{"id":1151,"date":"2022-02-02T11:13:41","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T11:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/?page_id=1151"},"modified":"2022-02-02T12:16:56","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T12:16:56","slug":"flash-forum-archive-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/flash-forum-archive-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Flash Forum Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

20 May 2021<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Plant Life Flash Forum:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have 3 sessions \u2013 the first and last will consist of three 5-minute papers and 10-15 mins of discussion, and there will be a poetry reading in the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Walter Crane, A Garland for May Day, <\/em>1895, Museum of Fine Art, Boston<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Session 1<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lisa Mullen<\/strong> \u2013 In praise of the Woolworth\u2019s rose\u2019: matters of life and death in Orwell\u2019s garden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sarah Houghton-Walker<\/strong> \u2013 Juggling genus and genius: John Clare and the poetry of botanic variety<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spandan Bandyopadhyay<\/strong> \u2013 The Plant Directory: Introducing the Plant Life Website<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Session <\/strong>2<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holly Corfield Carr & Mina Gorji <\/strong>\u2013 Poems<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Session <\/strong>3<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura McCormick Kilbride<\/strong> \u2013 Beyond Use or Exchange: Sweet Peas at the Garden Gate<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kasia Boddy<\/strong> \u2013 Saffron in Cambridge<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Riley<\/strong> \u2013 In the Field: Notes On a (Video) Work-in-Progress<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

10 March 2021<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Plant Life Flash Forum<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first meeting of the Plant Life research group took place at lunchtime on March 10th<\/sup>. It was a rapid-fire conference in which nine Faculty members (academic staff, early career researchers and PhD students) presented tantalisingly bite-sized pieces of research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Session 1   <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Intrinsique Balme: Donne\u2019s Funeral Spices<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophie Read<\/strong> explored the botanical origins and metaphorical reach of a mysterious early modern substance: balm. It thought about its medicinal properties, scriptural history and connections with new world discoveries, and how these resonances emerge and signify in the poetry and sermons of John Donne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trees, Iconoclasm, Ballads <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonnie Lander Johnson <\/strong>discussed the persistent and literary tradition that existed before iconoclast controversy began to shape early modern poetics, in which Christ was depicted as a tree. Often he was growing out of the bodies of the Virgin Mary and her parents. These devotional images were meditations on the doctrine of the incarnation; they located Christ in the world of plants but also in the sensual dynamics of procreation. Her paper examined the fate of the trope after it came under the pressure of iconoclasm and split into two quite separate traditions in the 17th century ballad: the reformed song about Christ as a spiritually pure tree and bawdy tree song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Being a Vegetable in the Seventeenth Century <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Felicity Sheehy<\/strong> considered the meaning of the word \u2018vegetable\u2019 in the seventeenth century. She pointed out the word had different connotations, which have at times been lost on modern readers. Rather than simply suggesting \u2018listless\u2019 or \u2018bare life\u2019, the word also indicated \u2018growing\u2019, \u2018flourishing\u2019, or even \u2018animating\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Session 2            <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sweetgrass, or Wiingashk <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Morris<\/strong> discussed sweetgrass or Wiingaashk<\/em> (in Anishinaabe), Hierochloe<\/em> odorata<\/em> in Latin, one of the four plants sacred to many North American indigenous peoples. She focused on Braiding Sweetgrass<\/em>, by Potawatomi writer and biology professor Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmer shares a vision of interweaving science and indigenous knowledge. She also signals a note of resistance: sweetgrass \u2018is not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk <\/em>belongs to herself.\u2019 Through its naming and its various uses, sweetgrass has things to say about indigenous-settler relations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Indian corn: crooked ears<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fiona Green\u2019s<\/strong> paper was about corn songs in nineteenth-century poetry and ethnography. The \u2018crooked ear\u2019 \u2013 the blighted corn cob \u2013 in Hiawatha, pilfered from Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, signals an act of cultural theft and at the same time figures Anglophone metrics as a sort of pathogen, as though the verse culture in which Longfellow\u2019s poem proliferated so wildly was also the medium that blighted the oral culture it pretended to transmit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Popcorn: the plant, the snack, and its connotations of \u2018childhood\u2019 in US English 1840s-1920s<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura Wright <\/strong>considered the polysemous plant-term \u2018popcorn\u2019, as its social connotations differ over time and place.  In American English the word popcorn<\/em> in its \u2018snack\u2019 sense was used mainly in the context of children, sold from carts and in toyshops, and also at railway-stations, evidenced from the 1840s into the first quarter of the twentieth century.  Christmas time was popcorn time for rural children.  There was a difference between \u2018rural\u2019: home-grown, home-cooked, eaten and used for making decorations, and \u2018non-rural\u2019, bought for eating only ready-mixed with molasses from a street-vendor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Popcorn Vendor Illinois, 1912<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Session 3<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Literary Beginnings: The Botanical Origins of Early Modern Paper <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Georgina Wilson<\/strong> began by explaining that early modern paper came from hempseed and flax. She discussed how Henry Vaughan\u2019s \u2018The Book\u2019 and John Taylor\u2019s \u2018The Praise of Hemp-seed\u2019 foreground paper\u2019s botanical origins, and suggested that we might think of literary texts as \u2018beginning\u2019, in a material sense, as plant life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John Taylor, The Praise of Hemp-seed, <\/em>1620.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Down with vexatious and vicious peeping\u2019: John Ruskin among the botanists<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outraged by the \u2018unclean or debasing associations\u2019 of contemporary botanical taxonomies, John Ruskin attempted in Proserpina <\/em>(1875-1886) to rewrite the texts of the scientific naturalists according to his own, predictably esoteric principles. Hollie Wells<\/strong>\u2019s paper proposed that the source of Ruskin\u2019s discomfort can be located in his preoccupation with an essence of wholeness and purity always already slipping from his grasp, a kind of grace made manifest in the evanescent glow of the undisturbed bloom.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John Ruskin, Daffodil<\/em>, Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lichen fashions in Victorian studio photography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drew Milne<\/strong> considered Victorian studio photographs in which rocks and tree stumps (or their representations) were commonly used as props. But whether real or imagined, these failed to include the lichen which always inhabit rocks and trees. Their absence offered a provocative conclusion to our meeting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

20 May 2021 Plant Life Flash Forum: We have 3 sessions \u2013 the first and last will consist of three 5-minute papers and 10-15 mins of discussion, and there will be a poetry reading in the middle. Session 1 Lisa Mullen \u2013 In praise of the Woolworth\u2019s rose\u2019: matters of life and death in Orwell\u2019s garden Sarah Houghton-Walker \u2013 Juggling genus and genius: John Clare and the poetry of botanic variety Spandan Bandyopadhyay \u2013 The Plant Directory: Introducing the Plant Life Website Session 2 Holly Corfield Carr & Mina Gorji \u2013 Poems Session 3 Laura McCormick Kilbride \u2013 Beyond Use or Exchange: Sweet Peas at the Garden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1151","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1151\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.english.cam.ac.uk\/research\/plantlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}