Dyads and silences: critical plant studies and craft choices in writing Celtic rainforest

This article reflects on the ethics and craft choices of writing about the at-risk ancient temperate rainforests of Coed Felenrhyd and Ceunant Llennyrch in North Wales. These are sessile-oak-predominant biomes, their light-dappled understory supporting rare plants, animals, fungi and lichen. These habitats are increasingly at risk. This article draws on critical plant studies to reflect on the ethics of plant representation via Patricia Vieira’s concept of ‘phytographia’, to inform both theory and creative practice: namely, centring plants’ particularity and form, and doing the imaginative work to – albeit always inadequately – honour plant specificity and locatedness. My creative writing project was comprised of two parts: a creative prose ‘Litany of Hesitations’ which uses an incantatory register to hold a sense of suspense, impossibility and urgency; and second, a short series of flash/micro written works, each describing a vivid moment between two beings. Temporality is key to the project’s formal choices, using litany and flash form to create and occupy a vivid present tense of relationship. The project yielded two transferrable writing techniques which could be adapted to other creative practice: the use of a cautious, paradoxical incantation to hold open the aspiration and conscious labour to reach for less human-centred framings; and the use of present tense, a ‘lyric now’, to enhance micro-attention to specific relationships beyond the human.