Plant listening: How North American herbalists learn to pay attention to plants

Abstract

What kinds of relationships enable plants to become medicines? Can humans communicate with plants – and if so, how? In this article, the author engages with Western herbalists in the rural northeast of the United States as they transmit knowledge about medicinal plants. She focuses on herbalist teachings which use ‘the doctrine of signatures’ as a framework for the learning process of attuning bodily attention to plants. Herbalist modes of learning how to attend to, and thereby enable, communicative relationships of different sorts with plants have implications for the ways that humans understand the interconnectedness between human life and other kinds of life. Cross‐disciplinary multispecies studies may learn from herbalist practices as well, opening up a more vibrant set of possibilities for thinking about the connection, communication and relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans. The broader context of this cross‐species attention lies in the question of how humans and other beings can learn to attend to one another and mutually thrive in a time of environmental disruption.

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