Living with plants and the exploration of botanical encounter within human geographic research practice

Explorations of the boundaries between human culture and non‐human nature have clear ethical dimensions. Developing both from philosophical arguments about the value of such boundaries and recent empirical work following the traffic across them, we seek to complement these discussions through a consideration of how these boundaries can be enacted by ourselves, as researchers, and the methods we employ. As part of an agenda seeking to reconsider organic agency within geographical narrative, we have been exploring different techniques for documenting the ways in which such agencies are encountered. Specifically, we are interested in plants and the ways in which they might be researched in new ways by human geographers. Based on two particular pieces of research into human–plant dealings, our aim is one of exploring their lively presence as part of a performative environmental ethics enacted, in part, through the very practice of the research encounter.