BookBrowse Reviews Dispersals by Jessica J. Lee

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Essays examining what it means to truly belong to a place, seen through the experience of plants that spread from their original homes.

We so often think of plants as stationary creatures—they are rooted in place, so to speak—that it can be easy to overlook the biological ingenuity that allows them to thrive in many locations at once. Plants are in fact anything but sedentary. Throughout human history we've moved them with us intentionally and unintentionally, and that adaptability can appear menacing when we no longer see a benefit to having a plant in its adopted home.

Some of these botanical movements may have happened too long ago to remember, or perhaps they were too sudden to stop, but Jessica J. Lee slows time down to explore all sorts of connections between humans and plants in a series of meditative essays compiled as Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging. Lee wrote these essays during a time of personal upheaval, which coincided with the general social re-examination of the early pandemic period. She experienced job changes, multiple moves, including between countries, and having a baby all in the span of just two years. As a result, the book ruminates on what it means to be from a certain place and how anyone, or anything, truly makes a new home.

Plants are a lens through which Lee tries to understand her own identity and that of her family. Born to a Welsh father and Taiwanese mother who settled in Canada, she is attuned to the realities of migration and a sense of "otherness" wherever she goes, be that her own home, her parents' birthplaces, or the many places she moved during a peripatetic adulthood. Of herself and her sister she says, "We wear a border in our bodies."

Lee weaves together personal stories—of her family's gardens, trees from her youth, and learning to grow plants as an adult—with historical events and current social issues reflected in the natural world. For example, she describes how plants have been an instrument of empire, with the example of Japan gifting cherry trees during its imperial period in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Power dynamics have worked in the other direction, too. Nations like Britain and the United States took plants from colonized areas and used them for their own purposes. Sometimes these were devastatingly large-scale changes, such as British demand for tea driving a corollary desire for sugar, which fueled trans-Atlantic slavery and plantation agriculture. Or, the demand for tea sparking the opium trade with China and the catastrophic Opium Wars (see Beyond the Book).

Lee also examines how plants can act as a reflection of our prejudices. When we call plants "alien invasives," what do we really mean? She doesn't impugn the idea of invasive plants being problematic with no check on their growth, nor does she shy away from the unintended consequences of people bringing plants to new places. But she thoughtfully reveals how a plant like the soybean, which is integral to Chinese culture, can become a convenient symbol for xenophobia elsewhere. American dairy farmers and proponents of "meat-heavy fad diets" found common cause in decrying largely unproven health risks of soy (it causes cancer!), and denigration of this bean even made its way to plainly bigoted insults ("soy boy" in the parlance of the alt-right). Describing the growth of this hysteria in the last 20 years, Lee summarizes, "The rumors cut across racial and gender lines, built on stereotypes and patriarchal fears."

In another chapter, we see how seaweeds and algae were dismissed and overlooked by 19th-century male scientists. They readily ceded this area of botany to female scientists who proceeded to make important discoveries about the plants. Lee also addresses how plants' responses to climate change affect how we modify the natural world and still turn to nature to solve the resulting problems—i.e., seed banks to hedge against future famines, and seaweed going from slimy afterthought to potential industrial-scale carbon sink.

These ideas are spread across different essays, looping back around rather than unfolding in a linear way. The chapters that connect plants to larger social forces are the strongest. Lee's beautiful descriptive language forms like petals around the durable nuggets of analysis she shares: "Daubs of seafoam pulse where the chalk reef creeps onto land, and the rocks are furred with algae and red weeds. This is a zone of transition, where the tide fills the space between land and sea."

At other times her natural tendency towards poetry leaves the reader a little disjointed—a choppy chapter on citrus trees, for example, where the personal memories and historical anecdotes struggle to come together in a coherent way. Fortunately, these are minor detours in the winding stories of plants that Lee cherishes, ones she seeks to understand, and her search for roots and a sense of belonging in an unpredictable world. In a time of uncertainty and climatic instability, Dispersals is a quiet yet probing meditation on what it means to inhabit our world as we've made it.

This review first ran in the April 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.