Live Matter: Towards a theory of plant life

Abstract

Planting endures unquestioned in landscape architecture through a reliance on the authority of scientific botany and design expertise. While plants represent the intersection of life and matter, the discipline of landscape architecture only recognizes plants for supreme utility or divine beauty: our collective desire to domesticate. The ensuing planting procedures rely on a lineage of practices that pacify the aliveness of plants, as choice parts and reductive binomials render plant form. By using the term ‘live matter’, I suggest that plants can be reoriented and recognized for their aliveness. This reorientation is substantiated by an alternative botanical framework, which lies outside the burden of economically driven botany or reductive typologies of formal composition. In the following article, the botanic contributions of three scientists—J. W. Goethe, C. Darwin, and A. Arber—are described in order to expand the practice of planting in landscape architecture, so that identification of parts can be replaced with the potential of formation. This decentering introduces a provocative new perspective on the living, breathing organisms that are all around us yet seldom fully appreciated. Can plants ever be reclaimed as a series of transformations, a creative collaboration, or a philosophical subject, despite centuries of fixed practices and parts procedures?