Hello, I am a writer working on a project that involves interviews with people who have owned or encountered traumatized or menacing houseplants. If you have any leads, please contact me. All best Alissa
You mean plants with issues, or plants that create issues? If a plant ever menaces me, I whack it. Besides, most houseplants can't be psychoanalyzed: when you're asexually reproduced, Oedipus doesn't apply.
Well, I mean both! Haven't you ever seen a plant and felt pure malevolence of spirit? I have! Or maybe it is more accurate to say that I am interested in plants that have been exposed to trauma, to death or divorce or fighting or war... Maybe plants that come to represent unhappiness or loss, plants that become the metonymy of their owners' trauma?? Tell me what you do when you whack a plant. That is interesting to me too....
No, but I tend to be guided by the maxim "correlation is not causation", and so am very cautious about claims made on account of experiential associations. Jagadish Bose did some work on plant feeling, but sensation is one thing, interpretation another. I do appreciate the long human history of conceptualizing non-human nature in anthropomorphic ways, but Manichean notions are always the hallmark of a human touch: this would encompass projecting 'malevolence' on the tabula rasa of a plant leaf. Now, if you should find, in the course of your inquiries, a relationship between plants oft-claimed to be such and certain physiologic features to which people are generally averse (ie. black flowers, nasty spines, feotid smells), you'd be getting closer to the root of the thing as I see it. I suspect, though, that houseplants, being subject to intense selection over time for traits most desirable in a household environment, will rarely evidence the sort of defensive features upon which notions of 'malevolence' tend to project. As ever-present features of people's lives, however, and as vital points of contact with the non-human over which we tend to fawn, houseplants are an interesting way to center an ethnobotanical inquiry. When I said 'whack', I mean, as in a gardening sense: hack down, line cut, prune or uproot. If I were to view plants as you do, the act would be either heroic or horrific, depending on the plant. Personally, I have a particular aversion to assigning historically condensed and simplified human narratives to the non-human world--they're often bad enough when applied to the human, so I try to give the rest of nature a break. It stands to reason, merely on account of their behaviours individually and vis-a-vis one another, that if plants could speak, they would, on account of their tendencies, have a very different sense of all things 'good' and 'evil', making any actual intentional expressions from them to us products of a fundamentally alien framework in which notions such as benevolent/malevolent are revealed to be little more than the peculiar cognitive adaptations of a species of ape bewildered by the experience of being human vis-a-vis one another and a seemingly capricious natural world: apparent nowhere else in nature, save where it is projected. My contribution, at any rate (you did ask....). Good luck with your research. You might want to read Michael Marder's "Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life" if you haven't already. It presents an interesting case. To me, it merely demonstrates the endemic absurdity of the post-structuralist milieu, but does, in it's way, present a philosophical argument for what you're suggesting.
I have a houseful of plants that like my neighbour more than they like me. Every time I come back from a holiday they look happier and healthier when she's been looking after them. I have two pomegranates and a gingko that have come back from the dead- the jury is still out as to who resuscitated them. My coffee tree and its offspring like me, and my pitcher plant REALLY likes me. I might feed it a mouse next time I catch one. Maybe I'm too permissive as a plant parent, some need discipline and some want to do their own thing. Outdoors, my five needle pines love me.
By "dark plants" do you mean ones that are posionous, have been used in witchcraft, or are just evil to people who first glance them, Its not the plants fault it gets stuck with a lable but there are many such plants in our world. I would get wicked plants its a green book, that you can get at barns n nobles or any other nice bookstore.i had a copy given to me as a christmas present. but lost it.
