The Life Cycle of a Common Weed: Viral Imaginings in Plant-Human Encounters

Abstract

It was like a scene from Repo Man (1984) in which all the products are brandless and packaged with the same blue-on-white text, indicating exactly what they are and nothing else: milk, beer, corn flakes. The hard ware and garden supply in my farm community sold forty-pound bags labeled “ dried blood” in generic red-on-white. The huge bags were piled by the door, as if to remind you to grab one on your way out among other sundries like chewing gum, flashlights and pocket screwdrivers. I marveled to think that more than my own body weight in dried blood slouched by the cash registers, and what was it for anyway? My mother, an amateur botanist, explained that blood is a fertilizer high in nitrogen and can be dried and sold as a by-product of industrial slaughterhouses. Though blood is not new to agricultural systems. Lush gardens sprouted with the blood of slain beasts appear in the Talmud and in twelfth-century Persian poetry (Stanley 1993; Bynum 2007; Khayyam 1901). The blood of mortal wounds from protagonists of ancient Greek tales gave rise to hyacinths, violets, and crocuses, as well as mythological plants, such as the prometheion and the moly (Conticelli 2001). I am enamored of blood as a substance and as a symbol of vitality. But as I am a lifelong carrier of the hepatitis C virus, my own blood carries with it the sinister potential of seeding another person with disease. I was intrigued that my own blood— hazardous to humans—could nonetheless be useful to plants. This nugget of horticultural information lay dormant until the con