PLANT STORIES #5: ON PLANTS, BORDERS, AND BELONGING
Reading Group with Jessica J. Lee
31 AUGUST 2025 / 17:00
“What happens when a plant – or a people – moves from one place to another? We often turn to language to offer a frame. So we have introduced species, invasives, exotics, and weeds. So we have “plant immigrants”. Or indeed, too often when applied to people, just “migrants”.” (from the introduction of Jessica J. Lee: Dispersals. On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, 2024)
We will read together some chapters of Jessica J. Lee’s book Dispersals, and consider and discuss the topic of terminology and naming in the context of plants and migration. We want to look at plants that are somehow perceived as “out of place” – whether weeds, neophytes, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hands. How has the language that we use to describe such plants developed, and how does language shape the realities of how we make sense, relate to and deal with nature? What is more, how does this language also shape cultural narratives and analogies? What could different ways of speaking and relating sound and look like?
You are invited to also bring a short text or term you would like to talk about, if you like.
In English
JESSICA J. LEE is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She is the author of prizewinning books of nature writing, Turning (2017), Two Trees Make a Forest (2020) and Dispersals. On Plants Borders and Belonging (2024), the children’s book A Garden Called Home (2024), and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted (2023). She was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of the digital platform The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. She lives in Berlin.