The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

Even as they prefigure the vitalist turn in the life sciences, the seventeenth and eighteenth-century narratives of botanical speculation that we analyzed in the previous two chapters also suggest the sustained proximity of plants to modes of animation and vitality unrelated to and undefined by organisms and the life that they embody.¹ This is the kind of life to which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari will eventually turn in their deployment of the rhizome, a twentieth-century instantiation of radical botany. As we have shown, eighteenth-century visions of utopian plants are influenced at least in part by mechanist and materialist paradigms