Of Plants That We Meet: Encounters and Connections

This small booklet is a continuation of Of Plants That Live with Us: Names, Stories, and Care, in which we brought together twelve stories of houseplants as the result of a teaching course and discussed human-plant interactions in the context of daily indoor life. This time, lured by the lush greenery of summer, we continued our course with a return to nature.

We adopted a deep-dive approach to establish one-on-one connections: each student visited a green space in Braunschweig and chose a wild plant of interest. As part of this approach, literature research and drawing were used to learn the common, botanical, and native names, as well as the uses, phenology, native habitats, and morphology of the plants. Mapping and interviewing were employed to explore spatial and social relationships between plants and people. In particular, storytelling brought out personal connections between the chosen plant and the student.

During the first meeting with students, when I asked the students “do you know any of the plants growing outside?”, most shook their heads. This seemed to confirm the mainstream view that people are losing touch with nature. In fact, after putting the nine stories together, the situation is not that desperate. Some connections were already there. They just needed to be evoked, revealed, and reflected.

Fortunately, this small book captured these beautiful moments: a journey that began with a mistake, nostalgia for a lost mythological tradition, a shift from dislike to intimacy, nameless stinging pain, and regret over a past shame.

These connections are not only about the students and the plants per se, but also drift to families, hometowns, childhoods, and ethnic cultures. However, these connections were indeed once lost. Behind the loss are military conflicts, emigration, life pressures, and social prejudices.

We hope this booklet can save some of those tenuous connections and also foster new ones.