Jessica J. Lee: The entangled histories of human and plant migration (ep424)
“In regions that Japan colonized, like Taiwan, where my mom is from, or Korea, the cherry blossoms were deployed and the trees were planted to make that land Japanese. It became this cordoning off of place, of identity, and of belonging through the plant being mobilized.”
What do the terminologies we often use to describe plants reveal about human and human-plant relations? How is the current landscape of the plant world entangled with human histories of desire, power, and imperialism?
Drawing from her experience living across various countries and continents as a third-generation migrant, Jessica J. Lee delves into the nuances of shifting attitudes towards both plant and human migration stories throughout time. Join us as we explore how terms such as “weeds,” “naturalized” or “invasive” are defined and used to describe the plant world, how we might expand our understandings of belonging through recognizing the movement, as well as rootedness, of plants, and more.
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About our guest:
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and the author of several books including Two Trees Make a Forest, Dispersals: On Plants Boarders and Belonging, and the children’s book A Garden Called Home. She is also the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.
Artistic credits:
Song feature: Notawe, Father by Adrian Sutherland
Episode artwork by Yasmin Dahnoun
Dive deeper:
Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging, a book by Jessica J. Lee
Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants , a book by Richard Mabey
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transcript
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jessica Lee: I think it's an interesting thing because the more I thought about plants when thinking about this book, I kept coming back to, I guess that question that I get asked all the time, right? The “where are you from” question, and the kind of discomfort it immediately brings up for me because I start to get a little hot and sweaty and anxious. After all, I think, okay, what is this person asking me?
And very often as someone who was born in one place, spent most of their life growing up there, and moved all over, I've lived on multiple continents and in multiple countries and my parents both come from opposite sides of the world. I find it a complicated question, but I always feel like the asker wants me to give them a simple answer. As I was sitting with these stories of plants, I guess I realized that those same stories we tell ourselves about plants, that they're static, they stay relatively still, or they operate at a slower scale than us, of course, but they pretty much stay in place. They're rooted, for example. It just doesn't hold up, right?
When we think of how species have moved around the world, how they have moved independently of us, and how we've moved with them, it just felt for me like a real resonance in terms of thinking about offering a more complicated answer to that question to be able to say, I belong in so many places at once.
All these places are my homes and it's not a matter of saying ‘I'm more this than that’, or ‘I choose one and therefore no longer belong to the other’. But rather to see multiplicity as the possibility rather than narrowing down.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, we can approach this idea of belonging in a much more expansive way, rather than equating it with being rooted in one specific place. And one of the underlying messages of your work is to question the language that we use when it comes to plants. So as you share, when we call plants invasive, alien, or colonizers, we are implying a desired order for the world at large, end quote.
How would you elaborate on the ways these terms imply a desired order in the world? And what does this tell us either about the ways that we categorize or situate people or the ways we categorize and impose certain judgments onto the plant world?
Jessica Lee: So there's this line from the author of Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants. It's stuck in my head for years that, weeds are essentially just plants out of place. And the kind of starting point for my book was thinking about that line, that exact sentence from his book, and of course, it's a play on Mary Douglas, the anthropologist's formulation of what dirt is, that it’s matter out of place and how as cultures across the world, we have different understandings of what that means, essentially depending on the order that we want to see in the world. And I sort of sat with this for a long time and started thinking, okay, well, what is this order we want to see in the world for plants, right? Is it one of hierarchical control where humans decide what belongs where, when, and how?
Is it to say that plants ought to be, I don't know, ‘native’ to the place that they're in, that they're growing, and they're problematic otherwise, which kind of effaces our history of moving them around and causing quite a lot of the destruction that movement of certain plants has caused, but also effaces the possibilities and the resilience and kind of the more positive impacts that moving some plants around might have as well.
So yeah, it's one of those things where the order is not immediately clear. It's a cultural value that by necessity shifts, usually depending on how we see it at the time and what is convenient to us, whether for economic or for philosophical or (occasionally some of the plants I wrote about in the book) it's for political reasons, right? For reasons of nation and identity.
Kamea Chayne: So there are examples of plants whose labels and cultural value and significance to people or groups of people have changed over time.
Jessica Lee: Definitely. So the second chapter of the book, for example, looks at cherry blossoms. Part of the reason I wanted to unpack this is because I live in a place—I live in Berlin in Germany—where all around you're reminded of things like the Berlin Wall, where it used to fall across the city, stretches where it used to be the death strip, and how huge swathes of that are now planted out with cherry blossoms, a lot of them gifted from Japan.
And the kind of joy and renewal that that represents. As soon as I started diving into it, wanting to understand it more, I really started to learn a lot more about the history of cherry blossoms as a symbol within Japan and in Imperial Japan especially, and how they became symbols essentially of nation, of honor, and of death. They would be painted on the sides of kamikaze planes and soldiers would wear branches of cherry blossoms, pinned to their chests when they would go off to war. And of course…
In regions that Japan colonized, like Taiwan, where my mom is from, or Korea, the cherry blossoms were deployed, they were planted, and the trees were planted to make that land Japanese. So it became this cordoning off of place, of identity, and of belonging through the plant being mobilized.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and it sounds like it's very much context-dependent. There's significance to different parts of the world based on how they're associated with historical events, with them also symbolizing different things in different places. And also in human experiences histories of migration, colonization, or forced displacement contributed to and helped to explain a lot of present-day dynamics of power and injustices at different levels. I never really thought about this before, but now I wonder if we might be able to observe any sort of similar or parallel dynamics of power imbalance or domination or subjugation of different plant species that are similarly influenced by their contextual histories. Like does or could the concept of injustice or yearnings to belong or not belong exist in the plant world as well? I’m curious what you've thought through on this.
Jessica Lee: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I mean, I think this is where it comes down to plants being desirable to us at one point and then so suddenly no longer falling into that frame. So, one of the examples I write about is giant hogweed, which is technically speaking a kind of dangerous plant. If you touch it, it causes phytochemical burns and it is very hardy and spreads readily.
But it was from the caucuses, and it was brought to Britain, for example, as an ornamental plant in the 19th century. It was a super desirable garden plant in the Victorian era. And now, I was reading through news articles that called it the most dangerous plant in Britain. And this language that sort of harkens invasion, that harkens a kind of, frontline of war aggression when we speak about these plant invaders, so to speak. It reminds me just how liable our frames are to shift. One of the other plants I have been writing about in the book was Wakame Kelp, which, a lot of us will know from eating it. It's often what's in your miso soup or in other foods that you might know, it's a common seaweed that we eat, but outside of East Asia it’s considered invasive—in Europe, for example.
Within conservation, the language for describing the seaweed is again, this militarized, aggressive, language of not belonging, of invasion. But when you look at artisanal seaweed harvesting companies that are doing conservation work by picking the seaweed and selling it, the entire language shifts.
It becomes a super food and it's this wonderful thing, which I just think cuts to the core in terms of saying that these are just our frames, right? We're not getting to the thing itself. And so I think with the book, I wanted to tell as many sort of constellated stories as I could around these plants as if telling each of the stories I might get a little bit closer to the plant itself when, of course, these are our stories, they're cultural stories.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, and when you do tell these different stories, it also is vital in painting that overall bigger-picture message that kind of undergirds everything. So yeah, I appreciate getting to learn about these different plants and their diverse histories, but also their common denominators as well. And something that I'm thinking about is: where is the boundary between an introduced plant and a so-called naturalized plant? And what are the differentiators then between naturalized becoming very established in a place and invasive becoming very established in a place? And I know all these terms are subjective and very limiting and reductive in many ways, but how have you thought through these labels and what they signify or flatten?
Jessica Lee: Yeah, so I mean, my main approach when I wanted to understand these terms was, of course, being a historian, to do a bit of a deep dive into their history. And I guess I should mention the first thing that I found out when I started looking at the earliest iterations of these kinds of terms that, just determine whether plants belong in certain places. The language was originally borrowed from citizenship law, which I think is interesting just to note when we're talking about these parallels between how we describe humans and plants who are migrants, for example.
I mean, the big determining difference that's been found between say a plant that gets somewhere on its own, for example, and a plant that, arrives somewhere—and perhaps might be identified as a problem— is a human interaction, human help. So if we've moved something or it's been caused by our actions, then it would be classed say as non-native. When a plant is somewhere long enough without causing problems.
You might start to say it becomes naturalized, it settles in, and it becomes part of the community. Of course, we use the same language to describe people who become citizens in countries. And really, it's this sort of schema for what damage represents. It could be economic damage; it could be ecological damage. There's a whole range of factors that can be considered.
That's the thing that would set something apart as invasive or problematic. But again, these are categories that are rather liable to shift. And they only capture certain aspects. So one of the things I was interested in while I was working on the book was whether there were parts of the story that were missing, like whether there were positive impacts, or whether these frameworks unnecessarily narrow our attention.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I'm also curious about the nuances as well that this glosses over because when it comes to plants, a lot of what has become invasive in specific regions was initially brought there through no fault of their own. But rather than showing up like some other introduced species that respect the dynamics of the existing communities and kind of stay in their place and settle in, as you say, what’s considered invasive plants can very much wreak havoc on existing species and take over and threaten the well-being of other plant species that are vital to that bio-cultural region.
But this is also still highly contextual. One plant broadly labeled as invasive in a specific region of the world might not behave invasively given the different conditions that they're in. So, one plant whose entire species has been labeled as invasive in one specific garden where they're planted next to species, they might not go “out of control.”
And so, I wonder about the ways that we impose these all-encompassing labels onto an entire species rather than trying to get to know the specific context that allowed them to behave a certain way. Kind of like the subtle semantic difference between an invasive species versus a plant that can become invasive in XYZ context. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this as well.
Jessica Lee: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting, nuanced thing. There are of course species that when introduced to certain environments, especially island environments, if you're speaking about a place like Hawaii, the level of impact that can happen when plants are brought in is just incomparable to a lot of other places because of how many endemic rare species there are in Hawaii that are just not set up a deal with a lot of these species that come in and can out-compete them in a lot of ways. But outside of those niche contexts, I guess I was troubled by the way this terminology hangs over a plant in a way.
I was inspired to write the book after encountering a species in the high mountains in Taiwan. And it was a completely beautiful flower in this little green plant growing on the ground with little white flowers. And I stopped because it smelled so incredible. It smelled like almond cookies. And I thought, okay, what is this? And when I went home and identified it, it was Chinese knotweed or Chinese smartweed. It's sometimes called Persicaria chinensis. And I started reading about how it's native to Southern China, Taiwan, the Philippines but is considered an invasive species in New Zealand, for example, and elsewhere.
And I was just sort of sitting there thinking I'd had this enchanting experience with this plant, seeing it in its home context, you might say, and then holding the idea of it being kind of villainized in this way and wanting to make sense of that.
And I think for me as a mixed-race person, as a migrant and the child of migrants who are the children of migrants (the three generations of migrants in my family), we keep moving. I felt like there was something that I needed to unpack there, not just in terms of the science and not just in terms of the specific plants, but also emotionally for myself.
I wanted to sort of get to the kernel of why that language was uncomfortable for me. Not to question the detriment that certain species do cause, and they do, right? This is something we do need to think about, but there is something about that language that I think forces a lot of people to feel a little bit uncomfortable with this sort of framework of conservation. And I wonder if there's a way it can be made more inviting.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I resonate with a lot of these uncomfortable questions. And I work very closely with the Hawaiian Koa. And there are some lookalikes and related species here. So the Koa here is considered invasive. But in Taiwan, it's of course, native to Taiwan and a very important tree. So having to think through this sort of dynamic has been interesting as well. And Guinea grass is what a lot of us are “battling” here in terms of what's considered an invasive grass that has taken over.
And they were initially brought in by ranchers for livestock because they can be, a protein-rich, drought-tolerant feed source. So there's a different sort of value judgment for people who do ranching here compared to other people who are working on reforestation and see these grasses as highly problematic. So even within one place, depending on people's intentions in terms of what they're trying to work on and their intended goals or outcomes that can also shift people's value perceptions or judgments of the roles that these plans play as well. I mean, it's like we label the plant, and we don't point to or identify the human culpability in that story.
You started touching on this, but I feel like the term “weeds” is also quite loaded with a lot to unravel and unpack. So how is this label commonly designated? Because I do feel like it's kind of thrown out, thrown around a lot. And what does it signify? Maybe a plant's value or usefulness or lack thereof to a certain culture or group of people or otherwise what other nuances might this umbrella term also gloss over?
Jessica Lee: Yeah, so I mean, “weeds” is a slightly more capacious term when we talk about weeds. And this is why Richard Mabey at the start of his book offers that frame, plants out of place, because philosophically on some level, that's the sort of clearest definition you could give it. It's a plant that is growing somewhere where it's not wanted, right?
But what I think is important to note with weeds is that we tend to have a lot of the same feelings and resonances that go with them. Non-native or invasive species, sent alongside weeds as a term. But weeds can also include plants that do belong to a place, that are native to a place, but don't behave in desirable ways.
So, one of my favorite plants, and it's on the cover of the US and Canadian editions of the book, is Rose Bay Willow Herb. It's called fireweed, often in North America.
And in the UK, it's well known for just being the kind of plant that grows in the railway sidings, just in abandoned industrial ground, in ditches on the sides of the highways, that kind of thing. And it's derided for it. People dislike it. And it's a beautiful plant with these gorgeous fuchsia flowers and big, long, green leaves. And it belongs there. It's a native plant.
I sit there with this idea that, just because something doesn't do what we want it to do, we sort of cast it in this negative light. And, if you turn that on its head, I think this is a resilient plant. It sprouts when there's been fire. It seeks disturbance to thrive. And it does best in these areas that we've forgotten and left in sort of poor condition. It makes the most of them. And I think that's a more interesting story.
Kamea Chayne: As an environmental historian, you've of course looked at the histories of a lot of different plants from their domestication spread or introduction to different places and so forth. All these diverse stories paint a sort of meta picture of how our plant world looks and is configured around the world today. But what are some of these stories that you found the most fascinating or different than the journeys of a lot of other plants that you've learned about? And what do you see as the overall significance of learning about the histories of the plants that we engage with?
Jessica Lee: I think, one of the things that I didn't expect I would get as interested as I did while I was working on the book was the story of certain crops, particularly crops that I think have, I don't know, somewhat problematic histories attached to them. So, one of the chapters I write is about tea. And I picked up on this one interlude in history, which was how Britain and the East India Company, acquired tea to grow in their plantations in India. And essentially this is a story that's been told repeatedly in the history of the botanist Robert Fortune, who ventured into China, as it's often told, and stole the tea plants on behalf of Britain so that the empire could thrive.
And of course, looking at that story, I was like, okay, there's more to unpack. And if you dive into his travelogues, there's this moment where he writes about dressing in Mandarin dress, cutting his hair, shaving the sides of his head, and braiding his hair into a queue and essentially disguise himself as Chinese so that he could enter China. It was forbidden at the time to enter the country, enter China, and steal not just the tea plants, but the knowledge of how to process them, because Britain could get tea plants but they had no idea what to do with them.
They couldn't make adequate tea. So, they needed that knowledge from China. And this sort of strange way that story gets retold and reframed in history, how he's framed as a thief and a spy, and a swashbuckler is the word I often came across and how problematic that feels. So, he essentially puts on a costume to steal these plants. And so that story stood out to me alongside the stories of USDA plant explorers in the early 20th century and how they acquired a lot of plants from abroad. And it was a real mission that the USDA sent them on to essentially broaden what was available in US agriculture. And they, in these collecting missions around the world, brought back hundreds of thousands of plant species, many of which ended up being redeveloped on US soil.
So, for example, at the Plant Breeding Center in Florida, those are the kinds of supermarket varieties you'll know today of say, mangoes or citrus. And the ways those plants, those species, those varieties then get shipped back out across the world. The strangeness of that movement was something I wanted to unpack. Yeah, so there are loads of stories like this, but the citrus I traced, and mangoes and tea and soybeans stood out to me for these compelling stories that I think brought up a lot about power and the ways it's been deployed about plants.
Kamea Chayne: This also reminds me how important it is to remember that even the histories of people are contextual and subjective depending on who gets to tell these stories and what lenses and intentions they hold as well. So yeah, just something to keep in mind. And across all the histories of the plants that you looked at, what are some of the major common threads that you noticed in terms of maybe the reasons plants might have been initially moved around or established in different parts of the world or how they might coincide with or further inform human histories of migration or colonization.
Jessica Lee: Hmm, this is an interesting question. I mean, I guess you could sort of broadly break up the plants I looked at into, there's the edible species, the crops that we make use of. And in those stories, it was very much, the big dividing line was whether they were plants that have moved around for, thousands of years. So their histories are muddy, and they become these sort of hybrid cultural things. So, I was looking at brassicas like cabbages and broccoli and bok choy and how those stories are just like history puzzles that we've still not solved. Those stories as compared with the ones I mentioned, like the colonial botany stories where plants were extracted. And that was like a dedicated effort to acquire a plant on behalf of a more powerful nation.
Those stood out to me as sort of two contrasts. And then there's of course, the weeds, the ones that we don't see as having any use. So, the willow herb and the hogweed stood out to me as really interesting. The frame I used was ultimately planted out of place, which meant, they could have been plants that, we took and moved out of place. They could be plants that have moved for so long because we don't understand how they've moved. Or they could be plants that have moved around on the soles of our shoes, like heat star moss, which is one of the plans I write about. Or the plants that have been shipped across continents, like the Wakame Kelp, there are those kinds of species that are seen as generally undesirable.
And then there was one further category for out-of-placeness that I wanted to think about. And it's when we intentionally take a plant, a seed specifically, and we keep it, we hold it, thinking about the future and remove it from its local context as if that is an act of protection for the future.
Kamea Chayne: I appreciate the multiplicity of meanings that this frame of plants out of place allows for. And the title of your book is Dispersals on Plants, Borders, and Belonging. It’s really interesting to think about borders as they relate to the more-than-human world because for me it emphasizes how while people can attempt to control and define place, in reality, these lines are social constructs at the end of the day that are not respected by the living gradients and agency of the more-than-human world who constantly are spilling over and moving beyond boundaries.
But I'd be interested in hearing you share some of the key questions you've had to sit with in terms of how learning from the stories of plants rooting themselves in dispersal might shine a light on different ways we might relate to both our social constructs and real roots of home, place, and belonging. What else do you feel called to weave in here?
Jessica Lee: Hmm. It's interesting because when it came to the plants and thinking about how so much of this language is linked to conservation science, I also didn't want to underplay the fact that there are real impacts of these plants on certain places, and that’s something that still needs to be accounted for. And that's where I think very often that human resonance that wanting to find a parallel with human stories, it doesn't break down. But it's where I think I exercise a lot of caution.
The more I sat with the language used to describe plants, I was just reminded of what we've seen over the past nearly 10 years of this enormous rise in really hateful language to describe people.
Of course, this has a long history, it's gone on for a long time, but famously in the UK, one of the headlines we saw described migrants as ‘cockroaches’. This evocation of pests, of borders being fortress walls, essentially.
I think it underscored as I was writing the book, writing these stories of plants, and writing about my own very privileged stories of migration in comparison to even what my parents went through, not to mention my grandparents. I think it underscored for me that there is a point where the metaphor can only serve us so far. It was helpful for me to unpack those stories, but then there's a real impetus when you sit with the plant stories, you sit with the human stories to say, okay, maybe some plants have detrimental impacts in some places, but also, borders are terrible.
And when we're talking about human borders, the conversation is a little bit less nuanced. I think this book underscored my dislike for borders, my dislike for passports, and how we impose passport privilege and migration privilege.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, it underscored that for me. As we wrap up here, I would love for you to share anything else you feel called to share that I didn't get to ask you about and any of your calls to action or deeper inquiry for our listeners.
Jessica Lee: I feel like you were so thorough in your questions. It was nice to get to talk on this level about the book. I really think the big thing for listeners, and that I think about every day is just, how do I become a better listener? I don't mean this in the literal sense, of course, that's also important. But, writing the book, I was sitting with these plants’ stories and just kind of saying, okay, what is it you're trying to tell me in your story little soybean, or, little seaweed.
And it felt a little bit like when you hold a light catcher up to the light or a crystal up to the light and you turn it and there's a refraction and you turn it again and you see something else. And it was this process of slowing down and diving deeper and saying, okay, if I look closely, will I get closer to you?
Will I understand you better? And just to keep doing that with everything in our world right now, I think it's key.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are ending here, but we'll have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer .com. And for now, Jessica, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an honor and a pleasure to speak with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Jessica Lee: Oh, look outside, go outside.
