poet and botanist Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the English poet John Clare,
or Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, all of whom shift between the science and poetry
divide.
CULTURAL BOTANY
145
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