Guise of Plants: Poems on “The Mind of Plants” by Peter Larkin
Below you will find a series of inspiring poems created by Peter Larkin and his interpretation of the beautiful plants mentioned in The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. A British poet known for his striking and powerful poems about trees, Larkin’s poems are rich with vivid imagery, as well as speaking to the intricate relationships between these magnificent organisms and the ecosystems they inhabit.
A note from Peter Larkin:
For John C. Ryan, with gratitude and admiration
Note: these poems are drawn in large part from The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, edited by John C. Ryan, Monica Gagliano, and Patricia Vieira (2021). Enormous thanks to and appreciation of the contributors whose striking materials I have snaked my textual links through to find some fresh patterns of original dependence. I have limited myself to plants I have actually encountered.
Finish-lines, margins
were haunted by how
dreams recall waking,
passions of a plant
matching the dazzles of us
apostolic symmetries the
entrance to a crown of form,
filaments declare no
further floral storm
searching for a stem
will traverse this sill
of witness, symbol
at its own expanse,
palmate luminals
lurching true from anthropo-
genic turbulence, diagnosed
(prophesised) as no dis-
entanglement
these are tracings
of a diet of calm the plant
invokes, no further chiding
than the facilitator it gives,
practitioner of a tendril
to scent a cosmology
sprouting a sacral to its
own fuse, a conduit between
adjacent destinations, rolls
its thoughts of new to the
range, prayerful vine
in exchange
Roses thrown here as
much as any other place,
crisp whenever spring
earns the intervention
attar of genetic pose, how
to get the lost scent back?
no heed of a substitute
blue, instead convey paler
colour-clues sub rosa
insisting on ubiquity al-
most undoes the vegetal
metaphor until an everywhere
incarnadines the symbol
draws in blood and marks
the blotch on cutting leaves, a
naked stem from the knife
being pricked to the pick of
it, a plant drily reduces to
flowering for altered purposes,
design-accretions of appreciation
aids the rose to cling onto
structures, pictures, buds
reported patent blossoming
always a curtaining rose
beside the death of a heath
Bean-like the use of
signals and sufficient
interrogation, social
stimuli on all solitary
lobes
pass many lives
crossing from seed to
plant, lacing the text-
ures of moistening,
bean grain speculates,
remembers, the entire
plant, charged with a
membrane resting
potential
self-
propagable, stimulate
every next cell, at the
transient switch release
persistent action
occasionals
what is
all-tellable of this plant’s
cognition surfaces, narrative
of an interior arises from
scolding the patches and scrapes
and say what
microscopic ritual at the mind
of beans, present complex
oscillatory instances, retain
an overlapped, crusts,
cyto-memories
green mind
for green sessile admission,
retakes stasis in its local
guise, transition abounds
through circulating veins
of mud and air
The gift of young graft
in the garden of philosophers,
themes a spare attentiveness
in rows of care, insightful
decay, home, stalking
many grounds since
ritualize conversion to tree-
minding, guided exchange,
co-visible network stances
trying beforehand to prove
embodied expectation
no way to flail the soil
at being a true apple,
appraising a fathomable
equity, fractal displays
of a life in shape
Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (
Dr. Alex Belser has been a leader in the psychedelic research community for the last twenty years, having served as an investigator on clinical trials of psilocybin and MDMA to treat depression, anxiety, substance use, OCD, PTSD, and end-of-life distress. Dr. Belser is a psychologist and Co-Investigator at Yale University. He serves as the Chief Clinical Officer of Cybin where he leads their clinical programs in psychedelic therapeutics. He is also part of Chacruna Institute’s Women, Gender Diversity, and Sexual Minorities Working Group. Dr. Belser previously served as Chief Clinical Officer at Adelia Therapeutics, where he directed the clinical program investigating tryptamines and phenethylamines for a variety of treatment indications. Dr. Belser has authored over a dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters. He worked as a therapist on studies of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of severe PTSD. Dr. Belser studied at Georgetown University, the University of Cambridge, Columbia University, New York University, and Yale University. Dr. Belser trained at Bellevue Hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, and New York Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. See more here 
Behike Sensei Kevon Simpson is an international healer who uses mindfulness and shamanism to help people create positive changes in their lives. He is from a Jamaican lineage of spiritual healers and has over 15 years of healing experience in various modalities including movement, word, and sound. He specializes in cathartic poems and prayers for deep ceremonial soul retrieval sessions, while playing a hang drum, and other instruments. Trained in both Shipibo, and Quechua medicine lineages, hearing icaros or medicine songs can be expected in his company. Kevon cherishes ancient indigenous wisdom in regards to the use of plant medicines and their ability to heal, and awaken. He believes it to be a most promising route to building a better world for our future generations, and works to raise awareness in that regard through his group The Entheogen Integration Circle which primarily serves POC and their allies in NYC.