Planted

Care is cultivated through those personal entwinements—so when it comes to crisis and awareness, we can't move forward on intellect and facts alone. We need the gut, the body, joy and grief.

Jessica J. Lee

The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee

The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee
The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee
Photo by Ricardo A. Rivas.
The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee

Jessica J. Lee is an environmental historian whose writing revolves around understanding the historical and social context behind environmental landscapes and how this affects personal interactions with these landscapes. She takes readers into the thick mists that cloak the mountains around Taipei, submerges them into frozen lakes in Berlin, and dives into historical bathing ponds in London.

Her latest book, Dispersals published in April 2024 by Penguin Books, delves into the history and nostalgia of plant species that permeate borders, grow wild, are cultivated and how we view them more than humans across urban and rural spaces.  Her participation in the collaborative publication This too is a glistening by Bitter Melon Press in November 2024 takes a communal approach to writing that focuses on the interconnection between stories and their collective voice instead of thinking in the singular.

In Dispersals you mention that although you didn´t grow up with a knowledge of local plants, you were always surrounded by gardens full of introduced species. How did a childhood of cultivated gardens influence your view of nature? 

I think growing up around really cultivated, manicured gardens shaped what became a kind of aesthetic rebellion, if I’m honest—a love for the natural world outside of gardens, and where my mother had loved stylised Chinese gardens, I leaned towards the rough and varied cottage gardens of the British side of my family. Most of all, though, I think this early experience of plants as managed, contained, and controlled really demonstrated to me the extent to which nature and culture are entwined. When I first started my PhD, it was with the intention of writing a dissertation on the nature/culture binary. It was a topic that I couldn’t put down.

  

The act of finding greenery in urban areas is a way of connecting with the natural world, which you mention in the chapter Bitter Greens in Disperals. What importance do you think urban greenery has in cultivating our connections with nature? 

  

I think really acknowledging urban plantlife and scrappy, overlooked patches does a few key things: it creates space to value experiences of the natural world that are available to those who live primarily in cities—which has the knock-on effect of taking seriously the experiences of people of colour with the natural world—and allows us to think about the ecological impact of these green islands, corridors, and small forms of resistance.

I am a city dweller who grew up in suburbs—and I’ve spent most of my life in cities of at least a few million people—and my experience of the natural world doesn’t stop or begin at the edge of an urban environment. I’ve always taken seriously Raymond Williams’s assessment of the ways that cities and the countryside are deeply entwined, and in our present moment, take this to mean that we need to address the experience of the more-than-human across these spaces.

Your works effortlessly blend historical, scientific and personal threads to create memory-filled environmental landscapes. Do you think at a collective or individual level, memory (and nostalgia) are what ultimately influence our relationship with nature? 

  

I definitely think memory, nostalgia, aesthetics—all of these things come into play when we encounter other species or ways of being.

And for me, rather than stripping that away and asking myself to encounter a plant coldly, clinically, I find it more productive to interrogate that baggage instead. What does it add? How does it shift my gaze and distract? We all bring lenses to every encounter, and I’m often more interested in asking questions about them than I am in reaching towards some unmediated experience of the world.

There is something natural about a weed (non-local plant) dispersing itself around the globe, but also a wariness of invasive species. You mention how weeds are able to unpick scientific paradigms, politics and nationalism. Do you think the aversion to non-local is rooted in this? 

  

I definitely think there is a connection. Of course, in Dispersals I acknowledge the detrimental impact some species (whether introduced or not) can have, as well as the positive impact, but what I think the aversion and the emphasis on nativeness often forget is that conservation requires us to stop the clock somewhere to decide on a vision of the natural world we want to conserve.

Weeds force us into seeing that passage of time—the stopped clock. Do we let a landscape continue unchecked or do we manage it? Do we allow succession or carefully cultivate a place to maximise biodiversity? Conservation, sure, but of what, when?

Immersing yourself in bodies of water and wild swimming is a common thread throughout your writing. Is this a recurrent theme as it provides a reset or connection for you? 

  

Absolutely. Swimming is probably the mode through which I feel most comfortable and connected with the world around me—water has always done this for me! So as much as walking, gardening or hiking, swimming is a way for me to move through the landscape. It puts me most in my skin, in my body.

If these bodies of water could speak, what do you think they would say to us? 

  

I am currently writing about freshwaters for my next book, and if I’m honest, I think a body of water would only be able to speak in polyphony—the voices of all the many species and things and forces that make a body of water work, sustain it. Not sure what would be said, though, besides “Hey, enough with the swimming, lady!”

You talk of seaweed as a repository of humanity’s greatest fears and ambitions, climate change and ecological collapse, carbon capture, and cultivation. What role do you see your work and environmental writing having in climate crisis mitigation and awareness? 

  

For me, the project of my writing has always been about helping tease out the emotional threads of connection we have with the world around us.

Care is cultivated through those personal entwinements—so when it comes to crisis and awareness, we can’t move forward on intellect and facts alone. We need the gut, the body, joy and grief. We need to see our personal entanglement in a really complicated world, and I think for many of us, we need ways to story that. Otherwise, it becomes too overwhelming. 

What kind of commentary do you think dispersals has on the current period we are living in and the way we interact with flora and fauna? 

I think so much of our history of encounters with plants, especially, has been effaced through global capitalism. The stories of how varieties came to be to often erase the many hands and long-term labour, our real entanglement, with plants. So at the very least I wanted to tug at those threads. And to ask, do we have a better language for plants? And for people? Do we have richer stories to tell? 

 

Your recent publication This too is a glistening with writers Pratyusha, Alycia Pirmohamed and Nina Mingya Powles, is an experiment in collaborative writing. How was the process of disrupting the solitary nature of writing to immerse and include yourself into a communal rhythm of writing collectively? 

Working together on the pamphlet was so energising—and somehow terrifying, because I’d never written so vulnerably, quickly, and in such close proximity before. I’ve never had to trust others in that way. But it’s made material so many of my beliefs around community, art, and ownership—a kind of utopian approach in an industry that often demands that we play the game of sole authorship, of carving out a brand, an identity. It felt very held, I suppose, to share a page with artists I admire so much. 

  

We all live in an interconnected ecosystem, and our stories are inseparable. Do you consider your writing to embody this universal approach?

Absolutely – I think this interconnection was part of the thinking behind this too is a glistening, and is very much on my mind as I write myself into my next project.

I don’t think it’s easy to navigate—right now I am asking, what would it mean to write as a watershed? What would it mean to centre interconnected species, ecosystems, rather than always thinking in the singular. And how can that be done, formally, on the page? I am hoping to find out!

 

 

Words by Jessica J. Lee 

Introduction and Interview by Anna Borrie

The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee
The Passage of Time and Visions of the Natural World | Jessica J. Lee
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