This chapter focusses on ubiquitous plant presences in some of the literatures of southern Africa, essentially of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Both Indigenous societies and incursive colonial regimes depended fundamentally on plant life for shelter, food, materials, and aesthetics of belonging. Colonials imported numerous alien species, both deliberately cultivated and inadvertently ‘released’, with incalculable impacts on the subcontinent’s variegated local environments. The governing divide between ‘indigenous’ and ‘alien’, however, is complicated by sundry blurrings and ironic cross-overs. These dynamics, affecting commercial, societal, and emotional dimensions alike, are explored through some selected nodes, particularly the iconography of Eden or Arcadia; the complex aesthetic ecology of the suburban garden; and the treatment of trees, especially the native yellowwood and the alien jacaranda.

The plant as spectacle and specimen loomed large at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated human innovation in horticulture and botany. In the decades that followed, writers responded to the images of plant life and floral motifs that saturated visual culture, from botanical illustrations and flower painting to the new decorative schema developed by the Bloomsbury circle. This chapter traces the ways in which plants were revealed in new and sometimes unsettling forms in the literature, science and art of the fin de siècle and first decades of the twentieth century. While some writers looked at plants as if they were artworks, discoveries about plant sentience challenged existing taxonomies and critiques of materialism encouraged alternative understandings of vegetal life to emerge. The plant literature explored here – ranging across poetry, fiction, and art writing– turns out to offer a mirror for its authors’ aesthetic, ethical, and botanical concerns.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.

This chapter examines early Christian (Patristic) literature to see the confluence of Graeco-Roman literature with its topoi and evocations of landscapes or plants as habitats and attributes of the gods, with scriptural allusions to the fruitfulness of the earth as a sign of divine bounty and pleasure. Central to early Christian allusions to plants is Eden, site of the Fall, the defining trauma of human exile from it, and the displacement of paradise to an afterlife. The first part of the chapter charts the development of accounts of creation and Eden, starting with Philo of Alexandria, with whom hexaemeral literature (referring to the six days of creation) originates, in synthesis with Plato’s Timaeus. If plants are elements in the universal ordering of species at creation, they are also topoi in rhetorical-inventive analogies for literary genres or organisation. The relations between scriptural-exegetical and classical-literary are therefore not merely a question of iconography or attribute, but of inventive figures. Related to the meadow is the figure of the garland, which will be so central to Christian symbolism, with its diverse significance as wreath, crown, or varied garland. If the rosary provides one case of the Christian development of classical poetic type, albeit beyond the timeframe of early Christianity, another case, little explored in its literary antecedents, is the crown of thorns, central instrument of Christ’s passion, which is in the Greek of the Gospels a wreath of acanthus.

This chapter focuses on three case studies from California that provide a laboratory for investigating value conflicts. One case involves feral goats and endemic plants on San Clemente Island. What initially presents as a textbook conflict between sentientism and biocentrism turns out to engage a host of other values. A second case concerns tule elk and cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore. A variety of values are in play, but the primary conflict is between an endangered species and a population of animals that humans use for food. The third case involves Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and mountain lions. Both of these species have depleted populations and restricted ranges due to human action, and both are under intensive management. Their interests conflict and humans cannot remove themselves from the conflict.

Many philosophers who endorse an environmental ethic are uneasy with animal protectionist philosophies. They reject sentientism – the view that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability – in favor of biocentrism, the view that being alive is necessary and sufficient for moral considerability. It is difficult to characterize both sentience and being alive in ways that are both informative and noncontroversial. Some environmental philosophers reject the individualism of both these views, and embrace instead holistic views that place such entities as ecosystems at the center of moral concern. Deep ecologists go even further, making it difficult to know how to live in accordance with their principles. Such views provide insight, but seem to abandon the fundamental questions of ethics.

This chapter traces John Clare’s unusual lifelong sympathy with plants. The bard of wildflowers wrote about the botanical world again and again, not only drawing on plants for numerous poems, but also recording his observations in botanical lists and Natural History Letters. Other men’s flowers, which he came across in his reading, cross-fertilized with his own habitual experience of local flora, to create poetry of startling freshness. The chapter draws primarily on Clare’s writings on flowers, trees, and grass but is also indebted to the work of key botanical critics and writers such as Molly Mahood and Richard Mabey, as well as recent environmental trends in Clare studies. Clare’s closely observed, celebratory, and elegiac poetry of plants demonstrates his vital importance for the twenty-first century, by alerting us to the irreplaceable value of the natural world.

This chapter contains an outline of the book and of its main argument. It concentrates on the deep structure of the Peripatetic science of perishable living beings, which consists in separate but coordinated studies of animals and plants. It provides the reader with an initial idea of the contents of the book with an emphasis on the epistemic requirements that shape the Peripatetic study of perishable life.

Theophrastus shares Aristotle’s methodological insight that the scientific inquiry unfolds in stages, and that the two main stages of any scientific inquiry are the collection of the relevant data followed by their explanation – the pre-explanatory and the explanatory stage of inquiry, respectively. This chapter shows that we should speak of two main stages of inquiry because the explanatory stage itself may unfold in various stages. In other words, the work that is required to arrive at an adequate (i.e., scientific) explanation may take place in steps and may require accomplishing different tasks. The chapter looks in some detail at how Theophrastus adopts this style of inquiry in his explanation of the various ways in which plants propagate.

The first and most important step into the Peripatetic study of living beings is the observation that life takes many forms. In the sublunary world, it takes the form of plant and animal life (with human life as a special kind of animal life). When Aristotle and Theophrastus speak of animals and plants, they never assume that they are a single form of life. This is confirmed by what we read at the outset of the Meteorology, where Aristotle outlines an ambitious research program that ends with separate yet coordinated studies of “animals and plants.” Whether there is unity, and how much unity there is, in these two studies remains an open question at the outset of the Meteorology. But when we look at the two corpora of writings that Aristotle and Theophrastus have left on the topic of animals and plants, we see that the unity they are able secure is limited. Last but not least, this chapter shows that the study of the nutritive soul advanced in Aristotle’s De anima cannot secure unity within the study of animals and plants.

Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

This chapter plays an important role in the argument of the book. It shows that there is room in Aristotle’s life for a study of what is common to animals and plants in addition to separate studies of animals and plants. At the same time, it shows that what Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is truly limited. By the end of the chapter the reader will see that the Peripatetic study of life is a complex scientific endeavor consisting of at least three components: a study of what is common to animals and plants followed by separate yet coordinated studies of animals and plants. What Aristotle is able, or willing, to say in common for animals and plants is to be found within the boundaries of project of the Parva naturalia.

This chapter introduces the reader to how Theophrastus approaches the topic of plants by offering a selective discussion of the first book of History of Plants. This book is a prolegomenon to the study of plants. It is also a liminal space where Theophrastus negotiates the transition from the study of animals to the study of plants. From the very way Theophrastus refers to animals, we can infer that Theophrastus builds his whole edifice on the results achieved in the study of animals. This overall approach not only confirms that the Peripatetic study of perishable living beings is approached via separate studies of animals and plants but also suggests that the relevant order of study is first animals, then plants.

This chapter examines the not fully researched Hebrew manuscript MS hébr. 1199 from the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, which is an illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in northern Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. It describes plants and their uses, and is part of a specific herbal tradition called the ‘Alchemical Herbals’. There are specific illustrations of plants in this tradition in which the roots are emphasised (typically depicted in geometrical, zoomorphic, or anthropomorphic forms). It is apparent from a comparative analysis of both the texts and illustrations that the Jewish scribe(s) and artist deliberately altered the texts and illustrations. As will be demonstrated, Jews were also involved in another Latin manuscript within this tradition. This chapter provides insight into herbal knowledge, the people behind manuscripts production, and the practical function of the manuscripts. Furthermore, it illustrates how pharmacological knowledge was transmitted between cultures.

Sandra Shapshay looks at the joy Schopenhauer acknowledges us to feel in the presence of natural beauty. Many commentators subordinate this theory of pleasure to the cognitive aspect of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic. Shapshay resists this interpretation. But she also resists its opposite but still reductive or unifying strategy that minimizes the cognitive for the sake of the hedonic. Rather, she discards the notion that Schopenhauer had a unified aesthetic theory as not only false but undesirable. Instead, she shows that Schopenhauer develops two, mutually irreducible spectrums of aesthetic value, based on two different criteria. The spectrum that commentators acknowledge in Schopenhauer is the hierarchy of the arts, which puts architecture and fountainry at the bottom (as revealing the lower Ideas) and literature at the top, as a display of the higher, more complex ideas. The spectrum that is overlooked, but becomes visible if we take his more formalist views of natural aesthetics seriously, is the spectrum of the beautiful and sublime, where the beautiful – and botanical beauty in particular – lends itself more readily (than experiences at the sublime pole) to a state of mind that is not only tranquilizing but (in a departure from his usual attitude) positively joyful.

Our dietary choices affect our health and fitness in two ways: diet has a direct influence on the brain and other body parts and also influence the nature of our microbial populations in the gut. These two mechanisms frequently work together; a high salt diet can make high blood pressure worse and will influence the nature of our microbiota increasing inflammation – two issues which increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. Our dietary choices strongly affect our health through direct influence on all our organ systems, and the nature of our microbial communities has profound influence on our health and fitness. In order to have a diverse bacterial community we need a diverse diet with different good sources of nutritional support. Fiber-rich foods enhance the gut barrier and lower inflammation throughout the body. Good sources of fiber are reviewed in this chapter, along with recommendations for a plant-based diet with antioxidants, little meat, and low levels of saturated fat. High levels of sugar and salt intake, alcohol, and processed foods should be avoided. Fish consumption is advised and vitamin and mineral containing foods are also considered.

Chapter seven examines cultural production and religious institutions in seventeenth-century royal courts, both Muslim and Hindu. Beginning with art and architecture commissioned by Jahangir and Shah Jahan, we then discuss elite lifestyles of both men and women. The opulence of court life attracted international visitors and led to cultural exchange leading to the introduction of chilis and other American plants. Next we examine non-Mughal cultural production in Rajput kingdoms whose attitudes toward the Mughals varied. Lifestyles of elite Rajput and Nayaka women are examined next, before we consider the courtly skills and sciences, such as letter-writing and astrology, that were admired in the Deccan sultanates, where literature with Sufi themes flourished. Royal patronage of three religious sites concludes the chapter.