Reviewed by: Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants by Stella Sandford Joela Jacobs Stella Sandford. Vegetal Sex: Philosophy of Plants. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Pp. 256. As a work of plant philosophy that is invested in botany, Stella Sandford's Vegetal Sex examines the zoocentrism in current models of plant sex to arrive at more precise, phytocentric concepts. In doing so, the clearly written book touches on sexuality and gender but is primarily concerned with sex, to respond to the question of what "female" and "male" do and do not mean in plants. Beginning with a chapter on plant philosophy as a method, Sandford defines this kind of work against current plant advocacy texts, perhaps sometimes taking those other publications to task a bit too much for their anthropocentric metaphors, since—by definition—they serve a science communication purpose that differs from the precise philosophical conceptualization she pursues in her own work. And indeed, Sandford's book fills an important gap for botanists, plant scientists, plant philosophers, and anyone working in critical plant studies, as well as for scholars of the history of science and gender studies—if they are interested in terminology regarding plants, not humans, and bring some botanical reproduction knowledge to help them along. By mapping major moments of thought and discovery from Aristotle—via Grew, Camerarius, and Linnaeus—to the fascinating work of David G. Lloyd in the late twentieth century, Sandford elucidates both the history and the science of plant sex in the subsequent five chapters. She emphasizes how much the understanding of plants has been guided by analogies to animal sex to this day and in which ways this analogy is inaccurate. In doing so, Sandford shows the lasting centrality of Aristotle for the conceptualization of plant sex and emphasizes the importance of philosophy for botany as a field. While Sandford's impressive interdisciplinary knowledge and carefully scaffolded, logical steps demonstrate the significance of these claims for plant philosophy, for a scholar of literature and culture like me the strict dismissal of metaphors and of the sociocultural realm occasionally seems to limit the argument to being only about what plant sex is not or should not be called, instead of what it has been and is, precisely because of the language and terminology people have been using. While poetic language and cultural practice are of course not what the book sets out to engage, the turn to Indigenous knowledge and feminism in the final chapter troubles the sometimes artificially upheld distinctions of the monograph's prior theorizations in productive ways and shows what is at stake for Sandford herself. As these final pages expand the question of plant sex from the strict sense of the previous chapters, they engage with cultural contexts and metaphors like the "mother tree," and they break away from the overwhelmingly white, male perspective with which Western philosophy is otherwise suffused. Especially in the epilogue, Sandford's exciting own conceptual constructions of vegetal sex begin to emerge, which I hope will be pursued further. Joela Jacobs University of Arizona Copyright © 2023 L'Esprit Créateur