Dispersals

A seed slips over a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is taken from its culture and its land. Dispersals asks what happens when plants leave their original homes and put down roots somewhere else.

The book is a collection of fourteen essays on the entanglement of plants and people. The plants range from species considered invasive, such as giant hogweed, to others that are vilified yet intimate, like soy, and to those on which our futures depend, like kelp. Each is seen as being out of place in some way: weeds, specimens gathered through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by human hands.

Jessica J. Lee, a prize-winning memoirist and nature writer, blends memoir, history and scientific research in poetic prose. She uses the plants to reflect on belonging, displacement and identity, on why plants and people cross borders, and on how our shared futures are more closely linked than we might imagine.

Lee is also the author of Two Trees Make a Forest and Turning.