LO NGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024 'An invigorating
cross-pollination of memoir and natural history both beautifully phrased and delicately
structured-this book deserves your time and attention' Cal Flyn author of Islands of
Abandonment A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their
entanglement with our human worlds A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts
through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture
and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots
elsewhere? Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father steeped in both literary
and scientific traditions Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in
motion. In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and
human worlds and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and
people - and the language we use to describe them. Each of the plants considered in this
collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds samples collected
through imperial science or crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir
history and scientific research in precise and poetic prose Jessica J. Lee meditates on the
question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross and
reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine. 'At once expansive and
intimate and most of all gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the
course of my life' Nina Mingya Powles author of Small Bodies of Water
