Dispersals

On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

De: Jessica J. Lee

Narrado por: Jessica J. Lee

Duración: 5 h y 58 m

Resumen del Editor

INSTANT TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER

The prize-winning and bestselling author of Two Trees Make a Forest turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future

A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?

The themes in these fourteen essays become invigorating and intimate in Lee’s hands, centering on the lives of plants like seaweed, tangelos, and soy, and their entanglement with our human worlds. Lee explores the rich backstory of cherry trees in Berlin; a tea plant that grows in the Himalayan foothills just southwest of China; the world of algae and wakame, and the journeys they’ve made to reach us.

Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being “out of place”—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Lee looks at these plant species in their own context, even when we find them outside of it.

Dispersals draws a gorgeous, sprawling map of the diaspora of flora. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

©2024 Jessica J. Lee (P)2024 Hamish Hamilton

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings—by people and by plants—to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration.” —Amy Brady, Lit Hub

“A thought-provoking and elegantly argued book that asks us to see the world around us anew . . . both beautifully phrased and delicately structured—this book deserves your time and attention.” —Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

“Profound, poetic, illuminating, and moving, Dispersals' deep knowledge, sensitivity, and research (worn so lightly) addresses just how entwined our fortunes, migration and language are with plants: how much we are part of nature. Important and vivid.” —Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down