The Intelligence of Flowers

We could truly say that ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us. Flowers grope in the same darkness, encounter the same obstacles and the same ill will, in the same unknown. They know the same laws, same disappointments, same slow and difficult triumphs. It seems they have our patience, our perseverance, our self-love; the same finely tuned and diversified intelligence, almost the same hopes and the same ideals. Like ourselves, they struggle against a vast indifferent force that ends by helping them. The Intelligence of Flowers, translated by Philip Mosely

Artist and performance maker Francoise Belanger mentioned this book on botany to me in relation to my recent The Romance of Flowers posting, The Intelligence of Flowers (1907) by Maurice Maeterlinck (1962 - 1949).

There are two translations available online, the first by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos here on the endlessly valuable Internet Archive. 

The second by Philip Mosely, there is a review here.

Land Acts

Another of the intriguing bound documents I eased out of it's tightly held position on a full wooden shelf was a copy of the 1881 Irish Land Law Act, disarmingly slender for the import of such legislation and peppered with tiny flowers and leaves pressed between it's pages as if the act of land as being set upon an altogether logic with these pressings of delicate, fleeting plant lives. 

A conceit to get 'beyond our human ideas of time' in The Romance of Plants

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This is one among many of the marvellous natural history books I found myself revisiting in my mothers home in a book lined room known as The Study in the house where I did much of my growing up. I delved into it as Ecoeye was on RTE (Irish telly) exploring the current effects of climate change on Irelands coast and speculating about the escalation of it's impending impact. I was fascinated by the conceit in the first chapter of The Romance of Plant Life (published in 1907) in which the author imagines 'A Tourist From Neptune' who, the author supposes would have quite an alternative experience of chronology to an Earthling and a greater capacity to observer changes we barely sense. This idea of enhanced sensing or awareness of time and durations other than human is intriguing and our means of identifying indexical linkings into alterities of human temporal scales. How might we understand vaster and tinier durations and where might crumples of convergences and divergences provide these reckonings.

The Romance of Plant Life is viewable and downloadable online here and here.