DISPERSALS

Sweeping histories and personal narratives of our entangled lives with plants.

In this follow-up to Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, British Canadian Taiwanese author Lee delivers a memoir couched in botanical and environmental history. Chronicling the tension in her familial history of migration and travel and evoking a naturalist’s sense of an individual within an ecological system, the author presents a vision of belonging that relies on flux, extraction, and replanting rather than stasis. She follows the lead of “plants that, in dispersal, might teach us what it means to live in the wake of change.” In a narrative that often brings to mind Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lee strives to trace the often unseen yet volatile interface between plant and human life. The subjects of chapters have recognizable features that guide readers to broader narratives of that shifting border. Cherry trees, when exported from Japan, appear as unnatural features abroad and symbols of national influence often in colonial contexts, and they typify a host of historical arborists tracing nationalist lineages in trees. The tea leaves that fixated a national thirst continents away in turn fueled systems of British colonial extraction and influence in China, India, and the Caribbean. Individual species fallen upon by humans with specific hungers and ambitions soon adapt to these new environmental demands and in turn shape the desires and worldviews of their propagators. Lee asserts that as much as this influence is anthropogenic, it would be wrong to say that these plants do not shape our human evolution, captivating our tastes, consuming our attentions, and determining our political histories. Throughout, the author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection.

An insightful meditation on nature and identity within “a world in motion.”