Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging

A prize-winning memoirist & nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, & the truths of our shared futureA seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture & its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes & put down roots elsewhere?In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant & human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; & those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being ‘out of place’—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced & transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, & scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants & people come to belong, why both cross borders, & how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.°°°Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, & winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, & the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, & the children’s book A Garden Called Home, & co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review & teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. She lives in Berlin.°°°"Lee’s lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research & intimate memories—memories that are by turns sharply vivid & pleasantly hazy with the distance of time." —Katja Vujić, The Cut