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:Â
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-
entanglementÂ
                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
