Dispersals

A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worldsA 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.

A stunning record of inheritance, memory and belonging . . . In Lee's writing, you feel the radical potential of the essay form; 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, The author laces her histories with a subtle and personal optimism. Just as those plants replanted far from home, we can adapt to transition, dispersal, and recollection. An insightful meditation on nature and identity within 'a world in motion, Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience, Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book . . . [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us, Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings — by people and by plants — to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She is the author of two books of nature writing, Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest, and has been awarded the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and is a researcher at the University of Cambridge.