We had unexpected guests in the garden today: two dogs, Mr. Pickles and Bru, and a pair of neighbourhood cats who wandered in without needing an invitation. Their presence changed the energy. The young Bru bounced around chasing after his ball, while the much older Mr. Pickles waited patiently for me to come over, pet him, and call him a good boy.

After greeting them both, I made my way upstairs to the Roof Garden, carrying a garden hose a neighbour had kindly lent. As I watered the plants, I found myself thinking about something I had been reading: Sorting Things Out by Bowker and Star (1999). In it, the authors discuss how we classify things—how there is an Aristotelian classification, where categories are defined by clear, essential features, and a Prototypical classification, where we rely on "best examples" or prototypes to define a category. Wouldn't there be a mismatch, I wondered, between the Aristotelian definition of life and its Prototypical one?

Plants grow, metabolise, reproduce, respond to stimuli—ticking every Aristotelian box. But they don’t run toward me when I arrive. They don’t wag their tails when I water them. No wonder, I thought, that children often mistake plants for objects (Stavy & Wax, 1989). They don't feel alive in the ways we're most used to.

After finishing up upstairs, I carried my epiphany to my next task: sowing flower seeds directly into the beds. No propagators or cold frames when it’s floriculture. Only agricultural plants get that privilege.

I picked up a Calendula seed and studied it—dull brown, dry, hard. Far less 'alive' than the plants I’d just watered. I thought back to the Salsify Mammoth seeds I’d planted the week before. Those were practically indistinguishable from sticks.

I thought back to my recent supervision meeting, where my supervisor and I had started to 'map' how people form attachment to seemingly inanimate entities like plants. The idea was to lay out a trajectory: from awareness to attachment, and then to 'enlightenment' (my working title for an undefined overall goal). It was a neat line stretching across the x-axis. But today's observations were telling me that things also belonged on the y-axis. Because surely, the degree to which something feels 'alive' would affect this trajectory.

My thoughts were interrupted by something that caught my attention: one of the volunteers was being given their own plant bed. Most of the beds were tended collectively, but I gathered that some of the new beds were available for individual ownership.

Later, while walking back toward the tenement buildings to do some door-knocking (which, like the previous week, yielded no responses), the organizer asked me if I wanted a plant bed for myself. "That's the idea. Everyone gets their own,” she said.

I hesitated.

"No," I said. "I don't feel ready yet."

And I meant it. Something about taking ownership of a piece of land where I'd grow something independently, felt significant. I didn’t feel settled enough to be someone’s sole caretaker. It seemed like too great a responsibility for a novice to have.

After we’d finished cleaning up, I returned to find my Eden Rose starting to bloom. No longer distressed.

Maybe plants don’t wag their tails at us.

But they do communicate with us in their own ways.

Bibliography

• Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.
  

• Stavy, R., & Wax, N. (1989). Children’s Conceptions of Plants as Living Things. Human Development, 32(2), 88–94. jstor.org/stable/26767571