Lingua Flora presents an ongoing body of work focused on the intrinsic language of plant beings. Guided by contemporary research in plant science and storytelling in science journalism and literature, these drawings explore plant sensory perception, memory and communication systems as aspects of plant intelligence. The work combines observational drawing with imagined botanical and fungal forms. I approach it simultaneously as visual research about plant lives and as plant portraiture, a way to present plants as beings.

The impulse to address the more-than-human parts of nature as persons has been a steady presence in my work over the years and has deepened my interest in the extrinsic language of plants, or our language for plants. Most human languages place significant limitations on our ability to imagine plants as anything other than lower forms of life. Scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the need for a grammar of animacy, or words and pronouns “that invite us into an inclusive worldview of personhood for all beings”. What would our relationship with plants and other parts of the more-than-human world look like if we were able to reframe our perception of them from objects to kin? This question has been a guide in much of my work and continues to resonate with urgency in all aspects of life.