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« L’arbre gémit, soupire, pleure d’une voix humaine », et Michelet ajoute : « On croit que c’est le vent, mais c’est souvent les rêves de l’âme végétale ». Aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, botanistes, romanciers et philosophes ont eux aussi rêvé et pensé la plante, en lui conférant un statut moral et ontologique équivoque. Car, sous leur plume, brouillant les frontières entre flore, faune et humanité, parfois l’esprit et le désir viennent aux plantes. Dès lors ce n’est plus seulement la mise en valeur de l’intelligence animale, mais aussi la promotion d’une pensée et d’une sensibilité végétales qui nourrissent la critique de l’anthropocentrisme dans l’Europe pré-moderne. Un tel trouble catégoriel, bien sûr, inquiète et stimule les efforts pour comprendre et distinguer les différentes sortes de vivants. Mais le problème, philosophique, est aussi religieux. La revalorisation de l’âme inférieure des plantes se situe du côté de la dissidence doctrinale, l’être végétal menaçant de destituer l’homme. Cet essai veut donc montrer que le monde de Flore a été utilisé pour subvertir le principe d’un étagement clair entre les règnes, au profit d’une conception plus poreuse des frontières du vivant.

Botany --- Libertinism --- Botany in literature. --- Social aspects --- Philosophy. --- History.

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In "Good Observers of Nature" Tina Gianquitto examines nineteenth-century American women's intellectual and aesthetic experiences of nature and investigates the linguistic, perceptual, and scientific systems that were available to women to describe those experiences. Many women writers of this period used the natural world as a platform for discussing issues of domesticity, education, and the nation. To what extent, asks Gianquitto, did these writers challenge the prevalent sentimental narrative modes (like those used in the popular flower language books) and use scientific terminology to describe the world around them? The book maps the intersections of the main historical and narrative trajectories that inform the answer to this question: the changing literary representations of the natural world in texts produced by women from the 1820s to the 1880s and the developments in science from the Enlightenment to the advent of evolutionary biology. Though Gianquitto considers a range of women's nature writing (botanical manuals, plant catalogs, travel narratives, seasonal journals, scientific essays), she focuses on four writers and their most influential works: Almira Phelps ( Familiar Lectures on Botany, 1829), Margaret Fuller ( Summer on the Lakes, in 1843), Susan Fenimore Cooper ( Rural Hours, 1850), and Mary Treat ( Home Studies in Nature, 1885). From these writings emerges a set of common concerns about the interaction of reason and emotion in the study of nature, the best vocabularies for representing objects in nature (local, scientific, or moral), and the competing systems for ordering the natural world (theological, taxonomic, or aesthetic). This is an illuminating study about the culturally assumed relationship between women, morality, and science.

Women naturalists --- Women botanists --- Natural history --- Nature in literature --- Botany in literature --- History

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"Few settings in literature are as widely known or celebrated as J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. The natural landscape plays a major role in nearly all of Tolkien's major works, and readers have come to view the geography of this fictional universe as integral to understanding and enjoying Tolkien's works. And in laying out this continent, Tolkien paid special attention to its plant life; in total, over 160 plants are explicitly mentioned and described as a part of Middle-Earth. Nearly all of these plants are real species, and many of the fictional plants are based on scientifically grounded botanic principles. In Flora of Middle Earth: Plants of Tolkien's Legendarium, botanist Walter Judd gives a detailed species account of every plant found in Tolkien's universe, complete with the etymology of the plant's name, a discussion of its significance within Tolkien's work, a description of the plant's distribution and ecology, and an original hand-drawn illustration by artist Graham Judd in the style of a woodcut print. Among the over three-thousand vascular plants Tolkien would have seen in the British Isles, the authors show why Tolkien may have selected certain plants for inclusion in his universe over others, in terms of their botanic properties and traditional uses. The clear, comprehensive alphabetical listing of each species, along with the visual identification key of the plant drawings, adds to the reader's understanding and appreciation of the Tolkien canon. "-- "This book catalogs every plant found in J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium, showing how these plants influenced Tolkien's stories and characters"--

Plants in literature. --- Trees in literature. --- Botany in literature. --- Ecology in literature. --- Tolkien, J. R. R. --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Writing on the cusp of modern botany and during the heyday of English herbals and garden manuals, Shakespeare references at least 180 plants in his works and makes countless allusions to horticultural and botanical practices. Shakespeare's Botanical Imagination moves plants to the foreground of analysis and brings together some of the rich and innovative ways that scholars are expanding the discussion of plants and botany in Shakespeare's writings. The essays gathered here all emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of plants with humans and human life, whether culturally, socially, or materially, and vividly illustrate the fundamental role plants play in human identity. As they attend to the affinities and shared materiality between plants and humans in Shakespeare's works, these essays complicate the comfortable Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. And as they do, they often challenge the privileged position of humans in relation to non-human life.

Botany in literature. --- English literature --- Human-plant relationships in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Shakespeare, William, --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Shakespeare, botany, plants, ecocriticism, ecofeminism. --- ART / Environmental & Land Art.

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Her interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment.

Romanticism. --- Literature and science. --- Plants in literature. --- Botany in literature. --- Literature, Modern --- Pseudo-romanticism --- Romanticism in literature --- Aesthetics --- Fiction --- Literary movements --- Poetry and science --- Science and literature --- Science and poetry --- Science and the humanities --- History and criticism.