Reading Plants

with Simona
Vermeire

Walking with the

Plants
And all this Vegetable World
appeared on my left Foot, As
a bright sandal form d
immortal of precious stones &
gold: I stooped down&bound
it
onto
walk
forward
throEternity.
(Blake,
2004:554)

Feel beyond
green
Greenness implies
visual
categorization that
disfavors arid places
and plants.

Phyto Democracy
The biomass of plants
on land has been
estimated
to
be
around 1,000 times
that of animals

Sauntering in Delphi
We followed the old way of Pilgrims
who wanted to reach to Apollo temple
in Delphi.
So, I let me inspired by the deep
beauty of the valley and after I
discovered that it was a sacred path
from Delphi down to the ancient port
of Kirra.
Our voices of the Oracle are the Plants
founded on the way. We become
Pilgrims by sauntering in nature.

Sauntering in the literary interpretation of Thoreau

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who
understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a
genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived
"from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and
asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy
Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a
Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their
walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they
who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some,
however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home,
which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular
home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of
successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be
the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is
no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while
sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the
first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is
a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth
and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels. (Thoreau,
Walking)

Sauntering provides multi-sensorial

groundwork for an embodied aesthetic of flora
The cultural botany extents recent research into cultural ecology and
the ecological humanities, and counterbalances empiricist modes of
quantifying flora.
Thoreau as a proto-ecologist and proto-environmental ethnographer
presented a philosophy of plants fundamentally linked to sensuous
encounter with the literature. His writings trace a corporeal aesthetic
of plants and exhibits a syncretic approach to plants and place not
circumscribed entirely by empiricism.

The triumph of organic

There is nothing inorganic. This earth is not,
then, a mere fragment of dead history, strata
upon strata, like the leaves of a book, an object
for a museum and an antiquaria, but living poetry,
like the leaves of a tree,- not a fossil earth, but a
living specimen. (Thoreau)

The nature is a Republic of the visionary

experience
Sauntering can be a way to have a liminal experience which access an
expanded awareness through the plants.
Immersive sauntering. How does walking effect our perception and
sensitivity about the vegetal world?
Writer/walker could be a visionary who gives voice of the plants?
Is the walking itself a creation act? What we create by walking?
Patterns of the EMOTIONS and new landscape of our awareness?

The algorithmic beauty of plants

the recognition of self-similar features of plant structures
The modelling process captures repetitive patterns of cell divisions
The apical cell is the originator of the gametophyte structure

The division wall of an apical cell is attached to the thallus border on one
side and to a previously created division wall on the other side.
genetically controlled cell division patterns play an important role in
determining the shape of a structure.

Walking is a metaphor of the Plant Ontology

The walk is a production of the earth and of the sky. We

plant our steps as roots, growing paths to elevate our
minds and souls to the light.

Ambulator nascitur, non fit

You must be born into the family of the Walkers. (Thoreau,
Walking)
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and
sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them
again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and
settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are ready
for a walk. (Thoreau, Walking)

To be a Walker is to get your own Republic of the

freedom
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and
wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely
civil-to regard man as
an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a
member of society. (Thoreau, Walking)

Walking in the nature is a reading and a

thinking act
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the
only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler
asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study,
she answered, "Here is his library, but his study is out of
doors. (Thoreau, Walking)

Wildness is a path of our conservation

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild;
and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is
the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth
in search of the Wild. (Thoreau, Walking)

Nature is not a Garden!

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed
to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful
garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal
Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain,
then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me! (Thoreau,
Walking)

Our path is not on this

map!
The difference between a path and
a road is not only the obvious one.
A path is little more than a habit
that comes with knowledge of a
place. It is a sort of ritual of
familiarity. As a form, it is a form of
contact with a known landscape. It
is not destructive. It is the perfect
adaptation, through experience and
familiarity, of movement to place; it
obeys the natural contours; such
obstacles as it meets it goes
around.
(Wendell Berry, The Art of the
Commonplace. The Agrarian Essays)