Magnetic Attractions: Feeling Plants in Nineteenth-Century Botanical Correspondence

In the depth of the pandemic, my partner and I, accompanied by our dog, headed out of snowy Colorado for the desert landscapes of Sedona, Arizona. Instead of the spruces, ponderosas, and big bluestem grasses that make up the winter landscape of our home, we encountered a wintergreen—and spiky—world of succulents and cacti. During a hike along the red sandstone, I had the (mis)fortune of becoming one with such a denizen of the desertscape. Or, more precisely, I slipped and fell, palm first, onto the spiny tip of a blue agave plant, which then proceeded to puncture my hand to the joint of my middle finger. Later, in the emergency room, I had the time to scroll through pictures of agave plants in Arizona and was relatively certain that I had taken home a piece of Agave parryi, whose glass-like filaments were, at that moment, making an (infected) home for themselves deep in my finger joint.

My accidental entanglement with the agave brought home a question about the materiality of vegetal life—the actual plant and its capacities as an agent in the world—that has long animated my scholarly work on the history of U.S. women in nineteenth-century scientific botanical networks: Do plants matter or are they only matter to the people who collect them?¹ In most accounts, plants circulating through botanical networks transform from living plant to inert plant matter. They are merely things, artifacts found, plucked, pressed, mailed, examined, archived, and transformed by the alchemy of taxonomy into artifacts “already dead and dry” and “deprived of…distinctiveness.”² Plants are trafficked, with humans and others, through colonial networks, and the dry records of plant collecting activities—spare specimen lists and herbarium sheets locked away in institutional herbaria—are often all that remain of plants that were once part of living networks of human and nonhuman communities.³ Moreover, as Prudence Gibson notes, herbaria are also sites that encode colonial violence, erasing Indigenous cultural plant knowledge, as well as the work of the Indigenous people and women who were often involved in the collecting of plants.⁴

But turning our attention to the stories told about plants as they are collected in correspondence and published accounts shows a different kind of transformation as plants escape the status of specimen and become beings with the material capacity to get things done.⁵ Plants pulse with life in these stories, emerging as individuals with histories both connected to the letter writers and independent of them, and the sharing of plant and plant-story in botanical correspondence reframes botanical collecting practices as a kind of multisensory, affective entanglement with specific plant bodies.⁶ Such affective responses, according to Pablo Maurette,  have the capacity “produce a state of change…to leave a mark, to perturb, and perhaps most importantly for this discussion, to “initiate movements.”⁷ 

Plant collecting is, after all, a fundamentally tactile experience, one that engages the body with the physical, material world. But collecting also involves experiencing a specific plant in the midst of many others. In 1879, Mary Collins Reynolds (1852-1936) described the difficulty of collecting samples of Acrostichum aureum, or the golden leather fern, from a saltwater creek in the vicinity of St. Augustine, Florida. Bodies and body parts are everywhere in her description—fronds and rootstalks, heads, hands, and shoulders. Physical dangers abound, too, and Reynolds describes navigating “steep slippery wire-grass covered banks” to get specimens that inhabit alligator-infested waters. She leans far out over the creek as a friend grasped her dress with one hand, while with the other, “she took good hold upon a well-rooted Palmetto bush growing a little back of her.” In the meantime, another friend secured a long pole and “poked the fern” until it came within reach of Reynolds’s outstretched hand.⁸

As the alchemist Paracelsus observed, the naturalist carries within “an element…which corresponds to [a] particular plant and must, by an act of sympathetic and magnetic attraction, unite with it.” That sympathetic attraction then yields to the naturalist “knowledge of the natural object in question.” ⁹ Instrumental motives, such as collecting for pay or to build institutional or personal herbaria, certainly shaped nineteenth-century collecting, but such instrumentalism alone cannot entirely account for the pull to a particular plant that these collectors describe. Instead, we might read the “sympathetic and magnetic attraction” that Pagel identifies as foundational to the affective experience of plants for collectors in the nineteenth century, defining their subjective experience not only of the plants themselves but of the worlds those plants inhabit.

Such sympathetic attraction to the plant “obliged” Almeta Hodge Barrett (~1833-?), a settler in the Pacific Northwest, “to climb a steep bank” before “springing over a chasm” three thousand feet up Mt. Hood in pursuit of an unusual Dodecatheon that she sent to Asa Gray in 1882.¹⁰ It is there in the “little scream of delight” that Reynolds recorded in an 1884 letter to Gray, before she forced her way through briars that “clutched at” her hat, hair, and clothes and that “tripped” her up, and “threw” her down, to retrieve a sample of a rare pygmy pipe that now bears her name, Schweinitzia reynoldsiae.¹¹ And it is there in New Jersey naturalist and popular nature writer Mary Treat (1830-1923), enduring “fevers and chills” while reaching into Florida swamp waters with “nothing but the fingers following down” to locate the bulb of an elusive Amaryllis lily that also bears her name, Zephyranthes treatiae.^12⁠

Treat’s experience of searching for the Amaryllis lily illustrates the particularity that Pagel describes and opens onto the felt experience of the natural world that goes unrecorded when we attach meaning solely on the product of the search, that is, the resulting herbarium specimen. An example, also from Mary Treat, illustrates the point: Buried in the tall cabinets of specimens at Harvard’s Gray Herbarium are five herbarium sheets of flattened, fragmented species of a different Iris that Treat prepared and sent to Gray and Charles Sprague Sargent in 1877.

Despite the age of the plant forms, the detail of leaf and petal against the texture of the page is astonishing, perhaps made even more so by the ability of twenty-first century observers to zoom into digitized images.

Taken as one more series of dried plants among thousands in a cabinet, these five sheets carry little apparent significance. They are not type specimens—herbarium sheets that are considered reference specimens for botanists—nor are they even particularly valuable as objects of art; the natural grace of the living plant is lost in the tortured, angled forms pressed onto the page. In the context of the herbarium in which they reside, these plants are merely one more example of the mass of dried plant matter that circulated through natural history networks. And yet, it was the search for this specific plant (an Amaryllis lily) that sends a body, (that of Mary Treat) down a flowing river (the St. Johns, in Florida), stops it on a particular bank (at the confluence of Governor’s Creek and the St. Johns) at a particular time of year (spring). The sight of this plant makes Mary Treat, already sick with fever, step into muddy water; it compels her “gauntleted fingers” to “follow” long shoots down into deep water until a particular bulb is reached and taken up (with difficulty) from a “network of woody roots.¹⁴

Treat’s accounts of her pursuit of the Iris, told across the herbarium sheets and in fourteen letters to Asa Gray and Charles Sprague Sargent, show that that Treat was, if nothing else, perturbed by this plant. Certainly, she wrote in the hope that Gray and Sargent would be convinced that she found a new species; after all, Treat made her living as a popular nature writer and reporting on her collecting activities was important to her career. But the story of the five herbarium specimens is the story of a failure: the failure of conventional modes to make botanical knowledge and the rigidity of botanical practice to record them. Treat details her many collecting trips into the wet places along the banks of the St. Johns River in Florida and argues an unsuccessful case to the botanists at Harvard that the plant she has found there should be named a new species. But animating those letters is a nagging worry: The unique qualities of the plant cannot be conveyed via the only mechanism available to her—the herbarium specimen sheet.^⁠

Plants that are so firmly stuck to the page in form evade being fixed in fact, and the specimen fails to capture the essential plantness that the living, vibrant plant itself possesses. In her letters, Treat’s frustration with the Iris resides in resistance the dead plant offers against her archiving of it, its ability to impose on her “an alien intentionality of its own.”¹⁵ In one letter, Treat enclosed several dried specimens of Iris, but she warns Gray that the key structural distinctions on which her species argument hinges “disappear in the pressed specimen.” She had sent live specimens to Gray’s colleague Sargent but laments that he “will not get good flowers from the stems” as “flowers that open after the stems have been broken off a week or so, are very insignificant compared with those in the normal [native growing] condition.”¹⁶ Seeds, she found, would not reliably reproduce the plant’s distinctive traits either, since the species required the specific conditions of its river habitat to express them.¹⁷ After being told her plant was nothing new, Treat registers her frustration at being unable to express the distinctive qualities of these plants, “I wish you could see it growing, then I think you would change your mind.”¹⁸

David Abram, writing on the sensuous in the more-than-human world, observes that “to the sensing body all phenomena are animate, actively soliciting the participation of our senses” and asks how our own subjective experience enables us “to recognize the reality of other selves, other experiencing beings.”19 Mary Treat, perhaps, does not quite arrive at the point where she can acknowledge that the Iris bodies she has plastered to the herbarium pages are “experiencing beings”; nevertheless, her letters, like those of Reynolds and Barrett, show her negotiating a space in which the plant asserts a material reality of its own, one that complicates the very categories she is trying to impose on it. Context of course matters, and these collectors’ individual, often intimate encounters with plants take place within the political geography of the American scientific empire, an empire headquartered within the very institutions warehousing these plant bodies. Any account of their affective entanglements with vegetal life has to hold both truths at once: these were acts of collection that served an imperial project of classification and control, and they were also embodied, particular relationships with specific plants among a host of others.

My own encounter with the agave was minor by comparison, but it clarifies what is at stake in taking these letters seriously as evidence rather than anecdote. Stories told about collecting act as a corrective, a counter-narrative to the problem of the herbarium as a space of geographic and scientific empire.²⁰ When we treat the organisms trafficked through natural history networks not as inert matter but as beings that cause things to happen, other histories come into view. Among them, that these women’s claims to standing within botanical networks were staked less on institutional position, which most of them lacked, than on bodily, plant-specific expertise—knowing where a species grew and what it took to reach it. The individual plant comes into focus, too, and where the herbarium sheet flattens a specimen into settled fact, stories told about that specimen perform a different kind of alchemy, transmuting inert plant matter into beings who resist, delay, and complicate that settlement.

I did not go looking for the agave in the same way Reynolds went looking for her fern, or Treat for her lily. I encountered it by accident in a place where it lived and I didn’t. But their plants acted on them in unexpected ways just as the agave did on me—tearing clothes, exposing them to discomfort and danger, and, ultimately, resisting easy classification. And like them, I came away with material proof of my encounter: A thin white scar at the base of my middle finger, marking the place where a surgeon’s knife dug the agave’s transparent filaments out of my joint—and this article, telling the story. 

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose thoughtful and constructive feedback strengthened this piece. This essay would not have come about without the encouragement and generous feedback of Don Opitz, Adrienne Petty, Catherine McNeur, and Ashanti Shih.

1. My understanding of the agency of plants has been influenced by ongoing work in plant science, philosophy, and critical plant studies. The following have been especially important to my thinking here: on plants as sentient, communicating, and sensing beings, see Anthony Trewavas, Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015); and Monica Gagliano, “Seeing Green: The Rediscovery of Plants and Nature’s Wisdom,” Societies 3, no. 1 (2013): 147–57. On critical plant studies frameworks for rendering human/vegetal entanglements, see Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011); and Prudence Gibson and Baylee Brits, eds., Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World (Brainstorm Books, 2018). Indigenous peoples have long understood plants as agents bound to humans and nonhumans through kinship and reciprocal obligation. See especially Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013) and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003).[↩]
2. Marder, Plant-Thinking, 5.[↩]
3. Maura C. Flannery, In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 130.[↩]
4. Prudence Gibson, “Herbaria and Dark Botany,” in The Vegetal Turn, ed. Marcello Di Paola, International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, 38 (Cham: Springer, 2024), 279-289, on 281.[↩]
5. On plants in environmental storytelling, see Tina Gianquitto and Lauren LaFauci, “A Case Study in Citizen Environmental Humanities: Creating a Participatory Plant Story Website,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 12 (2022): 327–40, and the website associated with the project, Herbaria3.0: Everyone Has a Story to Tell about a Plant. What’s Yours?, www.herbaria3.org.[↩]
6. Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,” differences 23 (2012): 74-118, on 79.[↩]
7. Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense: Meditations on Touch (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 9.[↩]
8. Mary C. Reynolds, “Some Florida Ferns.” Botanical Gazette 4 (July 1879): 177-180, on 177. https://doi.org/10.1086/325245 (accessed February 8, 2025).[↩]
9. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (Basel: S. Karger, 1958), 51.[↩]
10. Almeta Hodge Barrett to Asa Gray. September 23, 1882, Asa Gray Correspondence, 1882, Botany Libraries, Harvard University, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/259067 (accessed February 12, 2025).[↩]
11. Mary C. Reynolds to Asa Gray, Asa Gray Correspondence, December 1884, Botany Libraries, Harvard University, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/252531 (accessed February 12, 2025).[↩]
12. Mary Treat, Mary [to C.S. Sargent], May 10, 1877, Asa Gray Correspondence, Botany Libraries, Harvard University, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/253234 (accessed February 12, 2025); Mary Treat [to C. S. Sargent], April 16, 1877, Asa Gray Correspondence, 1877, Botany Libraries, Harvard University, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/253227 (accessed February 12, 2025).[↩]
13. Mary Treat, Iris hexagona Walter var. virginica L., herbarium specimen, April 1877, Banks of St. Johns, East Florida, Gray Herbarium, Harvard University Herbaria, Cambridge, MA, barcode GH00231753, image courtesy of the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University.[↩]
14. Treat [to Sargent], May 10, 1877.[↩]
15. Michael Marder and Prudence Gibson, “Interview with Michael Marder,” in Covert Plants: Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World, ed. Prudence Gibson and Baylee Brits (Brainstorm Books, 2018), 29.[↩]
16. Mary Treat to Asa Gray, April 5, 1877, Asa Gray Correspondence, Botany Libraries, Harvard University, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/253222 (accessed February 12, 2025).[↩]
17. For more on Treat’s scientific correspondence, see Tina Gianquitto, “‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientific Correspondence,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, and Matthew Pethers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 435-449.[↩]
18. Mary Treat [to C. S. Sargent], April 23, 1877, Asa Gray Correspondence, Botany Libraries, Harvard University,  https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/253229 (accessed February 12, 2025).[↩]
19. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 7, 81.[↩]
20. Prudence Gibson et. al., “Introduction,” in Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales (London: Open Humanities Press, 2024), 7.[↩]