Borderless growth: reframing human-plant relationships

Abstract

The text takes the form of a discussion with Magdalena Zamorska’s work entitled Attentiveness and care: feminist plant studies. The starting point is the postulate of the necessity of writing new narratives, so that we can perceive plants in a way that goes beyond treating them as half-alive, manipulable and passive creatures. Thus, the aim of the article is to develop this story in the form of two narratives: about man as a creative being who creates the proper conditions for the development of certain plants; and about the human order as fragile and prone to disturbances. The first story is based on the example of the ubiquitous and inevitable presence of plants in the city, the second one indicates that the practice of constantly fencing off the human-controlled sphere from natural spontaneity has its limitations and cannot be fully implemented. Both of these stories are proposed so as to look at human-plant relationships in a different way than the image of man as a destructive force hostile to life and biodiversity. Therefore, plants are presented as an integral and active part of social life. In the conclusion of the article, the normative idea of
‘getting overgrown’ is proposed, which postulates the necessity of adopting a flexible approach to the boundaries between humans and plants.