Cultivating Connection: Room to Grow
27 April 2025

My Eden Rose continues to bloom. Not fully yet. It seems to be struggling.
Earlier this week, a close friend who's a plant scientist had mentioned that Plant Power 2025 (Link) was happening in Dundee on the 17th of May. It was a public facing event where she was to share her work with visitors, mostly families and children. Since my own project had a pedagogical element, I offered to help. Her research was on Aphids, which are tiny plant pathogens. As we discussed how to communicate that to children, I thought back to a talk I'd attended at the Edinburgh Future Institute's 'Video Games: Play and Pedagogy' Event (Link), and a book I'd since started reading: Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World. In it, Dr. Clancy (2024) argued that play isn't merely entertainment—it’s central to how we learn, socialise, and make sense of complex systems.

So I suggested we make a simple videogame so we could explain her work through play. But what would the game mechanics be? Who would be the protagonist? Should we anthropomorphise the plants? Would that make them more relatable by bringing them closer to their prototypical understanding of what's 'alive?'
I thought about these questions while engaged in today's task: moving the broad beans I had propagated two weeks ago from the cold frames into the plant beds. I hadn’t known someone had already moved them from the propagator to the cold frame earlier—a small reminder that, in this garden, care is often a shared responsibility.
My job was to squeeze the plastic pots to loosen the soil, lift the young broad bean plants (and their markers), gently separate their roots if they'd grown together, and plant them with enough space to breathe. They were all going into the "legume bed" because plants "liked" to grow together. The organizer told me that among their kind, they become less susceptible to disease.
I erected support structures from sticks and ropes to help them grow tall. I tried to make the lines straight with perfect spacing. A volunteer passing by remarked how precise I was being. I laughed, but couldn't help it. It felt almost ritualistic.
Eventually, I ran out of straight sticks. I started using crooked branches, tying knots where things wouldn't line up cleanly. What I ended up with reminded me of the original Mario game—a platformer with clear beginnings, then increasing difficulty.
When I returned home, I sat down to work on my game again. Maybe anthropomorphism wasn't the answer after all. Plants didn't need to mimic us to be worthy of empathy or attention. They were agentive beings in their own right, and my game needed to reflect that.

That evening I had the urge to inspect my Edin Rose. I took it out of its pot, like I had done with the broad beans earlier today. And as I had come to suspect: it wasn't one plant. They were three, cramped together in a single pot, and they were eventually going to need more room to grow.
Bibliography
Clancy, K. (2024). Playing with reality: How games have shaped our world. Riverhead Books.