- Melanie Duckworth & Lykke Guanio-Uluru
Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature
Plants are ubiquitous in children’s literature, yet as readers, we tend not to notice. American biologists J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler have labelled this condition “plant blindness” – where we do not really see the plants in our environment, nor recognize their characteristics. The rapidly developing field of critical plant studies has documented how this tendency is a pervasive phenomenon in Western philosophy and culture. As Jeffrey Nealon has pointed out in Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life, plants are not even considered – philosophically – to be alive. Compared to animals, plants are understudied in Western science, where they are often relegated to the background or ignored altogether. This tendency to overlook plants occurs despite the fact that all animals, including humans, depend entirely on plant life to be able to breathe and eat or live at all. Just think of food crops and carbon binding forests, which are also biodiversity hotspots.
It is no surprise, then, that the topic of plants has been understudied in children’s literature. But in the volume Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2021), the representation of plants is at the forefront. The first of its kind of an international scope, the anthology contains contributions from 16 authors from 11 different countries: after all, plants are everywhere including in children’s books.
Consider, for example, the many passages describing trees and flowers in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). Plants in children’s literature may also appear as characters, often in hybrid forms of the plant-human, as they do in Elsa Beskow’s The Flowers' Festival (1914), or Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books (first publication 1923). Such active plants are often trees: the original version of Cinderella contains an enchanted hazel tree instead of a fairy godmother. Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree (1943) bears magical fruit, is home to fantastic creatures, and acts as a ladder to magical lands, while the violent threat of J. K. Rowling’s whomping willow harks back to a heritage of vegetal horror that apprehends the strangeness of plants and includes J. R. R. Tolkien’s ravenous Old Man Willow. Rowling’s other magical plants, such as the screeching, potent, yet vulnerable mandrake babies, draw on long pagan traditions. Environmental literature for children, like Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax (1971), often centers on trees, but Bren MacDibble’s middle grade climate fiction The Dog Runner (2019) envisages the devastation of a world without grass. Conversely, Emmi Itäranta’s climate fiction for young adults, Memory of Water (2014), evokes in sensuous detail a future where the only food source left is plants.
The authors of this volume explore how plants are and have been represented in a wide selection of books for children and young adults, discussing how plant agency is entangled with child agency in our literary thinking, and how children are so easily compared to plants that must be nourished and tended to grow. Other chapters touch on the ethical considerations that arise when we think of plants as people, or as kin – a practice that extends back for instance to Old Norse mythology, where (wo)mankind is created out of two species of tree, and which still forms part of many indigenous thought systems.
The four sections of the book traverse international plants, both minute and monumental. In Botanical Fascinations, we zoom in to botanical details, reflecting on the ways in which the sexual categorization of plants queer a Finnish fairy tale, and how communities of tiny plant people created by Swedish author and illustrator Elsa Beskow suggest vibrant possibilities of kinship, before pausing to consider whether Aristotle can really be blamed for Western dismissals of plant significance. Plants in Folklore and Fantasy illuminates enchanted plants: magical herbs and flowers in Serbian folktales and fantasy fiction; chatty roses in Alice in Wonderland; and the terrifying, consuming forest in Naomi Novik’s YA fantasy Uprooted, which draws on the tradition of vegetal horror.
While an ancient mulberry tree, one of the Australian “mother trees” discussed in the first chapter of Arboreal Embraces, is similarly monstrous, the trees in this section are generally kinder. Brave, mournful trees in ecopoetry written by English school children fear deforestation; a boy imagines he is a tree in an Italian picturebook; and an Iberoamerican poem and picturebook affirm, respectively, Franciscan and posthumanist views on the vibrancy and proximity of vegetal life, as children hug an oak tree and dance with chamomiles.
The last section, Agency and Activism, questions ethical boundaries and assumptions about plant agency and personhood. Can a rhubarb plant be a friend? What would happen if the vegetables on your plate jumped up to defend themselves? The final chapter takes us to the Philippines, and sees Indigenous literature by and for the Lumad as utilizing a vegetal mode of resistance.
Climate change, deforestation, mass plantations, pesticides, and genetic engineering are affecting both plants and the complex ecosystems to which they – and we – belong. One way to begin addressing these issues is to start thinking of plants as more than just objects. Children’s and young adult literature offers unique ways of doing this. Reading about, dreaming of, and listening to the stories of plants might just guide us into a deeper connection and commitment to the living world we share. It has been a joy working on this anthology with our contributors from around the world. We hope the conversation will continue, and that its seeds will take root.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Melanie Duckworth is Associate Professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway, where she teaches English, postcolonial, environmental, and children’s literature. She is co-editor of Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature and has published widely on Australian literature, contemporary poetry, plant studies, children’s literature, and ecocriticism, most recently in Environmental Humanities: “Agency and Multispecies Communities in Picturebooks: The Snail and the Whale and The Secret of Black Rock.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lykke Guanio-Uluru (hagl@hvl.no) is Professor of Literature at HVL, Norway. Her research focus is on literature and ethics, with emphasis on ecocriticism, fantasy fiction and game studies. She is the author of Ethics and Form in Fantasy Literature: Tolkien, Rowling and Meyer (2015) and the co-editor of Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures: Nordic Dialogues (2018) and Plants in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (2021). Latest publication: “Analysing Plant Representation in Children’s Literature: The Phyto-Analysis Map” in Children’s Literature in Education.