Phytographia
Poems and prose inspired by the Herbarium.
The Plant Thieves
by Prudence Gibson
The Plant Thieves reveals stories from the National Herbarium of New South Wales, Sydney. It dives into this large archive, its specimen sheets and the human stories behind each collected plant. The book interrogates who gets to collect, how plants are named, First Nations agriculture, illegal plant drug harvesting and psychoactive plant knowledge. The book follows a trajectory of the author’s own discovery of plants that have deeply affected her. It questions her own desire to collect, to re-name and to tell the true stories of Australia’s human plant histories.
The Plant Thieves podcast 2023
Interviewer Anna Westbrook
Author Prudence Gibson
Plumwood Mountain Poets
The poems below appear in collaboration with Plumwood Mountain Journal
Plumwood Mountain Journal is an Australian and international journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics. They publish poetry, book reviews, essays, interviews, and artwork by established and emerging artists and writers that respond to the challenges of living in the Anthropocene. At Plumwood Mountain Journal, they advocate for the protection and preservation of the more-than-human worlds that we inherit and inhabit. We seek to raise awareness of ecological destruction, and to promote care for both global ecologies and the human communities that bear the unequal burden of environmental degradation and repair.
