Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?

Abstract

At its most basic, plant horror marks humans’ dread of the “wildness” of vegetal nature—its untameability, its pointless excess, its uncontrollable growth. Plants embody an inscrutable silence, an implacable strangeness, which human culture has, from the beginning, set out to tame. Not an easy task, perhaps, since vegetation constitutes over ninety-nine percent of the earth’s biomass, the “total mass of everything that is alive.” Earth is indeed “an ecosystem inarguably dominated by plants” (Mancuso and Viola 2015, pp. 123–124). Plants also embody, however, something more intimate—the mortality intrinsic to all natural beings, to our own nature. Most species bloom and die in often relatively short-lived cycles, constant reminders that while life (in general) will be renewed, we (in particular) will die. As T. S. Eliot famously wrote in The Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land.” Flowers blossom, but death is never far away, haunting life’s fleeting flourishing. And while humans may occasionally become food for predatory animals, we all, whether buried in the ground or scattered on the earth, become sustenance for plants. Ashes to ashes. Flesh to food.