The Quest for the Plant Script

If plants could write, what stories would they tell us? What might we learn—about ourselves and the botanical world—if we learned to read, write, and translate a language rooted in vegetal life? 

Join Sumana Roy as she explores why these questions have captivated our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars over the last hundred years. In this lecture, Roy traces the evolution of our century-long fascination with the “plant script,” a term she uses to describe our various attempts to parse a language from plants.

“The Quest for the Plant Script” begins with the Indian plant physiologist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose’s concept of torulipi—or “plant script”—a record of a plant’s responses to external stimuli written in their own “handwriting,” through which he hoped plants would write their autobiographies. Starting with Bose’s experiments and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the “language of flowers,” to poets writing about the syntax of falling leaves, to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants, or creating a “tree alphabet,” Roy examines our ongoing search for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.

Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries, Missing: A Novel, My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories, and two poetry collections, Out of Syllabus and V. I. P: Very Important Plant.

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