The concept of care has become central to understanding multispecies relations (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Mol et al. 2020; Münster et al. 2021). In work on vegetal worlds, care has been a generative concept, partly “despite and because” of its ambivalence and multivocality (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 2). Care sometimes involves as a situated attunement or encouragement intended for plants in that it is attentive to their interests and desires (Strathern 2017; Angé 2024), but it also supports projects aimed at standardization, control, and culling of plant life in pursuit of agricultural “scalability” (Tsing 2012; Chao 2018). Within this work, care refers to world-making practices recognizable in farmers’ fields, home gardens, and seed-saving networks (Nazarea 2005; Chapman 2018; Dow 2022) as well as different imperial, capitalist, and nationalist undertakings (Chacko 2019). The sheer breadth of these practices and projects makes it clear that “care,” as a concept for thinking plant-human relations, can describe very different kinds of interspecies attentions, affections, and power differentials. Thinking with the varied instantiations of plant care thus raises a bigger question about multispecies ethics. If care can be affective and exploitative, if care can undergird projects of sympoesis and extraction, how is one to care well?

Our interest in how to care well is inspired by work within anthropology and feminist science studies attuned to the politics of care. This work has explored the everyday practices in which care is deployed. In doing so, it has emphasized a need for greater attention to the milieu in which care is enacted and apprehended (Haraway 2008; Martin et al. 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Mol et al. 2020). Thinking about the particular circumstances in which care is both practiced and rendered possible provides insight into the ethical and political considerations that bear upon what comes to matter in caring relations. Such attention foregrounds the affective, aesthetic, temporal, and epistemological orientations that mediate how the objects and subjects of care are noticed. Questions of who is deemed a carer and who is deemed in need of care are not merely questions about what kinds of beings matter in the world or what care should entail. They are also questions enmeshed with particular ideas about power and beingness: If care implies a kind of capacity to act in the world, who gets to be a carer (or not) in plant-human encounters? Similarly, within what designations of personhood and planthood, capacities and accountability, are care relations, in all their potentialities, imbricated and practiced?

This series explores the multiplicities of plant care by attending to questions of vegetal “responsability.” Our approach is attentive to the many valences in meaning that responsability, much like care, can carry.  Throughout this series, responsability may index relations more akin to the English responsibility or the French responsabilité, in which certain beings are deemed to possess a capacity to act in the world with attention and discernment. To the extent that “to be responsible” evokes a kind of capability that leads into obligation and, perhaps, authority, it is thus a state of being that involves being able to account for and respond for one’s actions. In this modality, attributions of responsability activate ethical considerations among humans and plants that are shaped by broader (cosmo)political deliberations over who is able to act, who is able to respond, and with what capacity or intent (Hetherington 2015).

Where responsability calls up matters of obligation and accountability, it also gestures toward agency and the possibility of interspecies response. Here, our attention to responsability takes inspiration from Donna Haraway, who describes making space for response as crucial for respectful interspecies relationality (2008). Fostering response, for Haraway, is a vital ethical departure from the prejudice that certain kinds of beings can only react (2008, 79–80). In this valence, responsability, figured as a critical response-ability, entails a willingness to attune to multispecies communication amid unknowing and uncertainty (Hustak and Myers 2012; Rose 2011) by learning “to listen in order to make oneself able to hear and respond” (Stengers 2022b, 54). Scholars concerned with the composition of heterogeneous ecologies have issued various calls for attentiveness to more-than-human beings (Stengers 2009; Tsing 2010; Krzywoszynska 2019; Münster et al. 2021; Lien 2022), but there is still much to be learned about the possibilities and modalities through which humans can attend to vegetal signs and interests (Kohn 2013). For what does it take to care well in situations where the call and response vital for fostering caring relations unfold across vastly different modes of sensing and communicating?

The essays in this collection explore the different modalities of plant responsability to better understand the politics and the possibilities of vegetal care. Taken together, they show that questions of who can care, what needs care, and how care is practiced are never separate from the broader political fields in which matters of authority, capacity, and obligation are deliberated.

Four themes emerge across the essays. The first relates to how responsibility for care work is differentially distributed among people and plants. For example, Joeva Rock traces seed companies’ efforts to encourage the adoption of genetically modified cowpeas in Ghana under new “stewardship” contracts. Where “risky” seeds have generated new kinds of environmental concern, Rock reveals the unequal responsibilities for caring for GM plants: small farmers alone bear the risk of adopting GM seed and non-GM cowpeas are re-valued as killable catch-crops that are used to buffer the evolutionary edge of GM plants. Similarly, Helen Curry follows the rise of phytosanitary management within British potato collections. As plant scientists sought “control, regularity, [and] predictability” within the genebank, seeds emerged as preferable objects of care because they seemed less susceptible to viral transmission than tuberous accessions, at least until the arrival of seed-borne pathogens. As with GM cowpeas, the responsibility for controlling the spread of pestilence in the bank was distributed among both people and plants, though in vastly different and uneven ways.

This unequal distribution of responsibility for care work can still be valued in very different ways. Thinking on responsibility in Mexican milpas, Gabriel Roman notes that domesticated maize has lost the pericarp that once enabled it to self-propagate. What scientists dismiss as maize’s monstrous and irresponsible dependence on human care is appreciated by Mixe growers as a fabric of distributed responsibility in which humans carry the seeds that will, in turn, nourish them. Collectively, Rock, Curry, and Roman show that plants not only shape human endeavors, but they also are differentially acknowledged as responsible–or not–for how these endeavors unfold. In these shared worlds, plants also respond to human care—sometimes in resistance, sometimes in alliance. Whether through phenotypic or genetic shifts, via associations with fungi, viruses, or insects, or in their behaviors in the garden, plants continually enable the unfolding of human lives within entangled, more-than-human worlds. Yet questions remain as to how, or if, plant response is noticed, sensed, and apprehended in such settings.

A second theme concerns what it might take to attune to plant response so as to cultivate space for interspecies response-ability. Taking inspiration from André-Georges Haudricourt’s foundational work on relations of domestication, where he outlined two distinct modes of cultivation (friendly or brutal) differentiated by the degree of control exerted by the gardener (Haudricourt 1969), this series attends to the political dynamics of plant-human interactions. In doing so, the essays here reveal more entangled and situational power relations than Haudricourt’s general model allows, emphasizing the importance of closely attending to agricultural techniques and choreographies to understand the varied forms of interspecies communion and control emergent within cultivation practices. Ludovic Coupaye thus charts routines of careful indirect actions carried out by yam gardeners in Papua New Guinea, showing how techniques used for tuber cultivation extend responsabilities to the wider milieu in which a plant grows. Olivia Angé traces practices of care directed at cultivated and uncultivated potatoes in the Peruvian Andes, detailing how specific kinds of tubers obligate growers differently. Variations in care are particularly manifest in the modes of regards a potato demand. Growers maintain respectful relations with wilder tubers through silent engagement and a kind of hospitable “looking away,” thereby allowing the plants a wider space to respond, including by escaping from predators.

In considering plant response-ability, the question is not only whether certain agricultural practices better attune to plant response, but how people make themselves available to sense and consider the replies plants make to acts of care. Listening to the silent voices of plant life often demands a rearticulation of human sensory priorities and an openness to neglected perceptual cues (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Myers et al. 2021). In the garden, subtle pheromonal fragrances, color contrasts between plants, the roughness of a husk, the bitterness of a tuber, the saltiness of the soil, or the strength of a stalk become sensory orientations for caring well. In their essay on the rejuvenation of abandoned farmlands in the Nordic Arctic, Marianne Elisabeth Lien and Janike Kampevold Larsen describe how people attempting to rejuvenate meadows seek to make space for plants otherwise “muted” under standardizing agricultural practices to germinate, grow and “speak back.” In as much as this “relational choreography of cultivation” involves people, plants, animals, and tools, giving plants a chance to respond requires more than articulated human bodies. It also requires the cultivation of a milieu in which plants can respond in ways that can be noticed.

Caring well for vegetal beings, our contributors argue, unfolds as a situated ethic that requires commitment to becoming responsive to those being cared for. With this in mind, a third theme examines how attention to plants’ capacity to respond invites reflection on responsable caring relations. Industrial agriculture relies on composite practices, where affective care work (Chao 2018; Chacko 2019) is integrated into routines and projects oriented toward productivity and scalability. Such cultivation models dismiss the unpredictable relational ecologies of plants in favor of simplified behaviors enforced through chemical and mechanical infrastructures. To act or care responsably, by contrast, points to the need for a relational responsibility—that is, a responsibility practiced as an obligation to significant others that is attuned to mutual dialog and call-and-response. This includes attunement not only to a cultivar’s response but also “awakening to the calls of others” who bear the consequences of vegetal care (Stengers 2022b, 67; see also Haraway 2008, 77). It is this commitment to responsability, Can Dalyan shows, that is missing in the authoritarian environmentalist politics of Turkey’s national gene bank. There, the state’s sovereign claims to plant life and the value it produces are made possible by freezing strategies, which provoke “the suspension of the response-abilities of seeds and conservationists alike.” Although the state exercises responsibility for collections, it is a form of care that actively seeks to discipline and stifle responsable relations.

What might care look like, then, when it is premised on enabling (vegetal) others space to respond? Thinking on this question, Carlos Fausto details the array of care practices in the pequi orchards of Brazil, where plants—seeking to make humans into kin—prey upon people and make them sick. For the Kuikuro gardeners with whom Fausto works, noticing plant response in these moments awakens a web of caring obligations involving not only humans and plants, but also insects, birds, and a constellation of invisible yet powerful spirits. In all these cases, caring responsably does not preclude danger, loss, or death, but it does require opening new pathways of relational obligations to a plethora of beings.

The need to “awaken to the call of others” also entails a willingness to reconsider how humans intervene—or not—in the reproductive processes of plants. Eva Steinberg contrasts the pursuit of purity in controlled plant breeding to the embrace of contingent hybridity in “ultracross collard” initiatives. She proposes that staying with impurity by embracing plant crosses and genetic mutations can be a means of “unsettling” standardizing plant care. The cultivation of impure lines of ultracross collards is one way to foster responsable relations with a wide diversity of cultivars whose existence takes shape in response with their environment, as well as to yet-to-come varieties that may arise in the future. Likewise, Christian Keeve turns to thinking with offcut seeds—those culled and discarded “off-types” to dominant lines—as a way to theorize how to listen to otherwise “muted” plants. Attuning to such “queer seed relations,” Keeve shows, opens up different pathways, possibilities, and politics by fostering a space for plants to grow and respond, on their own terms, to agricultural care practices.

Thinking matters of responsibility and response-ability together is also an invitation to consider the politics of storying shared plant-human lifeworlds—the fourth theme of this series. The taxonomists, breeders, curators, farmers, gardeners, and diggers featured here offer different, and at times divergent, perspectives on plants’ capacity to articulate response and, by extension, bear responsibility within world-making projects. In these epistemological encounters, botanical knowledge practices mediate hierarchies among different kinds of plants and among different kinds of humans (Hetherington 2015). Sophie Chao reflects on the politics of storying the responsability of oil palm in the violent proliferation of plantations in West Papua. She argues that attending to plant responsibility in plantation worlds does not equate with refusal of (certain) human culpability. Rather, thinking care and responsability in multispecies terms opens up space for challenging anthropocentrism and imagining “responsibility otherwise.” Likewise, Susannah Chapman explores differential epistemologies of plant responsability in The Gambia, where the state is trying to standardize seed in the pursuit of agricultural markets. She shows that varied accounts of plant responsability subtend very different kinds of seed care practices among farmers and the state, opening up broader ethical questions about how to acknowledge the responsibilities that plants carry in signifying and generating the broader world.

Storying plant-human encounters is also a matter of care for scientific practices. The ways in which plants are given space—or not—to respond within different experimental dispositifs shape the kinds of stories scientists tell about vegetal life. Exploring the colonial history of Philippine botany, Kathleen Gutierrez reflects on the affective and contingent ties that underpin the expansion of Linnean nomenclature. Identifying a “plant apathy” toward botanists’ quest for the precision and prestige of Latin classification, she reflects on how plants’ very responsiveness—their continuous becoming—nonetheless muddles scientists’ pretension to objectivity. In a similar vein, Verónica Lema proposes thinking with plants that have been ignored in the archaeological record, such as the minuscule weeds found in caves in the highlands of the Argentinean Northwest. Thinking with these marginalized plants inspires her to cultivate a “weedy epistemology” attuned to the multiplicities and indefiniteness of ecologies, and what they might teach about more responsable care.

Inasmuch as knowledge practices are worlding endeavors, controversies over plants’ capacities to respond are also diplomatic encounters, where deliberations about who—and how—to integrate into our shared cosmos are at stake (Stengers 2022a [1997]). As various essays in this series attest, the stories we tell about plants’ capacity to respond shape the very space humans offer plants for responding. If neo-Darwinian theories of mechanically reacting plants have supported the breeding and populating of monocultured plantations, it becomes vital to take seriously alternative theories of plant responsability in which vegetal beings deploy their capacity to communicate and articulate propositions for composing heterogeneous ecologies. We argue that this begins with our responsability to the vegetal others we engage in our studies, which demands openness to being captured and transformed by their responses (Despret 2004). This series, then, is our response to the plant beings to whom we have become obligated through our respective fields of investigation.

Acknowledgments

This series is the outcome of a project that received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 950220).