Phytophilia: at the intersection of problem-solving and lovemaking
What follows are comments I put together in June 2024 for a presentation at FEMeeting, a conference bringing together women in art, science and technology. The title is a nod to the wonderful artist Michael Rakowitz, whose website I happened to be browsing the week before the conference. The first line of his bio struck me. It reads: “Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking.”
While troublemaking has been part of my practice, currently I am more interested in love. It is not any kind of love, but one that includes awe or reverence, and also one in which the recipient is non-human. And that is how I came to the talk title: “Phytophilia: at the intersection of problem-solving and lovemaking.” (h/t Michael Rakowitz)
Lovemaking
Let’s start there. It’s more irresistible.
Phytophilia means plant (phyto) + love (philia). There are four words for love in ancient Greek and philia is the most general. It is the friendship kind of love, but also has dimensions of care, respect and compassion. Furthermore it is a reciprocal love, like mutual respect and joint interests.
My plant love began in soil. Starting in 2012, I took a deep dive into compost. In a collaboration with Jose Luis Bongore, Beatriz Marcos and Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, I participated in Excedentes, a commission of the Matadero Center for Contemporary Art in Madrid that we later iterated for a NYC audience. The premise of the work was food rescue. We created a system (and built a cart) to divert unsold, yet edible, food from the market to people to avoid the trash. The NYC version included composting; edible food was distributed and spoiled food was composted via a tricked out cargo bike.
Learning to compost was my gateway to phytophilia. Watching the process of discarded food, considered garbage or waste, turn into a substance so precious it is deemed “black gold” was transformative. Like the fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” we get it all wrong when it comes to food scraps and when the surprise is revealed, wow!
The process of decomposition is magical, but so is the resulting humus. It is rich in color, soft and moist and just smells so, so good. It is no surprise that scientists have discovered a microbe abundant in compost called M. vaccae works on the human body much like an anti-depressant. Compost will make you happy.
My enthusiasm and regard for compost exploded when I took a microscopy class at the Rodale Institute with Dr. Elaine Ingham (the Soil Food Web queen) and mingled with the diverse microbiology at 40x magnification.
Then flash forward five years and several projects later. I am standing in a soil pit in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in California at Paicines Ranch with artists, land stewards and scientists. Soil pits are excavated to produce a soil profile to learn how different horizons or the distinct layers at that site developed over time. Characteristics like mineral, chemical, visual and textural are recorded.
Being in the pit brought me to next level soil fandom. I’m not sure why the experience was so profound. Perhaps being six feet under (at burial depth) was part of it. The perspective switch of being inside rather than on top is another factor. I was immersed in the smell of soil and its microclimate, hugged by the close walls. The biochemical field of energy surrounded and invaded me. Scientists talk of intense dreams when spending the night in a soil pit at a remote site. I learned the protocols for profiling but all I wanted to do was exist within it. The love was borderline erotic.
One of the most intriguing aspects of profiling for me was the focused effort to find the edges that separate one horizon from the next. So much attention was spent drawing boundaries to make classifications. What I was interested in were the liminal spaces, those areas of fuzziness where two states or things could not be distinguished from one another: the roots and soil, brown soil and red, biology and chemistry, the ground and the sky. You could not name it as one or the other but it had to be both. This is where potential and vitality seem to emanate.
One of those liminal spaces that I have grown to love is the root nodule — a convergence of soil, microbe and plant. This little sack, that glows pink when active, attaches to the roots of legume plants and are chock full of a bacteria called rhizobia. It’s a symbiotic relationship that benefits the plant and the bacteria, as well as humans. Rhizobia receive lifetime shelter inside the nodule and also food in the form of carbon from the plant. The plant, in turn, receives a nutrient that only rhizobia (and a handful of other free-floating bacteria) provide, consumable nitrogen. Humans and plants cannot make use of atmospheric nitrogen, but must depend on these bacteria to “fix” or transform it. Plants uptake it first and later humans eat the plants (or other animals that eat plants) for our nitrogen as part of the soil food web. We are indirect recipients of rhizobia’s gift.
The Native Americans knew of the rhizobia millennia ago, but had another name for it. They called it the Three Sisters, divine and inseparable. The corn, bean and squash plants, personified as women, are stronger together in sisterhood than they are apart. This indigenous tradition started in Mesoamerica and spread throughout North America. When colonial settlers arrived from Europe, they could not see the elegance of the symbiotic exchange, instead it looked like chaos and wilderness. The interdependence is quite intricate: the bean plant (a legume with root nodules) supplies consumable nitrogen for the hungry corn that in return offers an upright structure for the beans to grow while the massive squash leaves, close to the ground, cover the soil keeping it cool and moist. Abundance is the result of careful balance and coordination.
The Three Sisters is a myth and a method. It is easy to think that modern day, Western science is all method, but I have found storytelling and the divine in science, it is just unfortunately removed from the everyday and disguised. Sometimes when I read an academic science journal, I slip into a mode I call “fiction science.” I am by no means a science denier and this is not done with contempt, but rather it my way of welcoming in with open arms the wondrous, fantastical, dramatic, and alien worlds that are being described despite the tempered and technical language, despite the projection of definitiveness. You must suspend disbelief to follow along.
Here is one example. After first learning about rhizobia, I wanted to know more. Like, how exactly does this exchange of nutrients between the bacteria and legume roots take place? What is going on in that glowing pink sack and what happens when it turns off (or becomes grayish white)? No scientists I knew could answer these question for me but one day I stumbled across this interview with Professor James White of Rutgers University. He is an expert in “rhizophagy” or root eaters.
What follows is a barebones summary of what Dr. White and others are learning. These are new discoveries, since 2013, thanks to developments in imaging technology that detail plant-bacteria symbiosis and the exchange of nutrients they are calling “rhizophagy.” First, free floating bacteria are sucked into the root meristem cell walls (just beyond the root cap) of the plant and forcefully spun around the interior of this cell wall while being blasted with reactive oxygen. This causes the bacteria to be stripped of their outermost layer which is absorbed by the plant for nutrients. In self-defense, bacteria produce nitric oxide (a valuable nitrogen source!) and yet another win for the plant. The bacteria is also receiving nutrients inside the root cell, causing population growth, and finally shot out a new root hair back into the soil to recover, reproduce even more and eventually return to the plant root cell to do it all over again. What!?! Watch the above video and read this for further explanation.
If you read and watch this material as a scientist, you enjoy the ride (how can you not?) and are ready to question, disprove or iterate the tale into new directions. Science is not strictly scripture, it is also jazz: call and response, dynamism, playfulness that is not always obvious from the outside. Non-scientists can embrace this play too. It is not a weakness or a threat to read science as fiction; it is letting in joy, acknowledging the limits of the human perspective and embracing the creative impetus that is at the core of science.
Problem-solving
The lovemaking story is not complete but it does start to dovetail with the realm of problem-solving. To backup just a bit, in 2018 I was invited to be a designer-in-residence at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) in Queens, NY, and that is where I worked with Anghelo — as well as other college-aged interns — to produce the demonstration “The Power of Soil” (see image above). This was part of a project I was piloting at the museum called Carbon Sponge that spanned two years at NYSCI (2018–2020) and still continues to this day on farms in the Hudson Valley region of New York.
Carbon Sponge at NYSCI was a museum exhibition, in the form of a garden, and a scientific study co-designed with soil scientists at CUNY Graduate Center’s Advanced Scientific Research Center in Harlem. The question was: can human-engineered, urban soils store carbon as a means to build soil health and mitigate greenhouse gases like rural, native soils? And a second question, my personal pursuit: can anyone reliably track the changes in soil carbon over time with easy to use and off-the-shelf tools rather than expensive, professional lab testing?
Soil was my focus and I worked specifically with soil scientists, not plant scientists. I came to discover that the two are quite separate disciplines and the areas of expertise seldom interact (the delimited regime of science). This was surprising to me, as it may be to you. The study was an investigation into whether different planting scenarios affect soil composition. We had four plant groups in various combinations across 24 raised beds. The groups were: bare, edible crop, sunflowers and cover crop mix. The cover crop mix included 10 plant species commonly used by farmers after or before a cash crop is planted, and, more rarely, in conjunction with a cash crop.
One of the cover crop plants was sorghum. Sorghum is originally from northeast Africa (first domesticated over 5,000 years ago) and is a stunner of a plant. The plant followed the trade routes from Africa to India and China and most likely first made its way to North America on slave ships (not via Benjamin Franklin as the advertisement below purports). I have been growing sorghum every year since 2018 and sometimes it surpasses 20 feet tall. It takes 3.5 months for the plant to go from seed to harvest, meaning a plant at 20 feet grows on average over 2 inches per day. Yes, over 2 inches per day.
Height is only the beginning of sorghum’s glory. It’s grain crown blooms in a variety of colors: white, yellow, red and black. Sorghum also has deep, expansive roots (to keep it standing upright), is drought tolerant (and we are finding out that it’s OK in wet weather too) and suitable in many kinds of soil (including poor, depleted soils). For these reasons, it is referred to as a “climate-smart” plant or a plant we can rely upon in extreme weather and provides benefits to our soil while it cares for (i.e. feeds) us. The grain can be ground into flour or eaten whole, and its stalks can be pressed for sap that is boiled down into a delicious sweetener called sorghum syrup, or simply molasses in some parts of the US south.
A lesser known characteristic of sorghum is that it is a phytolith (plant + stone), meaning it uptakes silica in its tissue that naturally binds to plant carbon. This is the case with other grasses too, like rice, barley and bamboo. When these plants decompose into the soil, the plant carbon is already stabilized in organo-mineral associations resulting in carbon that won’t easily degrade or respirate back into the air as carbon dioxide (a gas we want to decrease in our atmosphere). Some scientists promote growing more plants that are phytoliths to accelerate soil carbon storage and, hence, my interest. This theory is part of the jazz performance that is science (i.e., there are supporters and non-supporters tossing claims back and forth) and continues to be debated.
Regardless, grasses are an important part of carbon storage with less recognition than trees. Across the Carbon Sponge Hub in Hudson Valley and Catskill regions of New York, we have been growing sorghum since 2021 and working with small farms to integrate grains into primarily vegetable crop rotations to generate new revenue, provide a local source of staple food and sequester more soil carbon while replenishing the soil. That is a lot of winning. This course of action follows Native American tradition: abundance as a result of careful balance and coordination.
My relationship with sorghum, or phytophilia, is a kind of balancing act. It is an experiment in both lovemaking and problem-solving. Can we produce and maintain spaces that are in between, not quite one or the other, but both simultaneously? For Native Americans, the Three Sisters exists, and has persisted for thousands of years, because (not despite) of being both a myth and method. That vitality should inspire and instruct, a vitality emanating from liminal space or the space in between.
