Welcome to the Plant Humanities Lab

The Plant Humanities Lab is a pioneering digital space designed to advance the interdisciplinary study of plants from the perspectives of the arts, sciences, and humanities, and to communicate their extraordinary significance to human culture. The Lab is a major output of the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard research institute, museum and public garden in Washington, DC.

We rely on plants for our most fundamental individual and social needs: from breathing, food, clothing, medicine, and dwellings to our encounters with them in art, spirituality, and literature. Although we think of plants as rooted in place, their global travels offer fascinating pathways into the past and illuminate burning issues of today, including legacies of colonial violence and displacement. Climate change, habitat loss, and accelerated species extinctions add to the urgency of acknowledging the vital importance of plants.

The Lab features approximately 50 peer-reviewed cultural histories that reflect the multiple characters and significance of plants to humans. The visual essays are created using Juncture, an open-source tool developed by JSTOR Labs and led by Ron Snyder. The narratives integrate a wide variety of primary sources, from herbarium specimens and early modern herbals to horticultural treatises and botanical illustrations. They are enhanced by digital elements such as annotated high-resolution images, network visualizations, and interactive maps. Written for a broad audience, the Lab serves as an open access education resource for faculty and students in Plants and People courses.

So Many Stories to Tell

As a visitor of the Lab, you will discover fascinating stories of plants from around the world. Consider cassava: poisonous when eaten raw, it was rendered harmless by Indigenous methods of processing this plant into food, so that today it is a diet staple of more than 600 million people. You can use an interactive map to follow cassava’s travels from the Americas, where it was already cultivated in 8000 BCE, to its global distribution today. Beautiful images—from a remarkable ceramic by a Moche artist living in present-day Peru to a colored print by the eighteenth-century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian—allow us to reconstruct this story. The narratives are written and curated by a team of fellows, interns, summer participants, plant scientists, and faculty collaborators—including our extraordinary post-docs over the years, Ashley Buchanan, Lucas Mertehikian, Kristan Hanson, and Émile Levesque-Jalbert.

The Lab is the flagship implementation of Juncture, an open-source tool that enables users to create subject-specific multidisciplinary and multimedia websites. For beginners, the tool can be relatively simple, but as digital skills improve, users can incorporate more complex visualizations. Since the technology is standard and open source, skills developed using Juncture are transferable to other digital endeavors.

Methodology

The plant humanities methodology developed at Dumbarton Oaks—with the help of our partners, especially the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard—is in dialogue with traditional and recent approaches such as ethnobotany, economic botany, the environmental humanities, and critical plant studies. But our methodology has distinctive features reflected in the Lab narratives.

First, we start with the plant at the level of the species or family, rather than plants in the abstract, to ground our narratives in specific evolutionary and cultural histories. We are interested in telling plant stories that are historically precise, geographically situated, and convey the interplay between place and mobility in plant-human relationships. Second, we root ourselves in primary sources and plant archives and prioritize their integration as important historical records that also serve new uses and values. Third, we implement an intergenerational and interdisciplinary approach, by bringing together different kinds of expertise at different career stages, from undergraduates to senior scholars, and from horticulturalists and plant scientists to historians, curators, and visual artists. And lastly, we envisage the Plant Humanities as a bridge between the life sciences and the humanities that connects the deep time of evolution and planetary processes with the historical time of human cultures, both to shed light on our current environmental predicament, and to help us imagine new futures for plant-people relationships.

In the next phase of the initiative, we plan to include additional digital tools that will enable students and researchers to embark on their own explorations, alongside new plant narratives. We also envisage organizing the narratives around the concept of “plant humanities hotspots,” on the model of biodiversity hotspots: geographical areas that feature a high degree of plant endemism, rich biodiversity, and/or important histories of plant domestication and dissemination, alongside rich material and textual archives of plant-human interactions. These plant humanities hotspots will drive our future collaborative research and navigation of the Lab.

Project Background

The Lab is a major output of the Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks, led by Yota Batsaki (Principal Investigator), Anatole Tchikine (Co-Investigator), and a dedicated team of collaborators and researchers.

The concept of “Plant Humanities” was proposed in a 2018 application to Mellon Foundation that provided seed funding for the initiative, and the term has been widely adopted since. A $700,000 Mellon seed grant supported the first phase of the initiative (2018-2022), with a sister grant to JSTOR Labs to develop the digital platform. Following the conclusion of the Mellon grant, the initiative is supported by Dumbarton Oaks. The Plant of the Month series that we publish with JSTOR Daily in parallel with the Lab reaches more than 100,000 readers every year.

The roots of the Plant Humanities Initiative go back to a conference organized at Dumbarton Oaks in 2013, and a subsequent publication edited by Batsaki, Tchikine, and Sarah Burke- Cahalan, The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press) 2016. The conference and publication centered the plant as agent of human histories, in keeping with the more-than-human turn in the humanities. It also set out our comparative, interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on primary sources and special collections.

Over the past decade, the project has grown and benefited from collaborations with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, the New York Botanical Garden, and many scholars and scientists. The initiative includes a pioneering summer program in plant humanities that brings together graduate students from different disciplines for structured training in special collections and digital tools, prior to their working in teams to research, compose, and code the Lab case studies. It also hosts an annual virtual faculty residency that provides feedback on the Lab as a teaching resource and helps grow the plant humanities scholarly community. Upcoming publications include a volume of Plant Humanities essays edited by Batsaki and Tchikine (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2026), and the first Handbook for Plant Humanities edited by Batsaki and Sir Peter Crane, forthcoming in 2027 by Bloomsbury Academic.

Further Reading

• Batsaki, Y. (2021), “Introducing the Plant Humanities Lab,” Harvard Library Bulletin.

• Driver, F., Cornish, C., and Nesbitt, M. (2022), “Plant Humanities: Where Arts, Humanities, & Plants Meet.” https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/22877/planthumanitiesreport.pdf

• Batsaki, Y. (2026), “Introduction,” Plant Humanities, Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press.