Spring bursts into exuberance with the opening of the crocus. It intimates the gradual movements occurring all around us, oft without our notice. No passer of pollen present, I can sense the animacy unfolding within the scene. The seed germinated in one apt spot and found an opening amidst the grass beneath, as stem carried the weight of a crown of purple, revealing a luminous orange glow from within.
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Cycling along the coast, I stopped to rest briefly on the strand and then walked across a park, where I was welcomed by these spring flowers. While grabbing my immediate attention with an array of colour, the unfurling of the petals signalled to me the powers of movement immanent to the plant. In the above image, the flower might well take centre stage and yet it inculcates the sense of growth, which literally outgrows the flower and frame, instilling the scene with an excess of living movement.
In my recent paper ‘Plant emergence: The aesthetics of plant Movement and the phenomenology of vegetal growth’, published by Environmental Values (King, 2025), I broach this topic of plant animacy and the sense of the phenomenon in detail. Responding to what has been called ‘plant blindness’, I challenge the presuppositions that often underlie the usage of the term. Namely, that being out of sync with the rhythm of plant life is something to bemoan and in turn eschew. While I think there is merit in emphasising our dissociation from the rhythm of plants, I portray these blind spots as something actually essential to the ways we come to appreciate the ‘sense’ of their gradual movements.
The above example is therefore such an instantiation of appreciating plant movement in situ, without the necessary aid of time-lapse technology, a representation of plant growth which has surged in popularity amidst the ubiquity of short form content. In lieu of relinquishing such technologies and their fecund contributions, I want to proffer a differential way of perceiving our blindness to plants, as a means to cherish the fruits of our perception, no matter how ostensibly out of sync with plant movement we are. This is why I invoke phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, whose writing, whilst relatively scarce on the subject of plants, is blossoming with many fruitful insights on the heterogeneous nature of movement as it is perceived. But first, some prickly comments on Hegel, whose work, whilst helpful for the purposes of my paper, falters on the subject of regenerative growth, a phenomenon I did not have room to explore.
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Locomotive movement tends to be far more conspicuous than the movement of growth, which cuts across both plants and animals alike. The movement of growth is therefore not unique to plants as much, but manifests too in our hair and nails, or in the feathers and fur of an animal for example. In Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics, he declares that ‘Such covering’, including ‘prickles’ ‘pelts’ and ‘shells’ has forms drawn from the kingdom of plants’ (Hegel, 1975: 145). But these external and more superficial outgrowths for Hegel are an indication of a ‘deficient’ kind of movement, which amounts to nothing of the sort putatively achieved by locomotive movement or the powers of the human soul for that matter. Although Hegel mentions the ‘remarkable’ nature of cacti prickles (127), he ultimately seems to suggest that these features are mere adornments, or at best, protective mechanisms and as such, are not reflective of a plant’s ‘inner life’ but from ‘forms drawn from a lower stage than that of life proper’ (145).
By comparing the outgrowths of a plant to coverings of an animal, however, Hegel instills a false analogy which oversimplifies and undervalues the dynamic and sophisticated phenomenon of vegetal growth. The regenerative plasticity of a tendril or branch is therefore more like the extension of a limb than the extension of animal hair, as the plant reaches out to relate to its surroundings. A pollarded tree for instance, whose shoots begin to resprout from its chopped branches emerge with new leaves that soak up sunlight for food, proliferating mouths that can feed from multiple vantage points, soon to be digested by a cluster of stomachs. The neuronal-like strands of plant roots, intertwining with threads of mycelium also intimate the depth of relationality afforded by plant growth.
Hegel sees the human body as having a ‘tremendous advantage’ over and above the plant, namely for being a sensitive body. Unlike hair and nails, Hegel contends that the ‘skin is not hidden by plant-like unliving coverings’ (146). As he continues, ‘the pulsation of the blood shows itself over the entire surface ; the beating heart of life is as it were present everywhere over the body and comes out into appearance externally as the body's own animation, as turgor vitae, as this swelling life.’ Yet, once again Hegel arbitrarily venerates the human form at the expense of plants, erroneously suggesting that the plant’s coverings are unliving and in turn, overlooks the fact that the organs protected by the animal’s epidermis are themselves analogous to the regenerative growth in a plant. Unlike humans or animals, however, who move around and whose flesh protects their vital organs, plants remain sessile, not out of deficiency, but because their organs are regenerative and thus do not require locomotive movement and flesh to protect them, akin to the unique capacity of the liver, whose regenerative capacity is an exception to the rule in animals. Plant life thus swells with the turgor vitae that Hegel ironically deprives them of; especially given that the Latin term itself pertains to the pressure within plant cells that makes them rigid and upright, like blood pressure maintaining circulation in the animal body.
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The regenerative features of growth are invoked by Merleau-Ponty, when he refers to ‘Hydriodic polyps of the germs Tubuluria—a sort of sea anemone" which he says can regenerate its ‘flower or head’ when amputated (Merleau-Ponty, 1995: 231). The dynamism of this regenerative capacity is intimated by Merleau-Ponty, as he writes ‘by cutting the stalk at any point, we always get a regeneration of the head, which then is reborn from any region of the organism’. Without ascribing any teleological function to regenerative growth, he suggests that there is a certain level of ‘creativity’ when the organism ‘recompletes itself’ and that ‘the operation is also entirely independent of conditions given once and for all’, and is therefore not merely predetermined (230). While not strictly speaking a plant, Merleau-Ponty’s reference to the hydrozoa is helpful for our purposes notwithstanding. Not only does the sea anemone resemble the plant in appearance, but its manner of regenerative growth is also analogous. Interestingly, sea anemones often harbour a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with single-celled algae, whose photosynthesis provides them with oxygen and other nutrients requisite for their survival, further evincing their plant like being.
In my paper, I try to emphasise the ‘perceptual sense’ of plant movement, which needn’t be conceived in a Zeno-like fashion, as atomized units of time, which we have to visualise as the movements unfold such as in a time-lapse video, but rather as a ‘style’ of growth, which we can appreciate without having it spelled out to us. Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the fruits of our intuition in appreciating the many kinds of movement that manifest in our perception. As he asks, ‘What is the wind perceived? Someone? A thing? A phenomenon? It is all three at once: a continuation of movement without mobiles, of behaviors without subjects’ (99). The movement of the wind is not so much seen, but is smelt, heard and felt, especially potent when cycling across the coast. The sense of movement therefore is not circumscribed to its visible manifestation. On the contrary, movement is like an ungraspable aura that surrounds and envelopes all of our senses. The wind, as Heidegger intimates, is never really perceived as ‘a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises’; on the contrary, we hear the storm, he says, ‘whistling in the chimney’ or rather in the gentle swaying of the trees (Heidegger, 1975: 26). The movement of the wind has an invisible quality and yet it has a certain graspable sense. Without subjects as such, the movement of the wind is expressed and intensified by living movements, as seed and pollen is transported through the air and aromatic needles are flung from evergreens.
The non-living has a kind of movement of its own, whether it is the shifting of tectonic plates or undulating waves, yet there is something peculiar about the movement of the living, each with their own very unique expression. Merleau-Ponty hints at such a distinction, albeit never entirely clean cut, when he instructs ‘the collectivity of life to be specified relative to the architectonic of the sand dunes’ (Merleau-Ponty, 258). This collectivity of life can be thought not necessarily as a homeostatic whole, but as an array of entangled and interrelated roots. Invoking arboreal metaphors that go deeper than the tree, Merleau-Ponty defines ‘production’ in a schematic note as "Not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together (ancient fauna (?) as divergent as our own—maybe all the types already realized for a long time)”. Much of what goes on in the world of the plant is underground and therefore always involves a degree of mystery. Yet beneath the soil where the crocus rests, lies the germ of something fecund, the sense unearthed without needing to uproot, as we perceive through the imperceptible and glean the sense of spring, arriving finally, at the sense of growth.
References
Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.
Heidegger. The Origin of the Work of Art. tr. A. Hofstadter. New York: 1975.
Merleau-Ponty. Nature: Course Notes from the College De France. tr. R. Vallier. Illinois: 1995.
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