Herbaria Symbiote is an Herbal Companion to Re-Enchanting the World. An herbarium is a collection of dried plant specimens that provide insight into plant relationships, history, evolution, and distribution. Herbaria Symbiote examines the history and lore of plants through an expanding aperture— a lens by which to examine another history: that of capitalist accumulation, and specifically how capitalist development is structurally dependent on the privatization of communal land, and the free appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as externalities to the market, like soil health, a functioning ecosystem and the unpaid domestic labor of women and caregivers.
Seven years ago, my daughter was born, this coincided with a gradual decline of my father’s memory, and a simultaneous awakening in my own consciousness to the urgent threat of ecosystem collapse. The assembling and the organizing of these tiny shards of everyday life—detritus left behind by my father and my daughter, and found by myself in the course of cleaning and caring— become the makings of a magic spell. The botanical diptychs in this book are a kind of memory spell, the fragments of the past rearranged, then assembled again in a glittering, seductive form. Designed to enlighten; to remember things we didn’t know we’d forgotten, and to reanimate our ancient relationship with the land.
As my fathers memory declines I’ve noticed it improves over the summers when he is in the garden, mucking about in the soil. This strange entanglement of memory and mycorrhiza, plant and psyche, is what has inspired this collection.
“Loss of memory is the root of oppression, for obliviousness to the past renders meaningless the world in which we move, strips the spaces in which we live of any significance, as we forget at what cost we tread the ground we walk upon and whose histories are inscribed in the stones, fields, and buildings that surround us.”
– Paula Gunn Allen