The Vegetal Return: Plant Time and the Curious Engines of Enlightened Knowledge

Enlightenment sciences turned to plants and seeds as animate vessels of knowledge about the limits of life and the nature of time. A wide range of natural philosophers and imaginative thinkers, drawing from a continuum of mechanism, vitalism, materialism, neoPlatonism, alchemy, converged on seeds as “curious engines” (Robert Boyle’s term), worthy of the highest scrutiny. Seeds were collected, preserved, dissected, imaged, artificially constructed, and imagined as inhabiting a little-known world of vegetal life that was thought to extend from deep inside the earth to the reaches of the atmosphere. This essay explores plant sensibility, longevity, and immortality that this early flowering of vegetal thinking pursued through experiment and speculation. The essay focuses on innovative seed longevity experimental and philosophical inquiries, and how these investigations of plant time shaped contemporary thinking on the scales of human time. Enlightenment efforts to extend plant viability across centuries or millennia by slowing plant time—or conversely, to accelerate plant time to make it perceptible to human senses—often included an eschatological, sacral component. This sacred dimension of plant time existed within mechanistic natural science, requiring a nuanced re-evaluation today of the underappreciated value of Enlightenment sciences for critical plant studies today.