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Paper short abstract

Folklore and narrative offer humans a way to recognise and explore relationships with plants. This paper explores how lore and stories can be used to think about plant-human relationships as multi-directional and reciprocal.

Paper long abstract

In the proposed paper, I will explore the use of folklore and storytelling to examine relationships between plants and people. This will draw from my dissertation research, 'Plants and People: Lore, Stories, and Relationships' (2024), in which I worked primarily with storytellers based in Scotland to understand their relationships with plants as well as my own. My contributors told me about their relationships with plants and shared personal experience narratives, folktales, and legends with me. Incorporating folklore and stories into conversations about human-plant relationships provides an opportunity to think about these relationships within a world that allows plants to communicate multi-directionally in ways that are easier for people to conceptualise (Naithani 2024). Moving forward with this understanding of plants as being able to participate in interactions allows for a recognition of plants as having agency within those interactions. This has the potential to shift the conversation from human exceptionalism and plants as resources and commodities to plants as active participants in a multi-species world in which humans are only a part. This paper will also discuss how reciprocity works in the context of human-plant entanglements as well as some of the ways my contributors suggested human-plant relationships can be strengthened and maintained.