Plants not only make our lives possible but meaningful. So why do we think so little of their everyday presence?
Since childhood, Cynthia Fan has been obsessed with plants, scientifically studying, artistically arranging and being continually surprised by their quirks and nature.
In this, her first book, Fan ponders profound questions about plant life – What exactly is a leaf? How does a plant think? – by reflecting on her own, as well the world around her. Whether in the South Africa of her birth, the China of her parents, or the blustery Britain in which she works today, Fan delights in the complex beauty of what she finds.
Accompanied by her own photos and sculptural arrangements, Fan discovers plants and people in a constant dance of deception and adaptation, inviting her readers to marvel at the fluidity of biology, the supremacy of serendipity, and the porous boundaries between self and environment.
This edition is for sale in South Africa. Buy it directly from our distributors here.
"Fan grounds her work in observation of the world that is both meticulous and playful. The reflections on kinship, collaboration, and justice always begin with empirical discussions of actually existing plants and the ways they might show us something new in the world. This is the joy of Fan’s book: that as she challenges the overly simple narratives we hold about evolution and reproduction in plants, she also unpicks the stories we’ve constructed around human kin-groups: partners; parents; aunts; uncles; friends. Because human life is intertwined with plants, because plant life is a precondition for human existence, the question of plant justice is also a question of how we do justice to ourselves."
– Thomas Hunt, Independent Lit
"Dialogues of duality and precipices of balance recur in Fan’s practice. Perhaps mirroring her own lived history, she moves lightly between disciplines and materials, as if to propose a method of querying rather than asserting one. In gravity-defying floral installations, the structural potential of plants and flowers becomes focal and calls forward a further tilting of perspectives. Straddling scientific inquiry, creative writing, and ephemeral intervention, Fan creates works that centre plants, humans, and their environments in an investigation. She writes about reciprocity. Across the book’s pages, she traces the push and pull of her history through plant analysis, folding it into inquiries around morphological development."
– Clare Patrick, SAAG
“A bold new voice in floristry.”
– Alice Vincent
