Plant life is an integral part of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional writings. Percipient trees, exemplified by Old Man Willow, possess the capacity to vocalise and approximate human speech, whereas herbaceous plants tend to be silent and aromatic. While Tolkien attributes qualities of consciousness and memory to sonic trees, he denies similar intelligent qualities to herbs, such as athelas or kingsfoil. This paper will compare the representation of the sonic trees and perfumed herbs of Middle-earth through the framework of emerging science in plant bioacoustics and behaviour. The distinction between the extrinsic and intrinsic capacities of plants underlies a more nuanced approach to plant intelligence in both Middle-earth and the living botanical world of everyday human experience. Tolkien's arborescent ethics privileges trees, endowing them with vocalisation, while constructing healing plants in terms of their use value and associating the sense of smell with a non-sentient flora. A more inclusive conceptualisation of intelligence and sentience involves close attention to the diverse sensory expressions of vegetal beings and non-human nature.

This article develops a reciprocity ethics of the environment through a discussion of ethnobotanical medicines used in the treatment of cancer. The moral virtue of reciprocity, defined as the returning of good when good is received or anticipated, is central to the posthumanist rethinking of human relationships to the plant world. As herbal medicines are used progressively more around the globe and as plant diversity decreases as a result of habitat loss and climate change, an ethics of reciprocity should be a concern for environmental philosophers and conservationists. Aldo Leopold's land ethic and J. Baird Callicott's distinction between deontological and prudential environmental ethics provide theoretical contexts for the development of a reciprocity ethics vis-à-vis ethnobotanical species. While this article does not necessarily specify modes or forms of reciprocity, it does outline some of the more prominent ethnobotanical species used in the treatment of cancer, including those from Native American, African, Chinese, and Indian traditions. In the form of a dialogue between the fields of ethnobotany, herbal medicine, and environmental philosophy, this article presents a position from which further articulations of reciprocity can be developed, particularly those involving the rights of indigenous cultures and plants.

This portfolio of ten poems contributes to the areas of ecocriticism, nature writing and memory studies. Informed by cultural and ecopoetic theories, I applied creative, practice-led principles, including the use of sensory data and the keeping of a field journal, to the investigation of topographical memory in Australia and elsewhere.

Phai thu nhan cai nhin tong quan ma toi dua ra o day chi la mot trong so rat nhieu dieu co the viet ra. No duoc thuat lai chu yeu dua tren mot cuon sach vua duoc xuat ban gan day la Phe binh sinh thai Dong Nam A, do nha xuat ban Lexington phat hanh. Cuon sach nay, thuc chat, la mot each tiep can co y chung cat Dong Nam A thanh mot hinh thai chung co the thong hieu duoc qua viec quan sat nhung duong bien chinh tri cua no, ma mot vai trong so nhung duong bien ay da duoc tao thanh tu thoi thuc dan, trong khi mot vai trong so do lai tuong ung voi nhung duong bien tu nhien cua nhung dong song, nhung vung bien, nhung day nui doi; va tat ca chung lai cung tao thanh nhung duong phan ranh gioi cac khu vuc van hoa, ngon ngu va sinh thai khac nhau. Chang han, trong cuon Nghien cuu Dong Nam A xuat ban lan dau tien nam 1971, hai nha su hoc David Chandler va William Roff cung voi nhung cong su cua ho da luu y rang, thuat ngu Dong Nam A chi bat dau duoc su dung pho bien nhu la mot dinh danh dia ly sau cuoc chien tranh Viet Nam nhung nam 60-70 the ki XX.

As a largely unexplored group of organisms, fungi are ecologically complex members of the Australian biota. Fungi represent non-human alterity and interstitiality-neither animal not plant, beautiful yet evanescent, slimy and lethal, and eliding scientific categorisations. Donna Haraway's notion of 'companion species' and Anna Tsing's 'arts of inclusion' remind us that sensory entanglements are intrinsic to human-fungi relations. Drawing conceptually from Haraway and Tsing, this paper will examine examples of poetry from John Shaw Neilson, Jan Owen, Douglas Stewart, Geoffrey Dutton, Caroline Caddy, Michael Dransfield, Philip Hodgins, Jaime Grant and John Kinsella that represent sensory involvements with fungi based in smell, sound, taste and touch. For Stewart, the crimson fungus is archetypal of danger, ontologically ambivalent and warranting physical distance. For Caddy and Dransfield, fungi are nutriment around which social and personal events transpire, whereas for Kinsella, fungi express concisely-as part of an ecological milieu-nature's dynamic alterity.

Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays-and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technological impositions. In literary studies, while Aboriginal poetry has become the subject of critical interest, few studies have foregrounded the interconnections between environment and technology. Instead, scholarship tends to focus on the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the writing. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the impacts of environmental change and degradation? How have poets addressed the effects of modern technology in ancestral environments, or country? This article will develop an ecocritical and technology-focused perspective on contemporary Aboriginal poetry through an analysis of the writings of three significant literary-activists: Jack Davis (1917-2000), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), and Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty strive poetically to draw critical attention to the particular impacts of late modernist technologies on Aboriginal people and country. In developing a critique of invasive technologies that adversely affect the environment and culture, their poetry also invokes the Aboriginal technologies that sustained (and, in places, still sustain) people in reciprocal relation to country.

This paper examines the relationship between language, particularly language that expresses aesthetic experiences of plant life, and corporeality. The theorisation of language is a keystone towards conceptualising participatory relationships between people and the botanical world. A comparative reading of the works of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Heidegger provides a framework for approaching language as embodied participation. Despite political differences, Thoreau and Heidegger shared a mutual conviction about the generative powers of language. Thoreau's literary practice partly involved immersion in places such as swamps and forests. Fittingly, Heidegger's explication of Rilke's concept of "the Open" mirrors the participatory aesthetics of Thoreau. Both thinkers looked towards the capacities of poetics to galvanise the evolution of language. In response to the increasing dissection offered by contemporaneous theories of linguistics, Thoreau and Heidegger held the notion of language as a body in itself, one brought to life through immanence between sensuous bodies in the world. For each theorist, language was both bodily and a body. Their works evidence that multi-sensorial encounters with the natural world can be captured in language. The body of language may be engaged with as a whole living phenomenon rather than a dissected corpse as this comparative reading of Thoreau and Heidegger will intimate.

A Bestiary of Wild Flowers is a poetic response to Australian artist Sidney Nolan's Paradise Gardens series of paintings. Based on the idea and practice of ekphrasis, the project consists of the researcher's poetic interpretations of Nolan's work, as arranged into three parts: Word Seeds (a haiku series), Remembrance, and Technique.

Examining how poets engage with and mediate botanical life, 'Plants in Contemporary Poetry' affords a glimpse into the ontologies, epistemologies, and semiospheres of flora and, by extension, the natural world. Highlighting the botanical obsessions of seminal poets writing in English today, the book calls attention to the role of language in deconstructing the cultural codes that limit an understanding of plants as intelligent beings. Ryan argues that, as poetic thought harmonizes with vegetality, writers gain direct knowledge of, and profound inspiration from, the botanical world. Plants in Contemporary Poetry provides a timely intervention in the prevailing tendency of ecocritical scholarship to date to examine animal, rather than plant, subjectivities and life-worlds. A sensuous return to vegetal being is actualized in this study through a focus on the contemporary poetries of Australia, England, and the United States.The lively disquisition traverses a cross section of contemporary poetic genres from confessionalism and experimentalism to radical pastoralism and ecopoetry. Through readings of eight poets, including Louise Gluck, Les Murray, Mary Oliver, and Alice Oswald, Plants in Contemporary Poetry centers on the idea of the botanical imagination and proposes a unique conceptual model the author calls vegetal dialectics. Drawing from developments in neuro-botany and contributing to the area of critical plant studies, the book also develops phytocriticism as a method for responding to the lack of attention to plants in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities.This ground-breaking study reminds readers that poetic imagination is as important as scientific rationality to appreciating the mysteries of plants on an increasingly imperiled planet. The book will appeal to a multidisciplinary readership in the fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental humanities, and ecocultural studies, and will be of particular interest to students and researchers in critical plant studies.

As agents of healing, purveyors of ornamentation, symbols of inspiration, inciters of attraction, and repositories of beauty, flowers hold special roles in human societies worldwide (for example, see Goody). Engineered into hybrids and raised in greenhouses, cultivated flowers have particular affinities with people as common members of domesticated spheres. For example, in seventeenth-century Holland, the over-zealous love of flowers galvanised the social and economic furore over tulip flowers and bulbs known as 'tulipmania' (Goldgar 7).