Dispersals
On Plants, Borders, and Belonging
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER
The prize-winning and bestselling author of Two Trees Make a Forest turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future
A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?
The themes in these fourteen essays become invigorating and intimate in Lee’s hands, centering on the lives of plants like seaweed, tangelos, and soy, and their entanglement with our human worlds. Lee explores the rich backstory of cherry trees in Berlin; a tea plant that grows in the Himalayan foothills just southwest of China; the world of algae and wakame, and the journeys they’ve made to reach us.
Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being “out of place”—weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Lee looks at these plant species in their own context, even when we find them outside of it.
Dispersals draws a gorgeous, sprawling map of the diaspora of flora. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
These utterly original essays seamlessly weave plants, politics, family, and travel into a gorgeous overarching theme about the search for community. Jessica J. Lee was born in Canada to immigrants from Taiwan and Wales and has since immigrated multiple times on her own. In these first-person essays, she draws links between the ways that plants and humans both move around the planet, bringing with them unexpected consequences. Considering both world history and her family’s personal stories, Lee looks at how the Brits first brought tea back from China, the international journey of the cherry blossom tree, the relationship between mangoes and colonialism, and more. And she does it all with the graceful language of a poet, the sociopolitical smarts of a history professor, and the pointed personal perspective of somebody with big ideas and an even bigger heart. Answering questions about botany, racism, and international trade, Dispersals is both vivid and fascinating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these genre-defying essays, Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest), a creative writing instructor at the University of Cambridge, discusses the peregrinations of plant species in relation to her family's migrations. Born to a Welsh father and Taiwanese mother while both lived in Canada in the 1970s, Lee contends that the contrasting teatime rituals of her maternal and paternal grandparents speak to the historical rifts between China and Britain over the tea plant. She chronicles how Britain supplied China with opium from its Indian colonies in exchange for tea, which was subject to import tariffs that funded Britain's colonial enterprise. Reflecting on the pine species she's encountered while living in Canada, England, and Germany, Lee describes the trees "as migrants making do" for their resilience, adaptability, and easily spread seeds. Elsewhere, she traces the domestication of soybeans in connection with her grandmother's family's soy sauce business and how humanity's interventions in the natural world make it difficult to determine whether species are invasive or native. Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline (in the poignant final essay addressed to her newborn child, Lee writes, "Above us the hawthorn leafs out against a pale blue sky. You watch the play of light and shadow it creates, cooing each time you round your lips and exhale"). This deserves a wide audience.
