Foliate Imagination

Near the beginning of his 2015 book The Cabaret of Plants: 40,000 Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination Richard Mabey presents a highly imaginative, and to me, a least, memorable conjecture. It’s about cave painting — arguably the earliest sort of evidence we have of human imagination. These paintings depict animals in abundance and great variety. Depictions of plants, on the other hand, are rare.

…Paleolithic cave artists seemed chiefly to find vegetation visually unstimulating or short on meaning, despite the ubiquity of plants in their lives and landscapes (15).

He goes on imagine a hunter-gather’s life — it’s patterns of work and leisure, its gradual absorption of the idea of making picture of things, perhaps a division between the skilled individuals painting animals in caves, and less skilled people carving available bone or flint with images of grains, that is, of plants, as in the image above.

What I’m suggesting is that plant images and metaphor were used very freely, and continue to be so in the visual vernacular, as if floral and folate growth somehow echo the dynamic processes of our imaginations. If animals have chiefly been metaphors and similes for our physical behaviour, plants — rooting, sprouting, forking, branching, twining, spiralling, leafing, flowering, bearing fruit — have, from these hesitant beginnings in the Paleolithic salons, come to be the most natural, effortless representations of our patterns of thought. (22)

No one could ever prove or disprove it, probably a good thing. To whatever extent plants may or may not resemble imagination — in the rooting and sprouting and branching and more, and however ancient the association may or may not be, what a splendid metaphor it is!