In Praise of Plants

This series is born out of my love and reverence for plants, those incredibly beautiful and generous living organisms.

Of the living things that we can see, plants make up the overwhelmingly greater part. They create the grasslands and forests and wetlands and the surface ocean conditions in which most animals live, they stabilize the atmosphere of the whole planet, and they are the ultimate source of almost everything that animals feed on. Yet biology, until its recent lurch into molecular studies, has mostly derived from animal models. In his groundbreaking book “In Praise of Plants”, French botanist and biologist Francis Hallé examines the qualities that make plants unique, so different from animals, and offers a new look at botany. Experienced in both the academic and in-the-field sides of science, Hallé makes the case that plants differ so profoundly from animals that questions are raised about the meaning of individuality and the nature of life and death. He examines the human – and even scientific – bias towards animals that impedes our understanding of plants. Concepts as fundamental as those of the individual, the genome, sexuality, the species, and evolution require modification or transformation to arrive at an objective biology, rid of zoocentrism and anthropocentrism.

Inspired by this marvelous lesson in biology, urging us to return the plant to its primordial place, I set out to highlight the sheer beauty and diversity of form plants can take by photographing some of them at my local botanical garden at dusk, as a nod to Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s book “In Praise of Shadows”.

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”

– Jun'ichirō Tanizaki