Plant Theory

Abstract

Abstract Over a hundred years after the publication of the scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s 1922 Abyakta, a book of essays in Bangla where he writes about his experiments on plant life, the response of plants to external stimuli, particularly electrical energy, a nervous system in plants, and his work towards revealing what he calls ‘torulipi’, a plant script, so as to be able to prove that plants were indeed living beings, scientists are now proving many of the Indian scientist’s findings. Simultaneous with this has been a public enthusiasm for the work of writers and artists that feature speculation over, and the subsequent creation of, a plant script. This review of works published in 2023 considers two key publications that illuminate the prescience of Bose’s thought for the contemporary investment in the plant humanities: Katie Holten’s edited anthology The Language of Trees and the spring 2023 special issue of Orion on ‘The Language of Nature’. This review therefore focuses on literature about the plant script while also recording and contextualizing the zeitgeist that compels and indulges such an imagining.