Lucie Chou

Botany was my first impulse towards creativity. At five years old, I chanted my first poem under autumn ginkgoes. Reading Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany, Addressed to a Lady as a fifth grader, I felt spoken to by a bosom friend, and the following years found me foraging in city parks, vacant lots, nurseries and botanical gardens for specimens, building a herbarium a foot tall, teaching myself botanical nomenclature and illustration. In my field diaries, I took on the persona of Copycat Little Sister of Rousseau, with the earnestness of an intense, nerdy eccentric slightly bemused about the world.

Though my allegiance as a girl was to science, I would later find what it has to say incomplete, even a little beside the point. About what it is to be or become a dandelion, a plane tree, a fern. About what it is to be a human who could understand a modicum of a plant’s wisdom, and take joy in that. That way, my eye and ear trained as a naturalist’s found their ways into poetry, a place to “dwell in Possibility”. Botanists and poets look at a plant with keenness of the same degree, but tending in different directions. What was wanting in botanical nomenclature itself, I found the inspiration to imagine by reading Amy Clampitt’s “Botanical Nomenclature” (The Kingfisher, 1983).

Then this initial shoot branched out into a half-thinking, half-feeling curiosity to discover new ways to “be with” the vegetal world, ways other than the everyday violence of “food”, “clothing”, “decoration” and the metaphysical violence of “rudimentary form of life” and “metaphor for higher being”. I long for communion on equal terms. Writing my own plant-poetry, I try my best to tell stories to allow myself, and my readers, access to plant-human relationships of genuine understanding and mutuality. I hope the plants are gratified to know I fail better each time.

Both poems in this issue of PHQ were given to me by generous plants on a trip to the Xishuangbanna Botanical Gardens. Having spent nearly all of my twenty-one years in a semi-arid temperate climate, I found myself fascinated and un-minded by the “jittery” little leaves of the telegraph plant and the mists and mysteries enveloping gigantic tree ferns in the tropical rainforest. Un-minded, then taken a few short wingbeats (or better, leaf-beats!) into the minds and meters of these plants. I like to see the poems as co-creations. I am deeply grateful.