The term Plantaction emerged through the process of gathering and documenting news reports of protests, performances and civic gestures in which plants were used as a means of expression. Around 2019, I was increasingly encountering media articles and images of citizens, activists, farmers and students using flowers, fruits, crops and trees as materials of protest. I began archiving images of these critical events, which led me to ask how such acts might be understood and taught as a pedagogy with plants.

Faced with over two hundred articles and news reports, I skimmed each one for the action involving plants and began creating an archive of statements and images. Bite into turnips. Build a car skeleton with bamboo. Dump tomatoes on roads and run tractors over them. Lock up green chilies in cash boxes. This list of provocative, critical, and creative actions with plants drawn from real events across the world, traces how plants move between field, forest, garden, kitchen, street, home and body. 

At the same time, while teaching, I used this archive to engage students with different aspects of the vegetal world. Students often added to the archive through their own research.

Last year in 2024, my friend, artist and gardener Leslie Johnson, suggested that I embroider some of the documented actions from the archive. The list was vast and so I decided to focus on India where I live and work.

Many symbolic, performative, participatory and provocative acts with plants relate to the food we eat. Within the Indian context, these actions with plants occur within various agrarian crises across the country. Thus, I embroidered a selection of statements, one by one, onto ribbons made from burlap, a fabric associated with the storage of grain. It was while embroidering these statements that the idea of Plantaction emerged.  Protests about food, demonstrations with vegetables, rituals with trees and pleas with flowers — a pattern of vegetal expression had begun to form. I used plantaction a way to interpret these gestures, and what they represented collectively — critical, creative and provocative actions with plants.

Plantaction simultaneously also characterizes the method I have been using over a decade as a pedagogue. Inserting paper leaves into real plant leaves in public spaces, an act that critiques the increasing use of synthetic plants as decoration. Writing an apologetic note to a tree while nailing a poster on its trunk, an act that expresses remorse for nailing a hole in its trunk. Hosting a fire ritual with the aloe vera plant as an homage to its cosmetic properties. These student assignments in hindsight can all be called Plantactions, where embodied experience and material awareness were the learning tools of a pedagogy centered on botanical themes.

Plantaction is thus both a concept and a method — a way of thinking through and acting with plants to create new dialogues between creative practices, our relationship with plants and the world we inhabit.