a short essay about plants

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Essay On Plants – 10 Lines, Short And Long Essay For Kids

Key Points To Remember When Writing An Essay On Plants For Lower Primary Classes

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Humans have depended on plants for generations for food and medicine. Plants go through photosynthesis and can pull nutrients from the soil and return them to the earth. They also provide clean air to breathe and scrub the atmosphere off pollutants. Many animals depend on plants for survival and live in environments surrounded by them, as they serve as natural habitats. If you are trying to write about plants in English and educate your kids, there are a lot of things you need to know to get started. Read on below to learn how to write an essay on plants for classes 1, 2, and 3.

Plants are valued not just for their beauty but for our well-being. Below are key points to remember on the importance of plants and how to write an essay on the same.

• Start with an introductory paragraph. Write a few simple sentences on how they influence our daily lives.
• Talk about the different types and uses of plants.
• You can also cover plants’ health benefits and briefly add how they improve emotional and mental well-being.
• Conclude with how to pick the best plants for your home, where to start, and why you love plants.

You can write a few lines on plants, but it’s crucial to understand their natural design and processes. We cannot enjoy the quality of life we live and breathe if it weren’t for plants. Here are 5 lines on plants for children:

• Plants do a lot for our environment, and their role is often underestimated.
• Plants in oceans maintain balance in the ecosystem and are essential for the survival of various aquatic species.
• Most plants absorb harmful outdoor gasses and purify the air.
• Plants absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen to sustain life on earth.
• The roots of plants bind them to the soil, and photosynthesis is a process that occurs through plants’ leaves.

The countless benefits of plants cannot be denied since plants have existed for thousands of years. You can mention this in your essay for classes 1 and 2. Here are 10 sentences on plants for children:

• Plants purify the air we breathe and help to maintain balance in an ecosystem.
• They reduce the harmful effects of UV rays coming from the sun and cool down the air.
• Plants are crucial to our survival as humans since they produce oxygen which is key to life.
• Transpiration is a process through which plants move water from the soil to the atmosphere.
• Plants give us different resources such as food, gum, herbal medicine, etc.
• Dried hay and straw are plants that are used to feed animals like cows, horses, and sheep.
• Plants make their own food. This process of making food is known as photosynthesis.
• The study of plants is known as Botany.
• Green algae are called primitive plants because they live in water.
• Liverworts are plants that thrive in damp and tiny conditions, often known for lacking vascular tissue.

Plants are always around us; we see them in houses and parks. Writing a short paragraph on plants will enhance kids’ knowledge of the subject.

A plant comprises more than 95% water; every tree we find around us was once a plant many years ago. It’s no surprise that they provide sustenance to living beings; without plants, it would be impossible to have a life on earth. There are three main types of plants – conifers, ferns, and flowering plants. Flowering plants are described as those species that grow leaves such as roses, tulips, dandelions, sunflowers, etc. Conifers are evergreens that grow tall and sometimes have needles instead of leaves. Ferns are non-flowering plants that don’t have leaves or flowers. Blue-green algae originated 3 billion years ago and were known to be the first plants on this earth.

Plants are found in all shapes and sizes and are known to improve our lives. Here’s a short essay for classes 1, 2, and 3 on plants:

Trees are the most significant plants, and they are full of leaves during the summers. Plants are the beauty of the earth. As humans, we depend on plants for food and various other things like gum, rubber, and paper for our consumption. Through photosynthesis, plants can make their own food. Plants cannot run away from animals to protect themselves but have specific safety mechanisms. Sharp spines and allergic reactions triggered by leaves are common ways to defend against prey in nature. Plants provide various benefits for people. They can purify the air and help keep us healthy. Some plants can even provide medicine or food when needed. Plants provide a variety of vegetables, fruits, oxygen, and other things and assist in controlling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Botany is the study of plants and their species and features. Plants are important because they provide habitats for animals and aquatic species and make other valuable things like rubber, resin, vegetable oils, and natural dyes. Fossil fuels like coal and petroleum are also by-products of plants used in automobiles.

Photosynthesis occurs during the day, and plants require sunlight, oxygen, and nutrients from the soil to survive and thrive. Unlike humans, plants are anabolic and catabolic by nature. Below is a long essay for class 3 kids on plants:

Plants are necessary for humans to survive and thrive. Chlorophyll in plant leaves absorbs light from the sun and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, releasing oxygen into the environment.

During respiration, oxygen gets utilised, and CO2 is given out. If the number of plants in our environment decrease, it can pose significant health hazards since there will be no control over air pollution. Plants provide animals with food and edible parts such as fruits and nuts. The roots of many plants are ground into fine powders and store medicinal value, and many plants, such as the aloe vera and neem plant, treat skin conditions such as acne, eczema, and rashes. Some plants can be used for getting relief from stomach ulcers and food allergies, boost metabolism and fix appetite.

Plant fibres are used for manufacturing clothing materials such as jute, flax, and hemp.

What Are Plants?

Plants are photosynthetic eukaryotes that comprise all living organisms that are not animals. They include some fungi, algae, aquatic, and land species.

Important Characteristics Of Plants

The important characteristics of plants are:

• Photosynthesis –  It is the process they make their own food and survive.
• Cell walls    –  They descend from the green algae and are multicellular.
• Meristems   –  New tissues and organs are formed at the meristems.
• Hydrostatic Systems –  Plant cell walls are made of cellulose, and these species serve as hydrostatic systems.
• Reproduction –  Plants are capable of reproduction and can disperse new life through airborne spores.
• Stationary –  Plants cannot move and are bound static to the soil.
• Aesthetics –  Plants are pleasing to the eyes and provide humans with aesthetic pleasure. They can liven up indoor and outdoor environments.
• Life cycles- Each plant has its definite life cycle, and its growth or lifespan depends on environmental factors and nutrition.
• Protoplasm –  Protoplasm is the actual living matter present in plants.
• Adaptability –  Some plants are versatile and can adapt to harsh living conditions.

Significance And Benefits Of Plants

Following are different benefits, significance, and uses of plants:

•  Lower anxiety and stress – Indoor plants have reduced anxiety and stress. As per multiple studies, people exposed to the greenery around them performed better than those that didn’t.
• Improve indoor air quality – Plants scrub dust, contaminants, and pollutants from the air through phytoremediation. Several species, such as areca, spider plant, etc., have been helpful.
•  Alleviate allergies or asthma –  If you have any seasonal allergies or asthma, you may find that having various plants in your home can help alleviate them.
•  Boost oxygen levels  – Plants are good at filtering out carbon dioxide from the environment and boosting oxygen levels. They also remove unwanted chemicals from the air, thus making it easier to breathe.
•  Reduce global warming  – Plants help lower the global temperature of the atmosphere; without them, we wouldn’t be able to survive on this earth.
•  Prevent soil erosion  – Plants keep soils fertile worldwide and supply all the significant nutrients to them.
•  Enhance creativity – Plants can significantly improve creativity for those trying to exercise their imagination. Many artists, singers, musicians, and great people in history had plants in their homes.
• Absorb background noise  – If you live in a noisy environment, you’d be surprised to learn that plants can absorb background noise. The best way to reap this gift is by positioning them around the edges and corners of rooms, and some excellent examples are the Snake Plant and Weeping Fig.

Factors That Are Affecting Plants

The following are common factors that affect plants:

• Climactic Factors –  Plants are affected by climate conditions such as temperature, light, wind, humidity, and precipitation.
• Nutrition –  Plants absorb nutrients from the soil, and soil composition is essential for their growth and development.

Your child can learn a lot by writing an essay on plants. They will learn how nature works, where they get their food from, and why plants are vital to their lives.

Now that you know enough about plants, you can get to work on writing about them. Look up popular houseplants and study the varieties you like. That’s how you write a unique and creative essay that’s not only informational but a fun read!

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Essay On Plants

Plants are an incredibly important kingdom of organisms and one of the most important components of the earth. They help in the sustainability of life on this planet. Most plants are photosynthetic in nature. Photosynthesis is a process by which phototrophs convert light energy into chemical energy and this energy is later used to fuel cellular activities. Plants provide the foundation of many food webs and aid the survival of the animal kingdom. Here are a few sample essays on “Plants''.

100 Words Essay On Plants

A plant is a living thing which grows in the crust of the earth (soil), in water or on other plants; and usually has leaves, a long thin green central part called the stem, flowers, seeds and roots. A plant can be a young tree, vine, shrub, or herb. Plants belong to the kingdom “Plantae” of multicellular eukaryotic, mostly photosynthetic. Plants lack locomotive movement, and nervous or sensory systems and possess cellulose cell walls. Plants are classified by a system called taxonomy, which is based on their genetic and evolutionary relationship. Plant taxonomy is a branch of science that gets updated as new species are found almost daily.

200 Words Essay On Plants

Plants are multicellular organisms which can be distinguished by various features like they make their food. The study of plants falls under the subject of Botany. Botany has identified about 3,50,000 species of plants such as bryophytes, seed plants and fern allies. Green plants, also known as viridiplantae, prepare their own food in the presence of sunlight through a process called photosynthesis.

Source Of Food | Plants benefit us in a number of ways by providing seeds such as wheat, rice, corn etc that we eat in our daily life. Plants provide us with tasty fruits that give us minerals and vitamins. Apart from fruits and other food, plants also provide us with oxygen, shelter, fruits, food, timber, wood, fuel and medicine.

Preserve Ecosystem | Plants play an essential role in preserving the fauna and maintaining ecological balance. Without plants, human life would become miserable as we all are very much dependent on them. The absence of plants on earth will lead to desolation and deserts all around us.

Need To Protect | Thousands of plants are being cut down daily to make furniture and paper. All humans need to grow more trees and plants and protect the existing ones. Trees should be grown on bare cultivated land and forestry should cover a larger area.

500 Words Essay On Plants

Plants are incredible species which can use up abiotic components from the environment to make their own food and also give oxygen to the atmosphere, which is one of the basic factors for the sustainability of life on earth. The classification of plants is basically done on their evolutionary and genetic relationship.

Classification Of Plants

Plants can be classified on the following criteria:-

Vascular And Non-Vascular Plants

Plants can be classified as vascular or non-vascular:-

Vascular – the group of plants which possess the vascular systems to conduct food and water throughout the plant. They own true stems, leaves and roots.

Non-vascular – the plants which do not possess vascular systems. They have a stem and leaf-like structures and rhizoids instead of true structures.

Plants are also classified based on their life cycles:-

Annuals | These are the plants which live for only one season, that is they complete their entire life cycle in a single season. They are mostly herbaceous. Examples are wheat, rice, pulses, etc.

Biennials | These are the plants which complete their life cycle in two years. They are also herbaceous and examples are cabbage, carrot, beetroot and onions.

Perennials | These are plants having a long lifespan. They generally live for more than two years. They are either woody or herbaceous. Examples of perennial plants are lavender, dianthus and lilies.

Based on taxonomy, plants can be classified as below:-

Coniferophyta (Gymnosperms) | This group of plants is primarily evergreen and is found in the temperate zone. 700 species of gymnosperms are known to date. They are vascular, meaning that they do not flower. They do not bear fruits or flowers but produce seeds. Examples of gymnosperms are cycads, pines and cedars.

Anthophyta (Angiosperms) | This group of plants can grow into herbs, shrubs, bushes and big trees. 2,50,000 species of angiosperms are known to date. The trees we see around us are mostly under this category. Angiosperms are characterised by their seeds, fully enclosed in fruits. Examples are roses, mango trees, etc. They are further divided into -

Monocotyledonous – These plants are called monocot plants. These are flowering plants which have seeds that contain only one cotyledon. The leaves of these plants have a venation pattern, and it is a parallel vein. Examples are rice, sugarcane and corn. Over 50,000 species of monocot plants are known.

Dicotyledonous – These dicot plants are flowering plants, and they grow as herbs, shrubs, and trees. The seeds have two cotyledons. It has a net-like vein pattern, and the leaves radiate outwards from the main central vein. Examples of dicotyledonous plants are eucalyptus and figs.

Plant kingdom can be broken down into further divisions like:-

Thallophyta | This is the division which includes various kinds of microorganisms like fungi and algae. These algae can be further divided into green, brown and red algae.

Bryophyta | These plants are found in water and land, examples are mosses, liverworts and hornworts.

Pteridophyta | This group of plants do not have any flowers or seeds like ferns and club mosses. Ferns have true roots, stems and leaves, produced by spores. The life cycle of these plants depends on spores rather than seeds and preceded seed-forming reproductive processes.

Gymnosperm | This group have uncoated seeds that are exposed for reproduction. and the seeds are often born in cones that are not visible until maturation.

Angiosperm | These are also called flowering plants and their seeds are protected in an ovary. Fruits are born from the flower of the plant, which is formed from the seeds (ovules) in the ovary which is often enclosed in a flower, and in turn, contains seeds for reproduction.

My Fondness For Plants

I am a person who loves gardening. My love for plants is increasing day by day as I get to see these growing. These plants not only give us food but also add to the aesthetics of one's house. When I see those flowers or fruits on the plants, it makes me feel like I’ve forgotten all my worries. Thus I believe, plants have the ability to uplift one’s emotional strength too.

As a child, I went to nurseries with my mother and saw how well taken care of the plants were. It was such a fascinating thing for me that I gradually developed an interest towards plants. Also, being a passionate home cook I love using various kinds of herbs that add a different dimension to the food and also make it prettier.

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Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

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Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Product manager.

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Operations Manager

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Stock Analyst

Individuals who opt for a career as a stock analyst examine the company's investments makes decisions and keep track of financial securities. The nature of such investments will differ from one business to the next. Individuals in the stock analyst career use data mining to forecast a company's profits and revenues, advise clients on whether to buy or sell, participate in seminars, and discussing financial matters with executives and evaluate annual reports.

A Researcher is a professional who is responsible for collecting data and information by reviewing the literature and conducting experiments and surveys. He or she uses various methodological processes to provide accurate data and information that is utilised by academicians and other industry professionals. Here, we will discuss what is a researcher, the researcher's salary, types of researchers.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Safety Manager

A Safety Manager is a professional responsible for employee’s safety at work. He or she plans, implements and oversees the company’s employee safety. A Safety Manager ensures compliance and adherence to Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) guidelines.

Conservation Architect

A Conservation Architect is a professional responsible for conserving and restoring buildings or monuments having a historic value. He or she applies techniques to document and stabilise the object’s state without any further damage. A Conservation Architect restores the monuments and heritage buildings to bring them back to their original state.

Structural Engineer

A Structural Engineer designs buildings, bridges, and other related structures. He or she analyzes the structures and makes sure the structures are strong enough to be used by the people. A career as a Structural Engineer requires working in the construction process. It comes under the civil engineering discipline. A Structure Engineer creates structural models with the help of computer-aided design software. 

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Field Surveyor

Are you searching for a Field Surveyor Job Description? A Field Surveyor is a professional responsible for conducting field surveys for various places or geographical conditions. He or she collects the required data and information as per the instructions given by senior officials. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Pathologist

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Veterinary Doctor

Speech therapist, gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Are you searching for an ‘Anatomist job description’? An Anatomist is a research professional who applies the laws of biological science to determine the ability of bodies of various living organisms including animals and humans to regenerate the damaged or destroyed organs. If you want to know what does an anatomist do, then read the entire article, where we will answer all your questions.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story. 

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or  MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.  

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process. 

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• Paragraph Writing
• Paragraph On Plants

Paragraph on Plants - Check Samples for 100, 150, 200, 250 Words

Plants are living organisms that belong to the Plantae kingdom. The evolution of plants has been a crucial part of environmental development. Planting more trees helps in maintaining the ecosystem and saves the environment from the harmful effects of global warming.

Plants also include various other types called bushes, green algae, mosses, vines, trees, herbs, etc. Botany is the study of plants and their features and characteristics. To learn more about plants and how to write a paragraph on plants, refer to the samples provided below.

Table of Contents

Paragraph on plants in 100 words, paragraph on plants in 150 words, paragraph on plants in 200 words, frequently asked questions on plants.

Plants are living organisms that play an important role in our lives. They belong to the Plantae kingdom, as per science. The study of plants and their characteristics is known as Botany. Plants and trees are very important in our lives. Directly or indirectly, plants are connected with our lives, and we both are interdependent on each other. Plants provide us with various fruits, vegetables, oxygen, etc. We help them with carbon dioxide. Plants help maintain the ecosystem. Growing a plant is not so easy. It needs a lot of care for a plant to grow into a huge tree or a fully grown plant.

Plants are living entities that have a significant impact on our lives. According to science, they belong to the Plantae kingdom. Botany is the study of plants and their features. Plants and trees play a vital role in our lives. Plants are inextricably linked to our life, and we are both dependent on one another. Plants supply us with a variety of fruits, vegetables, oxygen, and other things, and we assist them in the removal of carbon dioxide. Plants aid in the preservation of the ecosystem. We all know that plants and trees are very essential for our environment, but we still chop down trees for various reasons. A plant that grows into a large tree or a fully grown plant requires a lot of attention. Therefore, once the valuable resources are depleted, it will take years to get them back. It is now the time to understand the value of the plants and work more towards the plantation of more and more trees.

Plants are the most significant gifts to humanity. They grow into huge trees or fully-grown plants with a lot of care. Plants help us with various fruits, vegetables, oxygen, etc. and maintain the balance in the ecosystem. Plants also include different types of organisms like bushes, herbs, vines, etc. Plants are inextricably linked to human existence on this planet. Plants are beneficial to us in a variety of ways. Plants offer seeds such as wheat, rice, corn, and other foods that we consume on a daily basis. Plants provide us with oxygen and take in the carbon dioxide that we release. This helps maintain a balance in the ecosystem and reduces global warming. The effects of global warming are known to everyone, and therefore, there have been a lot of efforts and awareness programmes to plant more and more trees to reduce global warming. The plants grow into trees which bind the roots to the soil, which prevents soil erosion. They also absorb other harmful gasses from the atmosphere during the carbon dioxide process. They absorb harmful emissions and other pollutants emitted into the atmosphere by industry and cars, acting as sponges. Therefore, it is essential to plant more and more trees. We celebrate Vanmahotsav week and encourage planting more trees.

Why is it essential to plant more plants?

It is essential to plant more trees to maintain the balance between the ecosystem and to keep our environment clean and safe from all harmful effects and disasters.

How does a plant grow into a tree?

A plant grows into a tree if it is watered daily and gets proper sunlight. The plant can grow into a tree if it gets proper nutrients and is taken proper care of.

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Importance of Plants in Our Life – Short Essay

Importance of Plants Essay: The importance of plants in our life is huge. We just need to understand it. They give us oxygen, food, wood and many other things that we need for our survival. Let’s understand it with this short essay on the importance of plants for humans.

It is impossible to imagine our lives without plants or trees. Do you know that how much we owe from plants? We can’t even calculate and our thanks are also not enough. Plants and trees are the reason why are we living. We get oxygen from them, fruits, flowers, veggies. We cut the wood to make papers, rubbers etc. plants are the reason why our ecosystem is balanced. Without trees, there is no boundary between us and wild animals, no rain, no winters, no proper summers, no diversity, no beautiful colours, no life in short. Try to grow more and more plants because it’s the only way for a better living.

Importance of plants – Essay for Kids

Look at the picture from Quora, this picture carries a very important message to us. It tells us that plants are a great support to mankind in many ways. I am sure that you will agree with what the picture is saying. Have you ever thought about how many difficulties we may have to face if there were no plants on our planet Earth? In fact in every step of our life we are very much connected with plants.

Let’s start with our basic needs. Our very basic needs are food, cloth and shelter, we know this. It is quite true that these three basic needs cannot be fulfilled without plants. Let’s know more about importance of plants in our life.

Provide Food like Grains, Fruits & Vegetables

First, think about food. Can you imagine any food items which we don’t get from plants? It is impossible. Any vegetables, rice, pulses, lentils, spices, everything we get from plants, even cooking oil, sugar, wheat flour all we get from plants. Sugar is made from sugarcane plant, wheat flour from wheat plant. In breakfast, often we take bread jam. You know that bread is made of wheat flour and jam is also made from fruits. Both are plant products. So it is obvious that all vegetarian food come from plants. Our farmers work hard to grow grains like wheat and rice on farms. We use this food to fill our stomach! Don’t we?

But you may ask what about non-vegetarian food? For non-vegetarian food also we depend on plants. Are you wondering? Let’s see. We know that animals like chicken, goat eat grass or other plants for their survival. Fish also eat algae, moss etc. as food which are also plants. Paneer, we get from milk and we get milk from animals like cow, goat, sheep and others. All these animals depend on plants for their food. So, we can say that for non-vegetarian food also we depend on plants, although indirectly. You can think of many more food items, but almost all food items come from plants directly or indirectly.

Provide Cotton for Clothing

Our next basic need is clothing. There are various types of clothes, which are available in market. For example khadi or handloom clothes, cotton clothes, synthetic clothes etc.

All of us are familiar with the word khadi or handloom. What are these? Khadi or handloom clothes are made of special kind of thread. This thread is produced from jute fibre and this Jute is a plant. There are also other varieties of jute plant which can be consumed as food as well.

It is always comfortable to wear cotton clothes, especially in the summer season. What are the special features of cotton clothes? Unlike synthetic clothes, cotton clothes are made of the natural material which we get from plants. There are some plants, from which we get cotton. Cotton from cotton plants is used to make cotton thread and cotton clothes are made of this cotton thread.

Provide wood for House

In winter we wear woollen clothes. Did you know that wool is made from fleece of sheep? Now, you also know sheep depend on plants for food. So in this case too, we indirectly depend on plants, don’t we?

Another basic need of human beings is shelter. A shelter is a house where we live. Have you ever seen small houses or small huts in rural areas? If not, then surely you have seen the picture of hut, wooden house in your books. Most of these houses are made of wood, dry hay, and very big leaves of plants.

Herbs for Medicine

Besides theses three basic needs, we have many other aspects of our life, where plants are our friend. You can see, in the medical world, many medicines are made from plant products. Especially, if we consider Ayurveda medicines, almost all medicines are made from plants. You know that Ayurveda treatment is being popular day by day and many researches are being held on this field of medicines.   We know that many plants like Neem tree, Goosberry or Amla, Tulsi or basil, Drumstick tree etc. have their medicinal values.

There are many more plants to mention, have medicinal values. Besides Ayurveda medicine, Allopathy medicine is also made from plant products. Moreover plants also take care of our beauty. Many beauty lotions, creams, oils etc. are made of the materials which come from plants.

If you look around your home you will see many other things which are made of plants. Furniture like chairs, tables, beds, book-shelfs etc. is made of wood, which we get from plants.

Plants also serve us in many other ways

Release oxygen.

Plants supply us with our most required thing that is oxygen. We inhale oxygen while breathing. Without oxygen there would be no living organisms on earth. Plants keep us alive by supplying oxygen through the process of photosynthesis. They also absorb carbon-di-oxide gas through the same process, which is harmful for humans and animals. Thus plants save us from air pollution too.

Conserve Soil

You know that soil from the ground erode by strong wind or rain water. But plants like bushy plants, grass help to hold the soil and they don’t allow the soil to erode. Roots of big plants spread out over long distances and go deep down into the ground and thus help to hold the soil.

Another big contribution of plants is that they also help to bring rain. Plants release water vapour into the air. This process is called transpiration. Millions of plants on the Earth release water vapour through transpiration. This water vapour comes into contact with cold air in the sky and turn into clouds. And thus help to bring rain on the Earth. That is why saving the forest, plantation have become important and environmentalists all over the world are trying so hard to stop deforestation.

Enhance Beauty of Mother Earth

Plants also enhance beauty in our surroundings. Almost in every house a garden is necessary. A flower garden always gives us enormous joy and pleasure. Fruits and vegetables in our kitchen garden make us delighted with fresh fruits and vegetables. Plants make us happy.

Reduce Global Warming

We all know that global warming is a grave problem today and one of the main causes is deforestation. So it is very important to save forests and to plant more plants.

You can find many more reasons to preserve forests and make agriculture sustainable after understanding the importance of plants in our life. Our life is totally dependent on plants.  We know from history that right from the beginning, civilization has always grown around plants and rivers. Because plants and water are prime conditions for the survival of any kind of life. So, save the plants and save life.  Save our Green planet, Earth.

Hope this essay on importance of plants is useful for you. Know more about importance of plants in our life in our another article – How Many Trees Are There?

Trees – Fact File

Activity: Grow indoor plants in your room. Learn here about growing indoor plants .

• Fast Growing Plants for School Project
• How plants tell time
• Can plants talk to each other?
• The amazing ways plants defend themselves
• Why are Plants Called Autotrophs?
• Why are the leaves of some plants not green in colour?
• How Capillary action is the reason for living plants?
• Can Plants Like Lotus be grown without Soil?
• Plants can produce flowers but we don’t. Why?
• Can plants think like us?

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it is really true that we can not live without plants

Essay On Plants For Students & Children In Simple English

• September 13, 2021

“Plants are the most important part of our lives. They provide us with food, give us oxygen to breathe, and keep the Earth healthy.”

Plants are living creatures that offer sustenance for other living species such as animals and people. Plants produce their food with the assistance of certain sophisticated cells, since they are unable to move because they are motile.

Plants, which include trees, herbs, shrubs, grasses, vines, ferns, and green algae, are categorized in divisions, and botany is the study of plants. There are about 3,50,000 species of plants, with some of them still unclassified.

Nutrients are critical for a plant’s survival and growth because its roots take water from the soil and its stems absorb air, allowing it to develop correctly. Photosynthesis requires sunshine, carbon dioxide, and water for plants to produce food.

Food Production by Plants

To create food for plants via the process of photosynthesis, plants have a component called chlorophyll that is green in color and absorbs energy from the sun to make food. Chlorophyll is mainly found in the leaves of a plant.

The transpiration process involves the evaporation of water from pores in the leaves, which draws water through the plant. Plant leaves are primarily responsible for producing food in the plants, as they serve as a food factory. Plant leaves come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they are always the plant organ most adapted to capturing solar energy from the sun.

After this food is created, the leaves’ job is to transport it to other sections of the plant, such as the roots, stems, and all other components of the plant.

Distribution of Plants

There are many distinct kinds of plants present, including vascular nonvascular plants, green algae plants, land plants, seed plants, and nematophytes plants, as well as many different species of plants.

In the photosynthesis process, the plant requires carbon dioxide, which is released via our exhale process, and in this photosynthesis process, the plant produces free oxygen, which is very beneficial to living organisms.

Sugar is converted to amino acids for proteins, DNA and RNA, as well as carbs and starch, in the cytoplasm of the cell.

After the leaves, the plant’s roots perform the most important role since they are the primary component of the plant that collects water and different nutrients from the soil.

Water is carried from the roots to the rest of the components of the plant using a specific vessel. Many blooming and nonflowering plants are also spread, and this is accomplished via pollination.

Gymnosperms and angiosperms are used in pollination, and as a result, many distinct kinds of plants are produced.

There are also many distinct plant species that date back millions of years. Plants, therefore, are an excellent source of energy and a food-producing unit for humans and all other living things.

If you have any additional questions about Essay Plants, please leave them in the comments section below.

The essay on plants for class 3 is a simple essay that teaches students and children about the different types of plants. It’s easy to understand, and doesn’t have too many difficult words.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are plants important write five lines.

Plants are important because they provide oxygen, clean the air, and help reduce carbon dioxide levels. They also provide food for animals that we can eat or use to make our own food.

Why plants are important in our life?

Plants are an essential part of our life. They provide us with oxygen, food, and drinkable water.

Why are plants important to us essay?

Plants are important to humans because they provide oxygen, food, and water.

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Essay on Plants

Plants are an indispensable part of the Earth’s ecosystem and play a crucial role in maintaining the balance of our environment. They are the backbone of all life on Earth, providing the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, and the beauty that surrounds us. This essay delves into the world of plants, exploring their types, importance, and the critical roles they play in sustaining life.

Types of Plants

Plants come in a myriad of forms and sizes, each adapted to thrive in specific environments. They can be broadly classified into several categories:

• Trees : Tall, perennial plants with a single woody stem called a trunk. Trees like oaks, maples, and pines are vital for providing shade, wood, and habitats for countless species.
• Shrubs : Smaller than trees, shrubs have multiple woody stems and are often found in gardens and wild landscapes. Examples include holly and rose bushes.
• Herbs : These are small, non-woody plants. Many herbs, such as basil and mint, are grown for culinary, medicinal, or aromatic qualities.
• Grasses : Grasses, such as wheat, rice, and corn, are the world’s most important food source. They have a unique structure and grow in a variety of environments.
• Ferns and Mosses : Unlike flowering plants, ferns reproduce via spores and have a different internal structure. Mosses, small and soft plants, grow in damp environments and do not have flowers or seeds.

Importance of Plants

Oxygen production.

Through photosynthesis, plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, providing the essential air we breathe. A single mature tree can produce enough oxygen in a season for 10 people to inhale in a year.

Food Source

Plants are at the base of the food chain, serving as the primary food source for humans and animals. Fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts are all derived from plants.

Medicinal Uses

Many modern medicines are derived from plants. For centuries, humans have used plants for their healing properties. Examples include willow bark (source of aspirin) and foxglove (used in heart medication).

Environmental Protection

Plants play a vital role in environmental protection. They prevent soil erosion, increase groundwater levels, and reduce greenhouse gas levels. Forests act as carbon sinks, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Biodiversity

Plants are a key part of biodiversity. They provide habitats and food for many species. A single tree can be home to hundreds of species of insects, fungi, moss, mammals, and plants.

Economic Importance

Beyond their ecological roles, plants are economically significant. Agriculture, horticulture, and forestry industries provide employment and materials for construction, clothing, and more.

The Role of Plants in the Ecosystem

Plants are the primary producers in the ecosystem, converting sunlight into energy through photosynthesis. This energy supports the rest of the food web. Moreover, plants regulate the climate by moderating temperatures, reducing wind speeds, and increasing humidity. They also play a crucial role in the water cycle, transpiring water from their leaves into the atmosphere.

Challenges Facing Plants

Despite their importance, plants face numerous threats from human activities. Deforestation, climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction are leading to plant species becoming endangered at an alarming rate. The loss of plant biodiversity poses a significant risk to the health of the planet and its inhabitants.

Conservation Efforts

To protect plant diversity, conservation efforts are essential. This includes establishing protected areas, practicing sustainable agriculture and forestry, and restoring damaged ecosystems. Additionally, public awareness and education on the importance of plants are crucial for their conservation.

In conclusion, Plants are more than just a backdrop to our lives; they are essential to our survival and the health of the planet. Their diverse forms and functions support life in myriad ways, from providing food and oxygen to regulating the climate and supporting biodiversity. As we face environmental challenges, it is more important than ever to understand, appreciate, and protect our plant life. By conserving plants, we safeguard our future and the myriad species that rely on them for survival.

In the words of conservationist Wangari Maathai, “We cannot tire or give up. We owe it to the present and future generations of all species to rise up and walk!” This call to action reminds us of our responsibility to protect the rich tapestry of plant life on our planet. Let us embrace this responsibility with enthusiasm and dedication, for the health of our planet and the well-being of future generations.

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Paragraph On Plants: A Comprehensive Paragraph

Paragraph On Plants: Plants are living organisms that play an essential role in our lives and the environment. They are vital to the ecosystem, provide food, and offer numerous health and economic benefits. This article paragraph on plants provides an in-depth look at the benefits of plants, their role in the ecosystem, the different types of plants, and how to care for them.

Paragraph On Plants

In this blog Paragraph On Plants, we include the Paragraph On Plants, in 100, 200, 250, and 300 words. Also cover the Paragraph On Plants belonging to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and up to the 12th class. You can read more Essay Writing in 10 lines, and about sports, events, occasions, festivals, etc… Paragraph On Plants is also available in different languages. In Paragraph On Plants, the following features explained are:

Benefits Of Plants

Plants offer numerous benefits to the environment, including reducing greenhouse gases, improving air quality, and preventing soil erosion. They also provide essential habitats for wildlife, such as birds and insects. Furthermore, plants offer many health benefits, such as reducing stress, improving concentration, and boosting mood. They can also improve indoor air quality and reduce noise levels. Additionally, plants have significant economic benefits, including the production of food, medicine, and raw materials for various industries.

Role Of Plants In The Ecosystem

Plants are at the base of the food chain, providing food for animals and other organisms. They also play a crucial role in the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle, with plants absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen through photosynthesis. This process helps to maintain a healthy balance of gases in the atmosphere. Moreover, plants contribute to soil health by preventing soil erosion, improving soil structure, and increasing soil fertility.

Types Of Plants

There are various categories of plants, including trees, shrubs, herbs, and grasses. Trees are large plants with woody stems, and they can live for many years. Shrubs are smaller than trees and have multiple stems, while herbs are smaller, non-woody plants. Grasses are plants with narrow leaves and are often used for grazing animals.

How To Care For Plants

To ensure plants remain healthy and thrive, they need adequate water, nutrients, and sunlight. It is essential to choose the right plant for the environment, as some plants require more sunlight or water than others. Plants should be watered regularly, but not too much, and fertilized to provide essential nutrients. Pruning, repotting, and pest control are also essential for maintaining healthy plants.

• In addition to the benefits discussed, plants also play a significant role in cultural and spiritual practices worldwide. Plants have been used for centuries for medicinal purposes and in traditional healing practices. Many cultures also use plants in religious and spiritual ceremonies, and they are often seen as symbols of life, growth, and renewal.
• However, despite their importance, plants are facing numerous challenges, including climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species. Climate change is causing shifts in the timing of plant growth and flowering, which can have severe consequences for the food web. Habitat loss, particularly in areas of high biodiversity, is threatening many plant species with extinction. Invasive species can outcompete native plants and disrupt ecosystems.
• Therefore, it is essential to take action to protect and conserve plants. This can be done by promoting sustainable agriculture and forestry practices, protecting natural habitats, and implementing policies that support the conservation of plant species. Additionally, individuals can contribute by planting native plants in their gardens or balconies, supporting local plant nurseries, and reducing their carbon footprint.

In this article Paragraph On Plants, Plants are vital to our lives and the environment. They offer numerous benefits, including environmental, health, and economic benefits. Understanding their role in the ecosystem, different types, and how to care for them is crucial to ensure their continued growth and survival. As such, we should appreciate and care for plants to ensure they continue to provide us with the benefits we enjoy.

Read More: An Indian Farmer Paragraph

FAQs On Paragraph On Plants

Question 1. What plants give us 10 lines?

• Food: Many plants are edible and provide us with fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts that are essential to our diet.
• Medicines: Numerous plants contain compounds that are used to make medicines and treat illnesses.
• Oxygen: Plants are primary producers of oxygen through photosynthesis, which is essential for the survival of many organisms.
• Fiber: Plants such as cotton and flax provide us with fiber that is used to make textiles and clothing.
• Fuel: Plants are used as a source of fuel, such as firewood and biofuels.
• Building materials: Plants such as timber trees provide us with wood that is used for construction and furniture.
• Aesthetics: Plants are grown for their aesthetic value, providing us with beautiful gardens, parks, and landscapes.
• Air purification: Plants help to purify the air by removing pollutants and improving air quality.
• Erosion control: Plants help to prevent soil erosion by providing ground cover and stabilizing slopes.
• Wildlife habitat: Plants provide habitat for wildlife and support biodiversity, contributing to the ecological health of our planet.

Question 2. What is the importance of plants?

Answer: Plants are incredibly important for many reasons, and their significance extends far beyond their beauty and their ability to provide us with food. Here are some of the reasons why plants are so crucial to our planet and to us:

• Oxygen production: Plants are the primary producers of oxygen on our planet. Through photosynthesis, they release oxygen into the atmosphere, which we and other animals need to breathe.
• Food source: Plants are the basis of the food chain, providing nourishment for both humans and animals. They produce fruits, vegetables, grains, and other foods that we rely on for our survival.
• Climate regulation: Plants play a critical role in regulating the Earth’s climate. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps to mitigate climate change by reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the air.
• Soil health: Plants help to improve soil health by providing organic matter, which helps to retain moisture, prevent erosion, and promote the growth of beneficial microorganisms.
• Biodiversity: Plants are essential to maintaining biodiversity, as they provide habitat and food for a vast array of other organisms.
• Medicinal properties: Many plants have medicinal properties and are used to treat a variety of ailments, from headaches to cancer.

Question 3. What is the importance of plants paragraph?

Answer: Plants are an essential part of our ecosystem and play a vital role in our lives. They are the primary source of oxygen that we breathe, and they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the air. Plants also help to maintain the soil’s health, prevent soil erosion, and provide habitats for various organisms. They are a source of food, fuel, and medicine, and have cultural and spiritual significance in many cultures.

Question 4. What are some sentences about plants?

• Plants are living organisms that can be found all over the world, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains.
• They come in many different shapes and sizes, with various adaptations that help them survive in different environments.
• Through photosynthesis, plants produce oxygen, which is essential for the survival of all living things.
• Plants have been used for thousands of years for food, medicine, clothing, and many other purposes, making them an integral part of human life.

Question 5. What are the 5 benefits of plants?

Answer: Plants provide a wide range of benefits to humans and the environment. Here are five key benefits of plants:

• Oxygen Production: Plants are the primary producers of oxygen on Earth through the process of photosynthesis, which is essential for the survival of humans and other animals.
• Climate Regulation: Plants play an important role in regulating the Earth’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and releasing oxygen, helping to mitigate climate change.
• Food and Nutrition: Plants provide us with essential nutrients, vitamins, and minerals that are necessary for our health and well-being. Fruits, vegetables, and grains are all examples of foods that are derived from plants.
• Aesthetics and Beauty: Plants are grown for their beauty and aesthetic value, adding color and visual interest to gardens, parks, and indoor spaces.
• Environmental Benefits: Plants help to improve air and water quality, reduce soil erosion, and provide habitat and food for a wide range of wildlife, contributing to the health and stability of ecosystems.

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Plants essay in English for School Students

Unlock the secrets of photosynthesis and learn about the diverse world of plants with our comprehensive plants essay on this fascinating topic.

October 31, 2023

Table of Contents

In Plants Essay, we will study the Plantae realm; these organisms are essential for supporting life on our planet. Through their contributions to ecological stability and efforts against climate change, plants have a significant impact on Earth’s overall health. With a wide range of species, including shrubs, green algae, mosses, climbers, trees, and herbs, this diverse kingdom remains a subject of study in botany – the scientific discipline focused on understanding the characteristics and behaviours of plants. 

The evolution of plants has played a significant role in the development of the environment. Planting more trees contributes to the maintenance of the ecosystem and prevents global warming from harming the environment.

We often underestimate how important plants are in our ecosystems. They are the primary producers in the biosphere, harnessing sunlight to create energy and forming the basis of the food chain.

In addition to plants, there are bushes, algae, mosses, vines, trees, herbs, etc. Botany is the study of plants.

Also Read:  Article on the Importance of Education

Plants Essay in 100 Words

Plants, members of the Plantae kingdom according to science, are essential living organisms. The study of their characteristics is Botany. They play a critical role in our lives. We are mutually dependent on each other as plants provide us with fruits, vegetables, and oxygen while we give them carbon dioxide. Additionally, they contribute to maintaining the ecosystem. However, growing a plant into a large tree or a mature plant requires significant care and effort.

Plants Essay in 150 Words

Plants, often referred to as the living beings of the Plantae kingdom, hold a significant influence on our lives. They are studied in the field of botany due to their unique features. These entities play a crucial role in our existence as we mutually rely on each other. While supplying us with an array of fruits, vegetables, and oxygen, plants also aid in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Additionally, they contribute to maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Despite being aware of their importance in our environment, trees continue to be felled for various purposes. It is worth noting that nurturing a plant into maturity requires substantial effort and resources, which cannot quickly be replenished once depleted. Hence, we should recognise the value of plants and strive towards planting more trees for sustainable growth.

Also Read: Article on Junk Food

Plants Essay in 200 Words

Plants are precious gifts to humanity, growing into various forms with proper attention. Their contributions include providing us with essential elements like fruits, vegetables, and oxygen while also maintaining a harmonious balance in the ecosystem. Additionally, plants encompass various organisms, such as bushes, herbs, and vines. They are deeply intertwined with our existence on this planet and offer endless benefits. These range from producing seeds that give rise to staple foods like wheat, rice, and corn to absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen.

This crucial process helps mitigate the effects of global warming, which are well-known to all. There have been numerous efforts and awareness programs aimed at increasing the number of trees to combat global warming. Trees play a vital role in preventing soil erosion by anchoring their roots into the ground and acting as natural sponges by absorbing harmful emissions from industries and vehicles. Therefore, it is imperative to continue planting more trees. The annual Vanmahotsav week is a testament to this cause as it encourages tree-planting initiatives nationwide.

Plants Essay FAQs

Plants are vital to life on Earth, serving as the foundation of the food chain. They convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, producing oxygen as a byproduct. They provide food, medicine, and materials for humans and other creatures.

Five benefits of plants include oxygen production, food supply, medicinal resources, carbon dioxide absorption, and ecosystem support. They enhance the air quality we breathe, contribute to our nutrition, offer remedies for various ailments, combat climate change, and maintain the balance of nature.

Plants are essential to our world. They generate oxygen, provide sustenance, and offer remedies. Moreover, they sequester carbon dioxide and maintain the delicate balance of ecosystems, making them vital for a healthy planet.

The importance of plants cannot be overstated. They are the bedrock of life on Earth, influencing our atmosphere, nourishing us, and offering solutions to medical challenges.

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Essay on Plants For Students and Children

We are Sharing an Essay on Plants in English for students. In this article, we have tried our best to provide a Short essay on Plants for Class 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 in 100, 150, 200, 300 words.

Essay on Plants in 120 words for kids

Plants are very useful for us. They give us food, medicines, gum, and wood. A plant has roots, stems, branches, and leaves. The roots remain under the soil and help the plant to absorb water and minerals from the soil. The stem, branches, and leaves grow above the soil. During the day, plants make their food with the help of sunlight, water, minerals, and carbon dioxide. After the food is made, they give off oxygen. Plants store food in the form of fruits and vegetables. We have fruits and vegetables as our food. Oxygen is necessary to keep us alive. Dried hay and straw make food for the cattle. Plants are therefore said to be very useful to us. We should grow more plants.

10 Lines Essay on Plants

Plants Essay in 200 words

Plants have served mankind in various ways from as far back as one can remember. They have fed numerous people and cured diseases since life began on earth.

The survival of human beings is dependent on plants. A large portion of food, medicines, and materials that we use in our everyday life, is from plants that grow all over the world in the tropics.

Apart from feeding and protecting human life, plants also protect soil from erosion, regulate climate, maintain water supplies for agriculture and prevent the forming of deserts.

Despite the great value of plants, man has been destroying them simply due to his ignorance and short-sightedness. According to the records, every year we destroy a tropical rain forest three times the size of Switzerland. About 25,000 flowering plants are on the verge of extinction. Some of the flowering plants are water lilies, violets sunflowers, orchids, magnolias, pitcher plants, Indian pipe, mistletoe (plant hung on doors during Christmas), and the Spanish-moss. We should take care of our plants and try not to pollute the air so much that plants begin to die.

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Paragraph on Plants & their Importance in our Life

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Paragraph on Plants:  Plants are a part of beautiful nature. They are very important for our survival. They purify the air and make our environment healthy to live in. There are different types of plants, some are small and some are big. We see them everywhere, in our gardens, parks and even in our homes. They play an important role in making our surroundings attractive.

Apart from their beauty, plants are important for us in many ways. They produce oxygen which is necessary for our breathing. They also help in controlling pollution as they absorb harmful gases from the atmosphere.

Plants are a major source of food for both animals and humans. They provide us with fruits, vegetables, grains, etc. which are essential for our health. Apart from all these, plants also have a therapeutic value. They are used to cure various diseases. The fresh air and the greenery of plants help in relieving stress and tension.

>>> Read Also : “Paragraph on Environmental Pollution”

Despite their tremendous importance there is a certain challenge to plants today. One of the major challenges is climate change which is affecting their growth and distribution. Plants are an important part of our environment and we should take care of them to keep our surroundings healthy and beautiful.

Therefore, we should take steps to protect them from the various threats they are facing. Being the students we can lead the campaign to protect the plants. We can bring solid pledges to protect our environment and its inhabitants with utmost care.

>>> Read Also : “A Short Essay on Vegetables “

In short, plants are very important for our survival and well-being. We should take care of them and try to preserve their beauty.

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33 Writing Prompts About Plants

Plants, trees, and flowers are all around us. They look beautiful, but they also serve an important purpose in our ecosystem.

Below, we’ve provided a list of plant-themed writing prompts to help you explore the plants around our world, and think creatively about what they mean to us.

Using This Guide

You can use this guide however you’d like to inspire your writing. As long as you’re writing something, you’re doing it right.

But if you need a little help getting started, try one of these ideas below:

• Challenge yourself to use one writing prompt each day for a week—or even a month!
• Pick your favorite flower, and use the number of letters in its scientific name to pick your prompt.
• Ask the person sitting to your left which prompt you should use.

Plant Prompts

• Write a story from the point of view of a butterfly looking for the perfect flower.
• Research a critically endangered plant , and write a couple of paragraphs about it.
• Write an acrostic poem using the word “garden”.
• Rewrite the process of photosynthesis in a nonsensical way.
• Write a poem or short story using the following words: bloom, roots, sunlight, seed
• If you could grow a garden, what would you grow? Why?
• Why is logging and tree thinning an important part of the life cycle of a forest?
• Write a story with a plant or flower as a symbol for something special.
• What kind of houseplant is your favorite? Why?
• What is your favorite flower? What makes it special to you?
• Write a story about a flower trying to bloom in a dark forest.
• Research an unusual plant or flower , and write 2-4 paragraphs about it.
• Write a story where something other than flowers is given on a special occasion.
• Write a poem about two flowers communicating with each other from across the garden.
• Write a poem or short story using the following words: lush, unique, breeze, timeless
• Would you rather spend your day in a quiet forest or a lush meadow? Why?
• Why are rainforests so important to our planet?
• Which plant smell is your favorite? Why?
• What plant do you think symbolizes your life? Explain.
• Plants can be used in medicine, cooking, art, and more. Write about a unique way you could use plants in your home.
• Read a children’s book about plants , and write a detailed review.
• Write an acrostic poem using the word “botany”.
• Research the flower(s) that represents your birth month . Describe the flower(s) and their significance.
• Do you prefer the budding trees of spring or the colorful trees of fall? Why?
• Write a few paragraphs about a plant or flower in mythology .
• Write a story about a gardener who has a pink thumb instead of a green thumb.
• Write 2-3 paragraphs about a real plant that has a funny name .
• What are some ways we can use plants in art? Use examples.
• Visit a local botanical garden, and write 3-5 paragraphs about your experience.
• Who is your favorite plant Pokemon? Why?
• Create a new plant Pokemon. What does it look like? What are its abilities?
• There are many superheroes with plant-related abilities. Create a new plant-manipulating superhero. What is their name? What are their abilities?

Looking For More?

We love providing fun and engaging writing prompts, and we’ve got a little something for everyone!

We even have resources for parents and teachers, so they can help you become the writer you were meant to be.

If you’re looking for a specific list and can’t find it, reach out and let us know. We love to hear your ideas!

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Plants and literature.

• Susan McHugh Susan McHugh University of New England
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1267
• Published online: 31 August 2021

In countless ways, plants have been in literature from the start. They literally provide surfaces and tools of inscription, as well as figuratively inspire a diverse body of writing that ranges from documenting changing social and ecological conditions to probing the limits of the human imagination. The dependence of human along with all other life on vegetal bodies assures their omnipresence in literatures across all periods and cultures, positioning them as ready reference points for metaphors, similes, and other creative devices. As comestibles, landscape features, home décor, and of course paper, plants appear in the pages of virtually every literary text. But depictions of botanical life in action often prove portentous, particularly when they remind readers that plants move in mysterious ways. At the frontiers of ancient and medieval European settlements, the plant communities of forests served as vital sources of material and imaginative sustenance. Consequently, early modern literature registers widespread deforestation of these alluring and dangerous borderlands as threats to economic and social along with ecological flourishing, a pattern repeated through the literatures of settler colonialism. Although appearing in the earliest of literatures, appreciation for the ways in which plants inscribe stories of their own lives remains a minor theme, although with accelerating climate change an increasingly urgent one. Myths and legends of hybrid plant-men, trees of life, and man-eating plants are among the many sources informing key challenges to representing plants in modern and contemporary literature, most obviously in popular genre fictions like mystery, horror, and science fiction (sf). Further enlightening these developments are studies that reveal how botanical writing emerges as a site of struggle from the early modern period, deeply entrenched in attempts to systematize and regulate species in tandem with other differences. The scientific triumph of the Linnaean “sexual system” bears a mixed legacy in feminist plant writing, complicated further by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) writers’ creative engagements with the unevenly felt consequences of professionalized plant science. Empowered by critical plant studies, an interdisciplinary formation that rises to the ethical challenges of emergent scientific affirmations of vegetal sentience, literature and literary criticism are reexamining these histories and modeling alternatives. In the early 21st century with less than a fraction of 1 percent of the remaining old growth under conservation protection worldwide, plants appear as never before in fragile and contested communal terrains, overshadowed by people and other animals, all of whose existence depends on ongoing botanical adaptation.

• botanical criticism
• critical plant studies
• ecocriticism
• literary and cultural plant studies
• phytocriticism
• phytocentric criticism
• phytographia
• phytopoetics
• plant thinking
• vegetal poetics

Plants and literature are both generic terms for highly varied and evolving referents. While plants permeate literary texts across all periods and cultures, their significance to literary critics remains uneven. In the works of the Bard alone, literary glossaries and lexicons from Henry Ellacombe’s Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare ( 1878 ) through Gerit Quealy and Sumie Haegawa Collins’s Botanical Shakespeare ( 2017 ) register longstanding interest in the mentions, motifs, and of course plant-based potions used as plot devices. Apart from utilitarian objects, however, representing the lives of plants—ethically, culturally, politically, historically, philosophically, and textually—has proven more challenging to literary writers, a problem that fuels a fast-growing subfield of scholarship in the 21st century .

All accounts of why plants are moving from the margins to the center of literary study point to the cross-pollinations made possible through interdisciplinary studies. William Shakespeare’s poisons notwithstanding, the rise of medical humanities has renewed interest in rhetorical and philological approaches to plants, particularly in classical and medieval scholarship, where substantial bodies of herbal-healing literature survive. In literary animal studies, the very different claim that plants are the final frontier of post-anthropocentric critique stirs controversy. Still more ambivalence surrounds the languishing of botanical interests following Lawrence Buell’s turn-of-the- 21st-century heralding of a definitive “environmental turn in literary-critical studies,” sparking debates about how literary writing creates, disseminates, and subverts ecocritical perspectives on plants as agentive beings. 1 Wider-ranging studies of the intertwining histories of literature and plant science are revealing the radical potentials that stem from the intersections of botanical knowledges and forms of expressing them, along with their proliferations and contestations through histories of settler colonialism. Elaborating the uneven consequences for people and plants, recent feminist, antiracist, and decolonial writing illustrates unique possibilities for literature in critical plant studies, a field gaining legitimacy through questioning how plants came to be seen as inert, insensate, and unintelligent.

Critical plant studies aims to inspire more comprehensive and sympathetic accounts of the implications of growing new evidence of the complex intra- and inter-species subterranean, biochemical, and airborne communications shared among photosynthesizing and saprophagous life forms. Philosopher Michael Marder elaborates how “plant thinking” is never simply a question of vegetal capacities: what humans think about plants can be distorted by metaphysical biases that compound our difficulties with perceiving vegetal sentience. Marder draws together insights from phenomenology, botany, and population ecology to model ways of ruminating that “neither treat . . . plants as passive objects (or quasi-mechanical structures relegated to the background of animal life) nor accept . . . the Western metaphysical equation of subjectivity with autonomy, unity, individuality, personhood or will.” 2 His prescient framing of critical plant studies as “an interdisciplinary dialogue, whereby philosophy and literature would learn from each other to think about, imagine, and describe vegetal life with critical awareness, conceptual rigor, and ethical sensitivity” drives inquiry into how literary workspaces have always been sites of struggle to articulate what is distinctive to botanical being-in-the-world. 3 Thus plant life as such no longer marks a literary-historical limit but rather becomes an inspiration for representing and recovering ethically driven plant-human relations in literature.

Getting deeper into the weeds of literary history highlights the profoundly different genealogies of critical plant studies and ecosophy. Following Marder’s lead by tracking leading-edge science, Molly Mahood’s The Poet as Botanist ( 2008 ) traces how poets’ seemingly endless fascination with flowers changed with the publication of Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné)’s Systema Naturae ( 1735 ), which simultaneously revolutionized the study of botany and language. Through “the close relationship of poetry and plant science” that “held ever since Linnaeus,” Mahood charts how organismal botany rose to fame. But, by the mid- 20th century , the popularity of botany became imperiled by increasingly technical interests through the rise of “biochemistry and molecular biology, . . . return[ing only] through the back door as plant ecology.” 4 A comparative view of literary history casts even more doubt on the inevitable or inherent ecocritical appeal of plants.

The systematic collection and study of plants empowered by European colonialism led not just to more imaginative literary writing through science but also established mutual influences. Best known for literary works like The Sorrows of Young Werther ( 1774 ), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe authored two publications that share the title Metamorphose der Pflanzen ( Metamorphosis of Plants )—the first a botanical treatise ( 1790 ) and the next an elegiac poem ( 1798 )—that together reflect how literary and scientific imaginations were mutually transformed by the Linnaean emphasis on shared morphological traits. Discovering how every tree is encapsulated by a meristem of embryonic tissue, which inscribes every experience of their lives in their own wood, is tantamount to recognizing how morphology makes of plants “a metaphor of metaphors”: open-ended, receptive, wondrous. 5 Goethe contemporary and friend Alexander von Humboldt’s even more widely influential Essai sur le Géographie des Plantes ( 1804 ) is credited as a foundational text of ecology and biogeography, and also as an aesthetically innovative textual interweaving of images and words. 6 Such works also mark profound transitions away from plants as objects of the classifying imagination and toward vegetal beings’ capacities for endless growth, inciting revolutionary thinking about questions of representation, broadly writ.

In the same period, Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden ( 1791 ) more directly synthesizes scientific and literary writing by binding together two poems in a single volume: “The Economy of Vegetation,” geared to introduce a general readership to a range of scientific questions of the day; and “The Loves of the Plants” (initially published in 1789 ), which capitalized on Linnaeus’s sexually explicit language to advance evolutionary thinking about human-plant continuities. Yet the complex potentials and limits of women’s affiliations with plants also contributed to the book’s sensational response, as Sam George elaborates in Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant ( 2007 ), which tracks the influence of the Linnaean sexual system on science and literature by focusing on the pivotal role of Darwin’s book in British women’s education. Through scenes pandering to misogynist (some also racist) fantasies, “The Loves of the Plants” pointedly challenged established assumptions that botany and floriculture were respectable foci for a lady’s education; girls’ and women’s rare point of access to scientific training consequently came under threat. The influence of Darwin’s poem on literary production was no less profound, particularly for women writers, who were both inspired by and scrutinized for engaging with the vitality of female plant parts. 7 Art imitating life, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things ( 2013 ) provides a fictional meditation on how 18th - and 19th-century Euro-American women studying plants such as Jane Colden, Jeanne Baret, and Marianne North overcame obstacles to make science history as botanical researchers and explorers.

New materialist approaches to literary criticism are also helping to make literature’s material origins in plant life more apparent today. Through a reading of Abraham Cowley’s poem “Written in Juice of Lemmon” ( 1656 ), Julian Yates’s Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression ( 2017 ) swerves the materiality of media toward self-reflexivity, here in the form of secret writing in citrus juice on paper revealed through delicate application of flame. Cowley’s perspective highlights how “plants funded and framed acts of inscription,” according to Yates: “literally (and figuratively) growing, living out their own forms of being in and by and through their use as media that bound human expression,” the medium that is the message “fruiting as it appears” reveals the fruit as symbiotically inhabiting literary expression. 8 But can literary expressions also trace the perspectives of literal plants?

To move beyond deadlocked debates about whether or not plants can embody subjectivity or assert agency, critics are reorienting discussions of plant speech toward more precise literary preoccupations with plant language and writing. Patrícia Vieira advocates for building more directly on the extensive emerging knowledges of biochemical signaling and other forms of plant communication by centering literary interpretation on “phytographia,” or “imprints left in texts themselves by plants.” 9 Starting with 17th-century German mystic Jakob Böhme’s theory that “God’s signatures” are apparent in all things, Vieira dismantles hierarchic views of nonhuman languages still more decisively via Jacques Derrida’s concept of “arche-writing,” or a type of writing that precedes the subjugation of writing as a vehicle of speech and meaning. As a mode of plant inscription, phytographia enables deconstructions of the contradictions peculiar to plants and literature, and more. 10 Vieira’s studies of Amazonian plants’ inscriptions on human lives in Colombian and more recently Brazilian and Portuguese modernist “novels of the jungle” further suggest how attempts to represent the vegetal voices of the rainforest give rise to literary creations that resist superimpositions of human stories, along with their silencing through settler colonialism. 11

Cross-cultural comparisons of historical representations of plants are destabilizing distinctions between naturalist and literary writing. 12 Such discussions provide just a sample of how literature and literary studies alike are themselves profoundly changed by fostering what Joela Jacobs conceptualizes as “phytopoetics,” an aesthetics of plant life that upends especially passive stereotyping by attending to the ways in which plants’ life-giving and life-taking capacities are not transcended by so much as reasserted in literary writing, particularly about what she terms “vegetal eroticism” and “vegetal violence.” 13 The phytopoetic charge of the nascent subfield of literary and cultural plant studies is leading to recoveries and reconsiderations of how writers have taken up the creative challenges of representing plants on their own terms, often through distinct themes and genres.

The materiality of plants in the instruments, surfaces, and everyday lives of literary authors is readily apparent from ancient traditions worldwide, and anthropomorphized vegetal characters are among the oldest staples of folklore. By the 20th century , their refusal to keep still in the objectifying gaze makes botanical beings ripe for retooling as threats, particularly as mass menaces or plant horrors. In contrast, rare individual plants, particularly trees, trend more sympathetic, especially when cast as bearing witnesses to atrocities, in feminist, antiracist, queer, and postcolonial literatures. Mixed communities of plants anchor more ambivalent literary histories, flagged by forests gradually changing from sites of satire or refuge to spooky, if not downright dangerous, zones for vulnerable people. Plants play more direct roles in representations of agricultural communities in flux, prompting bucolic reflections in critiques of urbanization, and devastating visions of manufactured food shortages and other crises that follow from industrialization and consolidation of farming.

As sites of hybridization, chemical manipulation, and genetic modification of plants, laboratories link together many of these scenes and more: bridging the commercialization of plant life and the growing prominence of plant horror, creative representations of technical control also extend connections forged between literature and science in the European Enlightenment that again include botanical capacities for resistance. 14 The divergent perspectives of botanical scientists from others with vested interests in plant life—whether horticulturalists, plant developers, or hobbyists—are signaled by literary representations of plant life changing through natural and especially artificial selection in sites closer to home. Whether in gardens, greenhouses, or simply pots, vegetal silence begins to emerge as a sign of exclusions by as well as within human communities. Through the rising popularity of botanically oriented memoirs at the turn of the 21st century , writers as different as novelist Jamaica Kincaid and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer are troubling histories of colonialism, enslavement, genocide, and extinction by finding ways of reconnecting with their heritage cultures, lands, languages, and losses through plants. These budding interests in ethically writing plant life indicate how engagements with botanical theory and horticultural practice continue to enable explorations of new frontiers in literary studies.

Plant Matter

The material presences of plants in writing make possible a play of sign and referent from literature’s inception. Carved with a blunt reed, the remaining fragments of the oldest literary text, The Epic of Gilgamesh ( c . 2100 bce ), include a story of the hero’s discovery and loss of a plant that would bring immortality. From ancient times, the plant matter of literary musing has included bark, bast, and other writing surfaces sourced from such diverse species as papyrus, flax, and fig trees. Of the hundreds of plants represented in the oldest Chinese literature, the mulberry is by far the most mentioned in Shijing or Classic of Poetry ( 1100–700 bce ). Writing long before the invention of paper and the lucrative trade in raw silk for textiles, its writers recognized mulberry trees as cultivated in plantations for the purpose of feeding the insect source of their primary writing surface: silk, usually used together with lacquer sourced in tree sap, was preferred before the invention of paper there. 15 Although virtually any plant can be used for papermaking, the exceptional durability of cotton-pulp paper makes it the standard for archiving literature, and along with it enduring material connections to the history of slavery. The detail in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved ( 1987 ) that the slave Sethe is tasked with making the ink used by her tormentor Schoolteacher likewise serves as a subtle reminder of the forced labor behind another one of Euro-Americans’ main writing materials from the 14th through the 19th centuries : iron gall ink, sourced from oak trees. 16

Human dependence on plants in general and obligations to trees in particular are familiar themes within ancient literatures, for instance in the Sanskrit tradition extolling the virtues of the mystical Forest Queen or “mother of all sylvan things” in the Rigveda ( c . 1500 bce ) and outlining rules for cohabitating with plants in the Puranas ( c . 400–600 ). 17 To their sacred knowledges, symbolic meanings, and medicinal properties is added a mnemonic device in the early medieval Irish alphabet Ogham, to each letter of which is ascribed the name of a kind of tree. The world tree Yggdrassil of the Old Norse sagas exemplifies how individual plants even occasionally figure as powerful presences within the oldest texts.

Whether via metaphor, simile, or personification, the vegetal has long served literary authors as a ready ruse by which to say things that are unspeakable in human terms. In the gardener’s discussion scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II ( 1595 ), menial servants are overheard speaking of fruiting trees, herbs, ornamentals, and weeds in postlapsarian disarray, but immediately understood by the queen to be actually discussing the failures of the titular king to manage his subjects. Throughout the play, the overtaxing of lands and people alike are figured through botanical vocabularies that clarify the stakes of the king’s poor cultivation of all within his island nation, rather, “our sea-walled garden” (3.4.42), according to the gardener’s servant. 18 Settler nations’ dependence on coordinated cultivation of the land with the most nutritive plants for table and livestock may not immediately spring to playgoers’ minds, but the metaphor only works because the questions of stewardship raised in the castle garden are recognized as applying as much to statesmanship as they do to horticulture. 19

In contrast, botanical rhetorics in modern literatures trend toward rendering plant life unimportant, most obviously through dead vegetal metaphors. Bearing associations with Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary, the flower figured in Robert Burns’s famous opening line “O my Luve’s like a red rose” ( 1794 ) reflects the Romanticist enlistment of botanical subjects as vehicles for expressing strictly human emotions. Over a century later, Gertrude Stein’s trademark quip “A rose is a rose is a rose” will become a preeminent illustration of the modernist literary counter-valuation of literal language (the line itself echoing Stein’s 1913 poem “Sacred Emily”). However unthinkable literature may be without plant matter, vegetal life appears also to be a limit case for the properly literary subject, a condition amplified by the rising popularity of fictional vegetal monstrosities in modernity.

Plant Horror

Examples from contemporary realistic fiction around the world—including Ibrahim al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone ( 2002 ), Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker ( 2006 ), and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian ( 2007 )—figure vegetal violence ironically, through the silent suffering of human characters who are victimized for being vegans or vegetarians. It’s a new twist on villainous vegetal representations in literary history, where botanical beings overwhelmingly assert themselves to the detriment of humans. And, when literary plants go bad, they do so often as mindless, monstrous menaces, in examples as diverse as the heroine’s poisonous vegetal “sisters” in Nathanael Hawthorne’s “Rappacini’s Daughter” ( 1844 ) and the mysteriously manipulative growth that haunts Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation ( 2014 )—examples that also use botanical figures to explore the demonization of female desire. While both leave open the question of plant culpability in the deaths of humans, there are far more literary plants that appear to crave human flesh, in “inscrutable silence and [with] an implacable strangeness.” 20

The roots of plant horror reach back to carnivorous variations on legends of the zoophyte known as the borametz , or vegetable lamb of Tartary, said in some variations to consume all who venture within its soil-rooted range. 21 Eighteenth-century European reports of the Javanese upas tree having a lethal poison that seeps through the ground and travels airborne (along the lines of the film The Happening , 2008 ) were only scientifically debunked by the mid- 19th century , by which time the dream of killer plants had become firmly rooted in the gothic imaginary. 22 Ranging wider away from colonial centers, the passive floral poisoner of Hawthorne’s story morphs into a more active threat. 23 As early as 1874 , a report began to circulate about an “atrocious cannibal tree” fed by tribal sacrifice in Madagascar, later outed as the cryptobotanical brainchild of fiction writer Edmund Spencer. 24 Published worldwide as a news story, its momentum is attributable to the coincidental publication of Charles Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants ( 1875 ), which confirms that some plants can have humanlike digestive mechanisms. Although Darwin clarifies that such plants are native to all continents except Antarctica, racialized fantasies of jungle-dwelling peoples’ proximities to carnivorous plants persist, for instance, in Scott Smith’s novel ( 2006 ) and film ( 2008 ) The Ruins , which portrays white Euro-American travelers falling victim to a parasitic vine at an overgrown temple tended by Maya people.

Written with his son Francis, Darwin’s later book The Power of Movement in Plants ( 1880 ) advanced further the hypothesis that plants demonstrate cognition, based on evidence that they act according to their appetites, a potential that becomes decidedly sinister in the literary imagination. Dramatic thrills and chills move with botanical specimens into the centers of empire through flesh-eating plants depicted as individuals collected and eventually bred by horticulturalist men, including the titular specimens of H. G. Wells’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” ( 1894 ) and Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Reluctant Orchid” ( 1954 ). Such stories also satirize the 19th-century eruption of “orchidelirium,” a variant on the Dutch Golden Age “tulipmania,” in which plant-collecting passions tip over into self-destructive obsessions. 25 Charles Addams’s Cleopatra, a member of the fictitious African Strangler species and the prize of fictional Addams-family-matriarch Mortitia’s exotic collection of deadly plants, is a prominent indicator of how the pattern of racial and ethnic coding of botanical killers persists well into the 20th century . That said, named individuals like Audrey II of Little Shop of Horrors ( 1960 , 1986 ) fame, along with the carnivorous titular character of Annie Proulx’s “The Sagebrush Kid” ( 2008 ), however deadly, are likewise plants deliberately nourished by humans as symbionts, even family.

Audrey II’s alien origins and monstrous proportions also reflect the ways in which the trope of vegetal attacks on humans develops through Cold War discourses of invasion. In the 20th century , fictions-turned-films like The Body Snatchers ( 1955 ) / Invasion of the Body Snatchers ( 1956 ; 1978 ) hearken back to radical traditions in botanical writing that challenge human dominance even while gaining in popular currency. The spectacle of ambulatory alien plants intentionally poisoning people in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids ( 1951 ) inspired a radio series ( 1960 ), a film ( 1962 ), a TV series ( 1981 ), even a sequel in the form of Simon Clark’s novel The Night of the Triffids ( 2001 )—a phenomenon that gains greater significance amid the struggle to advance nonanthropocentric ecological thinking. Even as debates grow about the literary values of botanical resistance—whether it figures fights for ecology, or against sexual, ethnic, or racial inequality—the tendency to interpret plants as stand-ins for humans in the history of literary criticism helps to explain why the need to read them on their own terms becomes felt so strongly.

Plant People

Apart from genre fiction, human identification with or as plants relegates characters to the textual margins in the modern literary canon, but that has not always been the case. Whether as gatherers and gardeners, farmers and gleaners, nomads and Natives, folks who raise and prepare plants to provide basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and medicine largely have done so at the edges of the canon. Yet how humans relate to plants appears to be guided by particular themes and locations in their literary representation.

A “notoriously enigmatic” staple of medieval European church décor, the “green man” carvings—typically a head fantastically entwined in, sometimes even emanating, greenery—have no corresponding representation in texts prior to or during their creation, leaving them open to interpretation as violent or menacing. 26 But, in pointed contrast to plant-horror’s tendency to depict plants as a mass menace, the foliate head usually appears in singular form, and so might be seen instead as a link to ancient literary representations of plants as motifs of personhood, kinship, and subjectivity. 27 BIPOC and feminist literary critics demonstrate how traditional ecological knowledges hinge on attending to plants as people in ancient stories. Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop ( 1986 ) shows how translating human-plant in terms of strictly human relations warps Native American storytelling traditions of the “yellow woman” central to her Keres culture; representing their main grain maize, yellow woman’s stories instill agricultural knowledge together with the traditionally gynocentric values of Keres people. Whether understood to be a staple of folklore in ancient cultures or a folklorist invention of modern paganism, the green man’s stories, like those of the yellow woman, foster a sense of wonder at the seasonal rebirth characteristic of deciduous trees and other nonevergreen plants, inviting comparison with fictional tricksters likewise associated with greenery. In UK literary traditions, Sir Gawain’s green-skinned Green Knight, Sherwood Forest’s green-clad bandit Robin Hood, even Kensington Gardens’s Peter Pan all trouble figures of authority, both by trespassing on lands marked as royal and by asserting pre-Christian ideologies.

Various interpretations open to the titular character of Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man ( 1969 )—a “tree monster” / “tree devil,” a psychological projection of the main character, or just the pub of the same name that figures prominently in the story—add to the sense that shared plant-human being appears deeply unsettling in modernity, even in fantastical settings. Contemporary sf writers in the United States invoke this figure still more directly to develop the narrative potentials of human-plant reciprocity for social and environmental critique. Both Robert Jordan’s series The Wheel of Time ( 1990–2013 ) and Gene Wolfe’s series The Book of the New Sun ( 1980–1983 ) explicitly label as “the green man” an individual character who has special powers to manipulate plant life. In Ursula LeGuin’s The Word for World Is Forest ( 1972 ), decolonial becomes also ecological justice when the Athsheans, green-furred hominids who evolved in symbiosis with their forests, rise up against their enslavement by Earthlings and other aliens who disparage them as “little green men,” and effectively halt the invaders’ planetary-scale deforestation. 28

Comics paint in broader strokes how ecoconsciousness is being advanced by such characters. The 1963 introduction of the character Plantman, who stimulates plants to do his evil bidding, in Strange Tales and later X-Men lofts a dark narrative of Cold War science, combining plants, men, and chemicals that gives way to greener visions within the ensuing decade. Later comic representations of especially plant hybridity extend instead the ecological sensibility popularized by Rachel Carson’s bestselling Silent Spring ( 1962 ). The two most successful examples of ecological comics, Swamp Thing and Man-Thing , were first issued in 1972 and feature plant-human hybrids evolving through their respective narratives to become stewards of their swamps, even of “all realities” in the case of Man-Thing . What makes these new green men stories pivotal is their positioning of the human as a connective node within (not, like Plantman, a manipulator above and beyond) highly contingent multispecies communities, namely the microcommunities of their swamps. Perhaps most indicative of evolving eco-consciousness are the bad-to-good transformations of two more characters: Poison Ivy, introduced in 1966 as a supervillain botanist and biochemist, and the Plant Master (later Floronic Man), introduced in 1962 as a Plantman-like botanical manipulator, except also an alien exiled from an interdimensional world called Floria. Each was initially conceived as instrumentally using plants or plant qualities. Pivotally drawn together with Swamp Thing in Black Orchid ( 1989 ), they become repositioned to be recast in ensuing stories, respectively, as eco-warrior antiheroine and straightforward superhero.

The different but entangled trajectories of Poison Ivy and Floronic Man also show how conflicted relations proceed from differently gendered representations of shared human-plant embodiment. Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 ce ) casts a long shadow over transformations of especially women and girls into flowering plants and trees in Western literary traditions. The story of Baucis and Philemon—who show hospitality to strangers later revealed to be gods in disguise, and therefore are rewarded by deathbed transformation to intertwining oak and linden trees—is referenced and repeated faithfully by the likes of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Powers along with Jean de la Fontaine, Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, Andre Breton, and Max Frisch to idealize heterosexual coupling. Not so is Daphne’s more abrupt change into a laurel to be saved from impending rape by Apollo, who then crowns himself with her wood; it is the rare literary reboot like Will Boast’s Daphne ( 2018 ) that resists her reduction to the vegetal/female object used by the animal/male superior force. 29 More typical are interpretations, for instance, of the title character of The Vegetarian as becoming silent, sessile, and otherwise plant-like by the end of the story, through the course of which she has already been depicted as brutally attacked, drugged, and ultimately institutionalized, indicating how the dangers of becoming plant-identified persist for some kinds of people.

The risks appear mitigated for those presenting as males voicing their own vegetal transformations. Walt Whitman’s willing himself to the reincarnating “grass of graves” is celebrated as one of the poet’s many gestures toward radical democracy in Leaves of Grass ( 1855 ). In Kobo Abe’s Kangaru Noto ( 1977 , translated as Kangaroo Notebook , 1991 ), the protagonist’s discovery of radish sprouts growing on his legs initiates a surreal medical journey to what he recognizes as Hell. Reflecting Abe’s formative years as a settler in Japanese colonial Manchuria and crediting the influence of Lewis Carroll, the novel meanders surrealistically, through “different things, creatures, and space-times, dreamings and stories.” 30 Only his story takes a uniquely weird turn along the way as he discovers that snacking on them makes him no longer able to stomach any sprouts except those grown on his own body. His growing sense of mutualism with his sprouts provides a tenuous connection back to another dimension of Ovid’s many tree-people, namely, their sense of more long-lived plants as benevolent personalities. It also provides the pretext for Le Guin’s “Olders” ( 1996 ), another transformation tale of a man, in this case in a coma, changing into the tree form in which he will join the grove of his likewise life-extended ancestors.

Trees for the Forest

“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree” begins the most famous work by Joyce Kilmer, and it concludes: “Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree.” A strangely monotheist rewriting of the dendrolatry or tree-worship common to many peoples (including Kilmer’s Celtic ancestors), the poem’s framing of the tree exclusively as an aesthetic inspiration contrasts its roots in sacred texts. 31 Whether anchoring concepts of life, knowledge, or immortality, particular trees are central to folklore, mythology, and religion—the Biblical tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Bodhi Tree or Buddha’s tree of awakening, and again Yggdrasil, the cosmically central Old Norse world tree from whom the god Odin hangs himself. Passionate paeans to trees also can be found in the works of William Blake, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Robert Macfarlane, and Mary Oliver—so prevalent, indeed, across cultures and periods that a comprehensive list might be endless—but individual connections like Odin’s prove more portentous.

In feminist fiction, the wavering of greenery between forefront and background roles can be traced in between two of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s stories. “The Giant Wisteria” ( 1891 ), under which is uncovered the secret grave of a daughter murdered by her mother for having an illegitimate child, seems complicitous in the cover-up, if not an active menace. Whereas, in “The Yellow Wallpaper” ( 1892 ), the heroine narrating the spectacular backfire of bedrest to cure her mental illness ultimately envisions herself literally fading into the vegetal design papering the room. An inverse trajectory—from décor to live trees—unfolds within The Vegetarian , in the subplot of an artist obsessed with painting and filming floral designs on skin, who has an affair with his model Yeong-hye, who is also his sister-in-law and the character who becomes vegetative through the course of the story. Tellingly, after accidentally viewing a film of them having sex, the betrayed wife/sister In-hye ends the novel by staring at actual trees, “as if for an answer.” 32

Trees take on still more special roles as witnesses to atrocities. In representations of the US history of lynching, individual trees loom ominously. While Billie Holiday’s 1939 sound recording powerfully popularized the metaphorical rendering of “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze” in Abel Meeropol’s 1937 song “Strange Fruit,” literary writers of preceding decades imagined the trees themselves as narrators or witnesses. Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak” ( 1913 ) describes a lynching from the perspective of a tree, recounting the story of a man hung by a mob from its bough. 33 A generation later, Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me” ( 1935 ) reduces the tree to “a charred stump of a sapling,” though likewise capable of responding to the injustice only silently, by “pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky.”

Contemporary fictional representations of trees as living testaments to lynching include Jesmyn Ward’s Sing the Unburied, Sing ( 2017 ), in which the arboreal witness is imagined as a gathering place for ghosts of African American victims of many more racially motivated killings, too. The spectacle of Native Americans murdered by hanging haunts the fateful cottonwood grove of Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead ( 1991 ). Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves ( 2008 ) imagines as well the transgenerational trauma following a particular historical incident in which three Native Americans—including one child—were hung by white-settler vigilantes, showing how the tree becomes not just an instrument of racialized violence but also ultimately a gathering place for the victims’ surviving tribespeople, alongside the ghosts of passenger pigeons, by then driven to extinction by the same killers. An early example also based on a true story, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s 1844 murder mystery Die Judenbusch ( The Jew’s Beech ) uses the supernatural more forcefully to bring to justice the killer Friedrich, who by the end is found hanging from the tree under which his victim Aaron was found, and subsequently into the bark of which Friedrich’s fate cryptically had already been carved in Hebrew.

The idea that individual trees become mediators of social and personal tragedies is prevalent in many more contemporary novels that cast them realistically as significant presences. A historic tree, the Splittereiche (Splinter Oak) that survived the traumatic February 13–14, 1945 bombing of Dresden, serves in Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenberg ( 2012 ) as both living witness and connection to the narrator’s parents, who were lost that night; unlike the mass graves where they may be buried, visiting the tree enables him to conjure up memories of them. 34 Identifying unique potentials for postcolonial critique, Wendy Woodward compares representations of individual “arboreal beings” in several southern African fictions, including Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness ( 2000 ), Niq Mhlongo’s title short story in his collection Soweto, under the Apricot Tree ( 2018 ), and Mia Couto’s Under the Frangipani ( 2001 ), to show how they “foreground the presence of trees in their narratives, all implicitly critiquing a ‘culture’ which neglects to acknowledge a tree in its full significance.” 35 Her further relation of these individuals to a grove that serves a similar function in Beverley Rycroft’s A Slim Green Silence ( 2015 ) suggests an even greater literary force for trees represented en masse. Just as they provide the material backbone of so many vegetal communities, trees appear to be the most dwelt-upon botanical subject in literature, if not always appreciated as such.

Forest for the Trees

“A culture is no better than its woods” is the concluding line to W. H. Auden’s poem “Buccolics, II, Woods (for Nicholas Nabokov)” ( 1955 ), which begins “Sylvan meant savage in those primal woods.” If Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization ( 1992 ) establishes that as far back as Gilgamesh “forests represent the quintessence of what lies beyond the walls of the city,” then Auden’s poem exposes how they come to serve as a modern poetic measure of humanity’s failure to prove ourselves civilized. 36

Forests have long served as transformative zones in literary traditions of cultures rooted in arboreal regions of the world, whether as sites for carnivalesque inversion, like Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, or the unsolvable murder mystery played out among the bamboo of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” ( 1922 ), a story best known outside Japan through the classic film adaptation Rashomon ( 1950 ). Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ( 1596 ), Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest ( 1791 ), all the versions before and since of the story captured in the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood” ( 1812 ), even Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ( 1999 ) position forests as places of intrigue and, especially for women and girls, danger. The trope of the deep, dark woods—whether as an uncanny place for humans, the home of monsters, or itself an active threat—has deep roots in specific, purportedly haunted woods, a staple especially of the English countryside, and consequently has strong attraction for eco-gothic writers today. 37

Literary history identifies more nuanced roles played by forests in particular periods and cultures. Albrecht Classen’s The Forest in Medieval German Literature ( 2015 ) examines canonical texts like the Nibelungenlied ( c . 1200 ) alongside lesser-known poetry and prose to complicate perceptions of forests as uniformly inhospitable, let alone as horror-filled, by showing how they guide characters’ development and renewal. Jeffrey Theis’s Writing the Forest in Early Modern England ( 2009 ) likewise reads Shakespeare, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton together with literature of the revolution like James Howell’s Dendrologia, Dordona’s Grave, or the Vocall Forest ( 1640 ) to show how literary and other writers expressed early concerns about forest law and deforestation. Citing Ojibwe traditional knowledges along with William Bradford, James Fenimore Cooper, John Muir, and Jim Harrison, among others, John Knott’s Imagining the Forest: Narratives of Michigan and the Upper Midwest ( 2012 ) uses literary and other stories of one North American region from the colonial period to the present to chart the emergence of two competing metaphors of the forest: as antithetical to civilization, in need of subjugation; and as cathedral, to be revered and protected.

More deeply mixing these impulses, a minor literary tradition imagines communities of arboreal beings as figures for social satire and eventually ecocriticism. Ludvig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum ( Niels Klim’s Underground Travels , 1741 ) imagines animate and articulate trees explaining their utopian world to a human visitor and suggests how literary representations of forests ground profound critiques within European Enlightenment thinking. These elements recur across the literary history of sf, most prominently perhaps with J. R. R. Tolkien’s old, wise, and otherwise treelike Ents of the Lord of the Rings series ( 1954–1955 ). 38 Similar creatures include Edgar Rice Burroughs’s otherworldly Plant Men of Barsoom in his Martian fiction series ( 1912–1943 ), as well as the sentient humanoid-cactus-like Cactacae of China Miéville’s Bas-Lag series ( 2000–2005 ).

The poor treatment of plants by people is a common complaint among literary treelike beings, though largely voiced from the sidelines. Much rarer are literary works narrated from the perspective of a tree like LeGuin’s “The Direction of the Road” ( 1974 ), in this case a stately oak who disdains apples in orchards as domesticated and thereby cognitively diminished “herd trees.” While casting doubt on the human character Olivia’s claim to hear individual trees speaking to her, Powers’s The Overstory ( 2018 ) further explodes this perspective on a global scale, imagining other humans tuning in less directly to arboreal chemical conversations circulating worldwide. Updating readers on the latest scientific findings as well as the cascading social and environmental consequences of replacing old-growth forests with tree plantations for capital gain, The Overstory as a whole complicates the picture through a self-reflexive critique of literature itself as obscuring the ethics of human-plant relations. Whether as e-books or print-copy “tree books,” bestsellers like The Overstory represent large-scale consumptions of forest products and other environmental threats, raising questions about how even sympathetic literary authors contribute to the slide of uses into abuses of plant life.

With vast monocrop plantings as a backdrop, literature primarily records the human toll of the intensification of agriculture made possible through settler colonialism, which not only has led to widespread diminishment and extinction of wild plant species but also to the movement and cultivation of plant species worldwide for the profit of few and through the victimization of many. Set on a sugar and cotton plantation in the southern United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly ( 1852 ) has long been touted as an example of literature’s power to enact social change, a legacy overshadowed by its trade in poisonous stereotypes of black people. 39 Attending to the intertwined diminishment of human and nonhuman lives moves critics more generally to reframe the Anthropocene as the “Plantationocene” era, indicating how, even amid critiques of exploitation, hope can take root in literary representations of humans tending to continuities with plants.

Although the dramas of animal husbandry dominate the farm novel tradition, plants gain greater significance in examples with more direct historical grounding in the imperiled rights of horticulturalists. Dīnabandhu Mitra’s influential play Nil Darpan ( The Indigo Mirror , 1860 ) recounts a revolt that began with poor Bengali farmers refusing to plant indigo under exploitative conditions imposed by British Raj planters; as the first play staged by the National Theater in Kolkata, it is credited with advancing decolonial politics. At many levels, Charles Chesnutt’s short story “The Goophered Grapevine” ( 1899 ) identifies African American slaves and freemen with the titular vine, all together victimized by the greed of plantation owners and entrepreneurial northerners who replace them. Mixed reception histories call attention to how peoples’ phytophilia or attachments to plants can complicate the indigenous/invasive hostilities long attributed to texts like Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)’s Out of Africa ( 1937 ), a white woman’s memoir about starting and losing a coffee plantation in what later became Kenya. 40 In the US, decolonial politics take a backseat through novels like Frank Norris’s The Octopus ( 1901 ) and The Pit ( 1903 )—the first two books of his unfinished Epic of Wheat trilogy—along with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ) and John Nicholls’s The Milagro Beanfield War ( 1974 ), all of which concern the dangers of corporate interests to local smallholders who grow, harvest, and market crop plants.

Scientific and technological developments to optimize plant propagation inspire fantastic literary satire. Projecting a nightmare scenario of the Green Revolution avant la lettre , Ward Moore’s sf classic Greener Than You Think ( 1947 ) focuses on a suburban Californian lawn that, after mistakenly being treated with a chemical fertilizer that enables plants to turn anything into nitrogen, takes over the world. An imaginative departure from flesh-eating plant horrors, Moore’s grass makes people feel alienated from their own planet, confounds morphological resemblances, and ultimately overwhelms anthropocentrist fantasies. 41 Albeit in contemporary realist style, Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation ( 2003 ) tells a similar tale of plant alteration through science leading to unintended, global-scale changes. Shadowing the true story of how genetically modified potatoes became the first gene-altered plant to be widely grown for and then withdrawn from commercial markets, Ozeki draws different people’s stories—including those of farmers, organic activists, fast food workers, public relations specialists, and, perhaps most importantly, teachers—together with stories of potatoes’ multifarious reproductive and cross-cultural significances. Unlike Moore’s story, Ozeki’s ends with a sense of human-plant solidarity. For, nestled within the biodiversity desert of its Midwestern US monocrop-farmland setting is a green oasis: an elderly Japanese war bride’s wildly chaotic garden plot, filled with an incredible mix of vegetables, flowers, and more, which serves as a stage for reconciling fractured friendships and family relations amid the fight against corporate takeovers. 42

Garden, Greenhouse, and Potted Plants

Gardens function to bring people together for nourishment and healing, but not evenly, in life as in literature. Edenic qualities attributed to flower gardens in English country-house poems like Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” ( 1651 ) naturalize the aristocratic status of the patrons whose praises they sing. Such associations persist in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden ( 1910 ), where sickly children of the rich unlock what becomes for them the titular paradise, but only after they get a servant boy to restore it to order. Burnett herself fits a pattern of modern writers who draw inspiration from their own experiences of directing staff to build and manage extravagant country manor house gardens, alongside Beverley Nichols, the author of garden-writing hits like Down the Garden Path ( 1932 ), whose effete horticultural enthusiasms in turn prove ripe for immediate lampooning in W. C. Sellar and R. W. Yeatman’s Garden Rubbish and Other Country Bumps ( 1936 ). Literary representations of grand-scale gardening all the more clearly devolve into signs of losing the common touch amid landscapes transformed by widespread suffering.

With Vita Sackville-West’s grand gardens at Sissinghurst Castle long since transformed into a popular UK tourist attraction, her musing in “The Garden” ( 1946 ), “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, / Therefore of gardens in the midst of war / I boldly tell,” seems worlds away from the more practical Victory Gardens promoted in plays of the time like Carey Miller’s Hoe! Hoe! Vitamin ( 1944 ), written as a practical intervention into the wartime starvation and malnutrition of the British populace. 43 That said, nostalgia persists for a sense that plant-tending provides a respite from the world, whether literally a safe space away from the hoi polloi in the case of Jerzy Kocinzki’s Chance, the idiot-savant gardener in Being There ( 1970 ), or a psychological respite from threats of murder and mayhem for the title character in The Constant Gardener , the bestselling 2001 John Le Carré novel and feature film based on a true story.

As Ozeki’s novel indicates, gardens are not just refuges from social struggles but also places for securing intimate ties amid them. Rosemary Manning’s The Chinese Garden ( 1962 ) features characters discovering a secreted and transformative space at a girls’ boarding school, only there it becomes a place for coming to terms with lesbian desire. The titular plant of Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night ( 1996 ), a species of cactus colloquially known as the “pass-along plant,” is an exotic transplant to a Caribbean garden that connects an intergenerational, queer, and racially mixed network of people who share and transplant cuttings from it, one that anchors a self-sustaining sense of fleeting, paradisiacal, “roving queer island garden” spaces for those who are otherwise set to be crushed by “the postemancipation plantation machine of the West Indies.” 44 Tan Twan Eng’s historical novel The Garden of Evening Mists ( 2012 ) makes the creation and restoration of a formal Japanese garden an impetus for healing from the loss of loved ones to the Japanese occupation of Malaysia during World War II. Eng’s aesthetic logic is clarified by a curious historical footnote: Japanese follow Chinese garden designs by favoring particular plant species praised in Classical Chinese literature, the point being circularly to create places of contemplation that in turn inspire more literary and artistic production.

That plants’ medicinal properties are central to folkways around the world lends gardens persistent dramatic value. Lacking affordable health care in contemporary small-town Mississippi, the African American protagonists of Ward’s novel tend in their gardens the makings of herbal remedies and charms depicted as easing, even saving, their loved ones’ lives. Such characters have many counterparts in earlier US literature, including Sarah Orne Jewett’s Eurowhite Mrs. Todd and Linda Hogan’s Native American Aunt Moon, both introduced as quirky botanophiles but later revealed to be powerful members of communities dependent on their herbalist expertise. Proulx’s 2016 novel Barkskins offers ironic commentary on this pattern through the character Sapotista, the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Mi’kmaq Mari, who was famed in the contact era for her North Woods herbal expertise. Uneasily inheriting Mari’s legacy, Sapotista herself earns a PhD in botany and exhorts students to turn their focus from “the old medicine plants [that] grew in a different world” before the forests were destroyed, in order to work as restoration ecologists to try to create conditions in which forest plants can regain their healing powers in the 20th century . 45

That such characters are predominantly women has roots in the practical needs of female embodiment, according to historian Londa Schiebinger, who points to works by Giovanni Boccacio, Ben Jonson, and Mary Wollstonecraft to show how “popular imaginative literature sheds light on early modern women’s use of abortifacients” like savin. 46 Genre fictions make much of associations of herbalism more explicitly with the dark arts, hence herbology featuring as a major discipline of study at J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry across the Harry Potter series of novels and films. The predominance of female poisoners in murder mysteries—notably those of Agatha Christie, who herself trained as an herbalist before becoming a writer—directly speaks to a period in which the professionalization of pharmacology was leveraged by men’s relentless discrediting of female herbologists. 47

Given the preponderance of female authors and characters in literary representations of herbalism, it is notable that so many more male authors and characters are linked together as plant-based drug users and abusers. Debates continue about whether and how literary depictions glamorize or critique psychoactive experiences with derivatives of poppies, coca, marijuana, and more. Stories as diverse as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater ( 1821 ), M. Ageyev (Mark Levi)’s Roman s Kokainum ( Novel with Cocaine , 1934 ), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ( 1952 ), Irvine Welch’s Trainspotting ( 1993 ), and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings ( 2014 ) become controversial also amid the unevenly experienced dangers of illicit drug trade for people of different classes, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. T. C. Boyle’s Budding Prospects: A Pastoral ( 1984 ) is an outlier in this tradition for its depiction of a young man’s drug use leading to his involvement in cultivation of a marijuana farm, and with a happy ending at that.

The introduction of greenhouses highlights how literature teems with the dramas of human and other animal lives, among which botanical subjects devolve to proverbial wallflowers in lockstep with their colonial exploitation for commercial markets. The faddish florist flowers and parlor flower stands heralding the Georgian era come to the fore at the end of Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion ( 1818 ), when the star-crossed protagonists’ mutual “admir[ation of] a fine display of greenhouse plants” provides a ruse for rekindling their love affair. 48 Victorian lovers gain a secreted space of luxury by escaping to the home conservatory, an architectural novelty that is itself a sign of conspicuous consumption in Charlotte Yongue’s novel The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations: A Family Chronicle ( 1856 ). 49 Fueling a vogue for greenhouses open to the eventually wearying public, the scene of literary hothouse love devolves to a cliché by the Edwardian era, as illustrated by an assignation at “the usual palm tree,” or “the second palm tree on the left” in Oscar Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband ( 1895 ). 50 Raymond Chandler’s iconic noir novel The Big Sleep ( 1939 ) flags the monstrous turn in the 20th century . An early scene features Philip Marlowe’s meeting in the greenhouse with General Sternwood, whose name along with his description as a “bloodless,” cold-sensitive, paraplegic, old, dying man aligns with his cramped plants, ominously described as “a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.” But even Sternwood hates them, particularly the orchids, declaring: “They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.” Instrumentally or decoratively filling in the scenery of human dramas, the literary destiny of such vegetal presences verges from unsympathetic to detested.

No living beings populate literary history more inconspicuously than houseplants, yet their growing presence in 20th-century contexts appears distinctly to their detriment. Identifying with a potted plant signals that a character is pathetic, sympathizing with its sufferings perverse, and truly caring for them pathological. Far from the hothouse and parlor displays, lonesome Fanny in Austen’s Mansfield Park ( 1814 ) is promised a puppy and sometimes lent a horse but ultimately makes daily life in her cold rooms bearable by bringing in potted plants. By the 20th century , fictions feature self-isolated and privileged white men who, although they claim to care about plants, only act to torture, kill, or even just leave plants unpotted to die of root exposure. The protagonists of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying ( 1936 ), Flannery O’Connor’s “The Geranium” ( 1946 ), and Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America ( 1965 ) all fit this bill.

Twenty-first-century examples suggest that this pattern might be changing, as the sense of growing relations between people and particular houseplants indicates how they can provide a basis for reconceptualizing difference or otherness. Extremely socially isolated and abused characters are identified with plants only in ways that highlight systemic social problems in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah ( 2014 ) and Haruki Murakami’s Ichi-Kyu-Hachi-Yon ( 2009–2010 ), translated as 1Q84 ( 2011 ). Both stories explicitly address the spread of and limits to settler cultures, respectively, in Africa and Asia, suggesting how enlisting potted plants in these investigations can open new avenues for social modeling and critique beyond Euro-American traditions. 51

Botanical Memoirs

Naturalist writing on forests tracks growing ecological sensibilities, and bleeds into botanical memoir amid the fraught histories of local peoples’ fights for environmental justice. While plant writing peppers all the work of Henry Thoreau, The Maine Woods ( 1864 ) most clearly articulates a vision of living off forested land, even while expressing sympathy with the peoples whose lifeways and lands alike were even then obviously being endangered by commercial interests, particularly loggers. (Telescoped across the Great North Woods into Canada, a similar but fictional story snowballs across generations, continents, and cultural perspectives in Barkskins .) The intersections of genres also prove useful for articulating the imbrication of scientific and literary writing about plants. Known mostly for his popular bird books, biologist Bernd Heinrich revisits a slice of the Maine woods in a likewise lyrical memoir, The Trees in My Forest ( 1998 ), to share his sense and sensibilities of arboreal being, and to detail recent scientific findings that affirm them.

Although not memoirs per se, botanical writing by authors with extensive experience working with plants, often as scientists, enjoys enduring popularity. Recognized more for her skills in plant propagation than her poetry in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson’s writing is filled with references to species that she cultivated in her gardens, meadow, and conservatory, many of which are preserved in a herbarium that she created as a schoolgirl. 52 In the 21st century , forester Peter Wohlleben’s runaway bestseller Das geheime Leben der Bäume: Was sie fühlen, wie sie kommunizieren; Die Entdeckung einer verborgenen Welt ( The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Discoveries from a Secret World , 2015 ) indicates public receptivity to perceptions of trees as social creatures whose needs intersect with those of humans. In Powers’s The Overstory , the fictional dendrologist Patricia Westerford’s similarly sensational The Secret Forest , which is the lone point of connection across the sprawling novel’s diverse cast, appears to have been modeled after the life of biologist Susanne Simard. Life imitating art, Simard’s own Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest ( 2021 ) is a story that blends personal and scientific discovery, more like biologist David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature ( 2012 ) and The Songs of Trees: Stories of Nature’s Great Connectors ( 2017 ) in weaving together autobiographical and nature writing for the purpose of advancing understanding of plants as communicative and social creatures.

A key intertext in Ozeki’s novel, The Harvest of the Years ( 1927 )—the autobiography of plant developer Luther Burbank, breeder of the world’s most-planted potato, the Burbank russet, among other popular cultivars—is an early example of a hybrid science- and life-writing genre that nearly a century later brings popular audiences to important critiques of science as well. Paleobotanist Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science, and Love ( 2016 ) details the grant-writing mill, laboratory turf wars, and institution-hopping expectations that condition plant science in her experience as a successful academic, with special attention to the sexism she endured. Similarly science-skeptical autobiographies of descendants of enslaved and colonized peoples instead focus on field work to suggest that intentionally living and working with live plants provides a bulwark against cultural and biological endangerment alike. Focusing on the fragile dependencies on native plant species helps Robin Wall Kimmerer to articulate her journey to becoming an ethnobotanist and an engaged citizen of the Potowatomi Nation in Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses ( 2003 ) and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants ( 2014 ). Though an ornithologist like Heinrich, J. Drew Lanham details in The Home Place: A Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature ( 2016 ) the fruits and vegetables of his parents’ truck garden, the borderland battles of weeds and flowers in his grandmother’s garden, even the endangered wild plants native to the home of this African American family, all of which provide a sense of connectedness that proves crucial here, too, to the successful career of a BIPOC natural scientist.

At the turn of the 21st century , creative writers experiment with plants to develop critical reflections on themselves as well. Adding a new dimension to his reputation as a poet and journalist, James Fenton harnesses his hobbyist experience with garden economy in A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed ( 2001 ), which organizes by garden plant varieties a thought experiment in what to grow if limited just to seed. Sumana Roy’s likewise formally experimental How I Became a Tree ( 2017 ) mixes memoir, literary history, spiritual philosophies, and botanical research to explore how trees inspire her to pursue more satisfying ways of being human. Poets Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s collaboratively authored Lace and Pyrite ( 2014 ) began as a commitment to weekly epistolary exchanges of poems over the course of a year, and the thematic centering on their respective obsessions with cultivating food and flowers is reflected in the title of an early excerpt, “Letters from Two Gardens” ( 2012 ). More recently Gay’s The Book of Delights , a genre-defying year in the life as told through short, daily reflections on something delightful, clarify further how an African American man finds much-needed pleasure in plants and plant writing amid the ongoing terrors highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement.

Experimental life writing about plants is an emerging genre with enormous potential for enriching the broader efforts of decolonizing and restorative justice projects as well. Jamaica Kincaid reflects in her experimental autobiography My Garden (Book): ( 1999 ) on how her gardening practices weave together various relationships with plants that are personal, historical, and transformative. Building on the family-gardening-memoir elements of My Brother ( 1997 ), a story ostensibly about her sibling’s AIDS-complicated death, Kincaid explains how she began gardening after already becoming a popularly and critically acclaimed writer of the black diaspora only to find among plants a different content and form for contesting the limits of authorial identity, for refusing the master narratives imposed on “me and all who look like me,” in Kincaid’s phrasing. 53 A project that began as a mixed-race adoptee’s search for her own roots, Catherine McKinley’s Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World ( 2011 ) more deliberately digs into the histories of peoples and plant species along with plant knowledges similarly to question how they became endangered or lost in the African diaspora, and why creatively adapting genres like autobiography are a necessary part of their recovery and restoration.

Discussion of the Literature

The tendency of literary scholars inspired by critical plant studies to highlight modern and contemporary literature suggests a tremendous opportunity to track plant thinking in older texts. The oldest examples of scholarship on plants and literature have emerged through classical and medieval studies of herbalism as a nexus of botanical, cultural, and medical knowledges. An early example that illustrates the importance of etymology to understanding ancient botany and medicine is Reginald Campbell Thompson’s The Assyrian Herbal: A Monograph on the Assyrian Vegetable Drugs . A century later, studies like Rebecca Armstrong’s Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine trace the porous boundaries of science and nature writing within the canon of classical studies by attending to their representations of “the contrast and intersection of rational and non-rational reactions to plants: the emotional and superstitious associations they evoke, together with scientific and pragmatic understandings of their properties.” 54 Attending not only to how texts were originally produced but also their subsequent disseminations, preservations, and sometimes distortions clarifies further the relevance of the history of plant writing to literary studies. Focused on a case in which “a once vital medical text was transformed into a literary curiosity,” Anne Van Arsdall’s Medieval Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine uses translation history to clarify the adaptation of ancient Roman knowledge to British medieval contexts, resulting in immediate enrichments, yet also eventual diminutions, of these knowledges across Europe and the Americas. 55

Widening scholarly focus beyond Euro-American examples is a persistent challenge largely taken up by BIPOC scholars and creative writers. More ordinary representations, for instance, of planting watermelon seeds help Gloria Anzaldúa to pinpoint her own mestiza status in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , at once celebrating her queer and Anglo-Latinx-Native American hybridity and expressing concern for its fragility deep in the home of her farming family, Hidalgo County in Texas, which despite great agricultural and cultural richness perennially ranks among the economically poorest parts of the US. 56 In Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , gardening serves as a metaphor for her own “womanist” aesthetic (“with every color flower represented”) that, quite apart from any anxiety of influence, fosters appreciation for continuities across famous black women artists and writers along with her own mother’s lone aesthetic outlet, her flower garden. 57 In contrast, the customary inattention to the literary histories marginalizing especially BIPOC women’s perspectives compounds the ableist offensiveness affixed to writers’ “plant blindness” and attempts to remedy it alike in literary criticism.

In Plants and Literature: Critical Plant Studies , Randy Laist attributes the dearth of “plant-based narratives” to a broader “defoliation of the cultural imagination” that follows from the withering “botanical vocabulary” of urban-industrialized peoples. 58 The predominant approach in literary criticism instead has favored what John Charles Ryan, in Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination , terms “botanical criticism,” a tradition of interpreting representations of vegetal life only to marginalize any sense of plants as having their own lifeworlds. As an alternative, Ryan outlines more verdant potentials in what he terms “phytocriticism,” which “assesses the extent to which vegetal dynamism figures into the shape of cultural productions,” and emphasizes the importance of botanical agency for ecocriticism. 59 Patterns across poems interrogating perceptions of plants as bodies and souls, as signifiers of settings and agency, and ultimately as inspiration for melancholia and even hope gain special interest amid ever-increasing anthropogenic extinctions of untold species of flora along with the fauna dependent on them. However, Ryan’s application of his phytocritical approach exclusively to contemporary Anglophone poetry indicates that the question of “why now” may be easier to answer than “why look at literary plants in the first place.”

In the introduction to The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature , Ryan together with Monica Gagliano and Patricía Viera calls for a more specifically “phytocentric” approach to literary criticism that “seriously would regard the lives of plants in relation to humankind in terms that would look beyond the purely symbolic or [objective-correlative] dimensions of the vegetal.” 60 However inadvertently, the handful of examples discussed in their volume’s “Literature” section indicate that such writing emerges sporadically, and only in post- 1800 white people’s writing. Joela Jacobs and Isabel Kranz’s bilingual coedited special issue of Literatur für Leser charts a broader range of histories and cultural perspectives that enrich their central concept of “botanical poetics.” 61 Though quite differently, these collections raise concerns about how genre, period, and cultural preferences create more obstacles than opportunities for studying plants and literature.

An earlier volume inspired by critical plant studies, Molly Mahood’s The Poet as Botanist samples a range of works by UK and US literary authors with formal scientific plant-related training and across the past 300 years. 62 Sharing Ryan’s focus on poetry, Mahood extends a literary-critical pattern set by Charlotte Otten’s Environ’d with Eternity: God, Poems, and Plants in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England . 63 Otten looks back still further to canonical early modern writers to trace how languages of flowers more specifically infuse theology with herbalism in British literature. That all three monographs separate and elevate botanical poetry in English over any other type of literature begs questions about how other literary forms and cultural traditions support still more plant-specific approaches, and for what purposes. 64

Without mentioning critical plant studies, several 21st-century volumes concentrate on Linnaean-influenced writers who muddy the science-literature divide and highlight linkages of experimental botanical writing and feminist critique. Elaine Miller takes a philosophical approach to Goethe’s poetry in The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine , making the case that it culminates in philosopher Luce Irigaray’s efflorescent interpretive writing practice, exemplifying “plant-like reading.” 65 Literary writers also find in plants inspiration to challenge the authority of analytic and experimental modes of inquiry in science, as again George’s Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830 likewise circles back to Erasmus Darwin in order to elaborate. Noting how the translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady ( 1785 ) was already “a surprise bestseller in England,” George explains how Darwin’s The Botanic Garden also inspired Wollstonecraft’s defense of botany against prudish reactions to Linnaean theories in her Vindication of the Rights of Women ( 1792 ), which immediately sparked numerous botanically themed satires. 66 Among the more lasting effects of the popular introduction of the Linnaean sexual system to the United Kingdom was the restriction of women’s access to botanical knowledges in favor of floriography—using flowers to send coded messages—which continues to be idealized through Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s bestselling 2011 chick-lit novel The Language of Flowers , published with a companion flower dictionary by Mandy Kirkby. 67 On the plus side, according to George, The Botanic Garden also led immediately to the innovation of “a new genre of women’s writing: the botanical poem with scientific notes.” 68 While most flowery-titled fictions today are nonbotanical romances, poet Molly Peacock’s experimental auto/biography The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 , which circles around her own fascination with 18th-century artist Mary Delaney’s massive, late-life production of hundreds of botanically correct, mixed-media collage representations of flowers (today housed as the Flora Delanica collection in the British Museum), provides yet another example of how women writers continue making formal innovations while directly struggling with these histories. 69

An enduring figure of the sublime, the blaue blume or “blue flower” introduced in Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg)’s unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen emerges in literary studies as the central symbol of German Romanticism. 70 But cross-cultural readings of the Romantic period further trouble a coherent plant politics in literature and literary criticism, whether ecocritical, feminist, or otherwise. Theresa Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture compares literary, scientific, philosophical, and visual art texts from the United Kingdom and its colonies in India and the Caribbean in order to highlight how Romantic plant representations undermine hierarchical thinking, throwing anthropocentric certainties into turmoil. Considering the highly variable spellings and wordings of common names for the same plant species in John Clare’s poetry, for instance, Kelley finds evidence of no eco-warrior but rather “a poet whose poetics of place, and especially of plants,” reacted against the doubled assault on place-based knowledge and language that was posed by Linnaeus’s systematization of standard plant names. 71 Her chapter on women’s plant writing of the period includes examples echoing Darwin, debating Goethe, and—notably in public disagreements between Wollstonecraft and similarly prominent, radical writer Anna Barbauld—conflicting with each other in their uncertain challenges to poisonous plantlike characterizations of femininity. Kelley’s approach complements earlier single-author studies that chart changing attitudes toward and interpretations of the significance of plants within the period, for instance, within John Keats’s oeuvre toward embracing floral imagery in ways that complicate received notions of sex and desire. 72

Intriguingly, a broader survey that cuts across cultures and periods further problematizes attempts to position literary writing as simply popularizing scientific or ethical understandings of plant life. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari’s Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction explicitly rejects Marder’s plant ethics as an imposition of human onto vegetal concerns, one that risks obscuring the important insight to which literary writing gives voice: how little we matter from plants’ perspectives. Charting convergences of botanical facts and fictions from the Enlightenment to the present, they make the case that select examples from literature, science, philosophy, and film constitute a minor tradition of “radical botany, in which plants are not just objects of manipulation but participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures.” 73 Compelled by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous injunction to “follow the plants”—and consequently to model not only treelike hierarchies but also tuberlike “rhizomatic” or lateral structures—Meeker and Szabari are more openly hostile to ecocritical traditions that posit plants at best as handmaidens to Romanticist visions of nature as a mirror to the human mind, as well as to animal studies, which they see as perpetuating anthropocentric bias. 74 Meeker and Szabari instead locate the origins of radical botany in the writing of 17th-century French libertins érudits (libertine scholars). Fanciful philosophical fictions by Cyrano de Bergerac and botanical writings of contemporary Guy de La Brosse (most famous today for having created the royal medicinal herb garden that became Paris’s Jardin des Plantes ) tease out a common theme of representing plants as percipient and libidinal that cuts across French science fact and fiction at the outset and connects a broad range of subsequent Euro-American literary developments.

If, as Meeker and Szabari assert, “plants draw us in (in their strangeness) and exceed our social and ecological categories” only to “undo us as individuals and as part of an ecosystem,” then it seems necessary to ask: for whom are we writing how plant being becomes radicalized? 75

Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas marks a frenzied era of plant movement around the globe as well as scientific knowledges and the development of systems to classify them, but less attention has been paid to how these developments also involve particular patterns in the representation of plant life, significantly including the deliberate curation of ignorance. 76 Reflecting on the same 400-years-and-more history—only foregrounding the colonial and postcolonial legacies of the enforced movements, renamings, erasures, and other violations of people alongside plants—Kincaid’s My Garden (Book): raises the question, what are nonwhite authors supposed to do with a story like this? An intriguing answer emerges through plant forms like Sargasso weed, a kind of seaweed that uniquely travels the routes and writings of the Black Atlantic as well as like much sea vegetation conceptually confounds tree, rhizome, and other land-based structures. 77 The disciplinary confusion and genre-melding aspects of botanical writing indicate that radicalizing literary forms along with poetics is part of an answer that remains much in need of further development.

Links to Digital Materials

• Botanical Speculations .
• Critical Plant Studies .
• Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network .
• Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture .

Further Reading

• Aloi, Giovanni , ed. Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2019.
• Armstrong, Rebecca . Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Butcher, Daisy , ed. Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic . London: British Library, 2019.
• Gagliano, Monica , John C. Ryan , and Patrícia Vieira , eds. The Language of Plants: Philosophy, Science, Literature . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
• George, Sam . Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant . Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007.
• Keetley, Dawn , and Angela Tenga , eds. Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film . London: Brill, 2016.
• Kelley, Theresa . Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
• Kincaid, Jamaica . My Garden (Book) : . New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999.
• Laist, Randy , ed. Plants and Literature: Critical Plant Studies . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013.
• Mahood, Molly . The Poet as Botanist . Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2008.
• Marder, Michael . Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life . New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
• Meeker, Natania , and Antónia Szabari . Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction . New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
• Miller, Elaine . The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Otten, Charlotte . Environ’d with Eternity: God, Poems, and Plants in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England . Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1984.
• Parker, Elizabeth . The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination . London: Palgrave, 2020.
• Ryan, John C. Forest Family: Australian Culture, Art, and Trees . Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2018.
• Ryan, John C. Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination . New York: Routledge, 2018.
• Theis, Jeffrey . Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation . Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2009.
• Van Arsdall, Anne . Medieval Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine . New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Yates, Julian . Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

1. Lawrence Buell, quoted in John C. Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2018), 7 ; and Erin James, “What the Plant Says: Plant Narrators in the Ecosocial Imaginary,” in The Language of Plants: Philosophy, Science, Literature , ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 270.

2. Michael Marder, “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence,” Plant Signaling and Behavior 7, no. 11 (2012): 1365–1372.

3. Michael Marder, book series description, Critical Plant Studies .

4. Molly Mahood, The Poet as Botanist (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2008), 226–227 .

5. Matthew Battles, Tree (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 73; and Elaine Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), 11–12 .

6. Stephen T. Jackson, “Introduction: Humboldt, Ecology, and the Cosmos,” in Essay on the Geography of Plants , ed. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, trans. Sylvie Romanowski (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), viii; and Laura Søvsø Thomasen, “Showing and Telling: The Integrated Use of Literature and Images in the Works of Erasmus Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42, no. 3 (2017): 27–240.

7. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 36–37.

8. Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 156 .

9. Patrícia Vieira, “Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing,” Environmental Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2015): 208.

10. Vieira, “Phytographia,” 215. Vieira elaborates, “Plants endlessly repeat parts of themselves by producing multiple leaves, flowers and fruits, all sharing similar traits but also displaying minuscule differences. Vegetal life and inscription are thus eminently graphic and could be understood as the paradigmatic example of arche-writing.”

11. Vieira, “Phytographia,” 218. See also Vieira, “Phytofables: Tales of the Amazon,” Journal of Lusophone Studies 1, no. 2 (2016): 116–134.

12. See for instance the argument for the literary merits of 17th-century Dutch colonial naturalist writing like Rumfius (Georg Rumf)’s Amboinsch Kruid-boek ( Ambonese Herbal , 1741–1750) through comparison with US Romantic writers like Henry Thoreau in Eric Beekman, Troubled Pleasures: Dutch Colonial Literature from the East Indies, 1600–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

13. Joela Jacobs, “Phytopoetics: Upending the Passive Paradigm with Vegetal Violence and Eroticism,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 2 (2019): 1–18.

14. Priscilla Wald, “Botanophobia: Fear of Plants in the Atomic Age,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 24 (2013): 7–27. See also Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology,” Discourse 34, no. 1 (2012): 32–58.

15. Hsuan Keng, “Economic Plants of Ancient North China as Mentioned in Shih Ching ( Book of Poetry ),” Economic Botany 28, no. 4 (1974): 404–405.

16. Nathan Snaza, Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 15–16.

17. Dhananjay Dwivedi, “The Importance of Plants as Depicted in Puranas ,” Indian Journal of History of Science 52, no. 3 (2017): 251–274.

18. Shakespeare, Richard II , ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Yachnin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Sarah Crover, “Gardening, Stewardship and Worn-Out Metaphors: Richard II and Justin Trudeau,” Early Modern Culture 13, no. 1 (2018): 152.

19. Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe, “On a Bank of Rue: Or Material Ecofeminist Inquiry and the Garden of Richard II,” Shakespeare Studies 42 (2014): 43.

20. Dawn Keetley, “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; Or, Why Are Plants So Horrifying,” in Plant Horror: The Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film , ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (London: Palgrave, 2016), 1.

21. Whitney Anne Trettien, “Plant -> Animal -> Book: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits,” Postmedieval 3, no. 1 (2012): 97.

22. “The Upas Tree,” Scientific American 13, no. 47 (1858): 374.

23. Daisy Butcher, “Introduction,” in Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic , ed. Daisy Butcher (London: British Library, 2019), 1.

24. Edmund Spencer, “Wonderful Stories: The Man-Eating Tree,” New York World , April 26, 1874.

25. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (New York: Random House, 2011), 74. See also Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), which corrects modern misperceptions of this phenomenon in part through references to the works of contemporary poets and pamphleteers.

26. Keetley, “Introduction,” 4.

27. Matthew Hall, Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), 126. Hall points to Elias Lönnrot’s 1835 epic poem Kalevala , which is drawn from Karelian and Finnish folklore and mythology, as exemplifying “the most complete and interesting European accounts of plant personhood,” including trees that give voice to their own self-awareness, 129.

28. Donna Haraway, “Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Transforming with Earth Others,” in Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway , ed. Margaret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 141.

29. Miller, The Vegetative Soul , 5.

30. Kaori Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and British Empire (New York: Palgrave, 2020), 148.

31. Manuel Lina, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 6.

32. Han Kang, The Vegetarian , trans. Debora Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 2016), 181.

33. “The Direction of the Road” in Ursula Le Guin’s collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper and Row, 1974) is a rare short story for likewise being narrated from a tree’s perspective.

34. Solvejg Nitzke, “ Saxony’s Arboreal Curiosities, or: How to Root (Hi)Stories ,” Botanical Letters , last modified June 16, 2020.

35. Wendy Woodward, “Arboreal Being: Encounters with Trees in Recent Southern African Fiction,” Journal of Literary Studies 35, no. 4 (2019): 96.

36. Robert Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 17.

37. See Elizabeth Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2020) .

38. James Ignatius McNelis, “‘The Tree Took Me Up from the Ground and Carried Me Off’: A Source for Tolkien’s Ents in Ludvig Holberg’s Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground ,” Tolkien Studies 3 (2006): 153.

39. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Kwame Anthony Appiah,” in Africana: Arts and Letters; An A-to-Z Reference of Writers, Musicians, and Artists of the African American Experience (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 2005), 544.

40. Peter Mortensen, “‘A Coffee-Plantation Is a Thing That Gets Hold of You and Does Not Let You Go’: Plant-Writing in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa ,” Journal of Literary Studies 35, no. 4 (2019): 28–45. A generation later and from a child’s perspective, Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (1957) is more critical of British paternalism toward African peoples and the senseless slaughter of wild animals, but likewise fails to question the settler monopoly on coffee growing in the region.

41. Vin Nardizi, “Greener,” in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green , ed. Jeffrey Cohen (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 155.

42. Susan McHugh, “Flora, Not Fauna: GM Culture and Agriculture,” Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (2007): 25–54.

43. See Char Miller, “In the Sweat of Our Brow: Citizenship in American Practice during WWII; Victory Gardens,” Journal of American Culture 26, no. 3 (2003): 395–409.

44. Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xx–xxi.

45. Annie Proulx, Barkskins (New York: Scribner, 2016), 696.

46. Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 125.

47. Alicia Carroll “‘Leaves and Berries’: Agatha Christie and the Herbal Revival,” Green Letters 22, no. 1 (2018): 20–30. Carroll argues, “Reading to historicize plants, advocate for them, and locate their presence in literature, then, may uncover debates long forgotten and reveal the extent to which stereotypes like the female poisoner and toxic plants conceal a hidden history of the pains—and pleasures—of ecological interdependence.”

48. Deidre Lynch, “‘Young Ladies Are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism,” ELH (English Literary History) 77, no. 3 (2010): 689–729.

49. Catherine Harwood, Potted History: The Story of Plants in the Home (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007), 123.

50. Oscar Wilde, Two Society Comedies: A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, ed. Ian Small and Russell Jackson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 253.

51. Susan McHugh, “Houseplants as Fictional Subjects,” in Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art , ed. Giovanni Aloi (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 191–194.

52. Judith Farr with Louise Carter, The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.

53. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book): (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999), 153 , 166. Reading this book together with Kincaid’s likewise hybrid travel-garden-autobiographical volume Among Flowers (2005), Julietta Singh posits that the author/narrator’s overt self-contradictions is staging a productively fractured sense of postcolonial subjectivity, “a promise of stalling mastery” over plants and people alike in Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 161.

54. Reginald Campbell Thompson, The Assyrian Herbal: A Monograph on the Assyrian Vegetable Drugs (London: Luzac, 1924); and Rebecca Armstrong, Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 2–3 .

55. Anne Van Arsdall, Medieval Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2002), xiii .

56. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

57. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983).

58. Randy Laist, “Introduction,” in Plants and Literature: Critical Plant Studies , ed. Randy Laist (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 10.

59. Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry , 15.

60. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira, “Introduction,” The Language of Plants: Philosophy, Science, Literature , ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xi.

61. Joela Jacobs and Isabel Kranz, eds., Das Literarische Leben der Pflanzen: Poetiken des Botanischen , special issue, Literatur für Leser 40, no. 2 (2017): 85–90.

62. Mahood, Poet as Botanist .

63. Charlotte Otten, Environ’d with Eternity: God, Poems, and Plants in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1984) .

64. Recently Ryan himself pursues the question of “what Latin American literature scholar Stephen F. White has described [as] ‘ethnobotanical poetry’ [or] . . . that which narrativises cultural knowledge of plants” in Ed. John Charles Ryan, “ Editorial: Plant Poetics ,” Plant Poetics , special issue, Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics 7, no. 1 (2020).

65. Miller, The Vegetative Soul , 183.

66. Sam George, Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 6 .

67. Isabel Kranz, “The Language of Flowers in Popular Culture and Botany,” in The Language of Plants: Philosophy, Science, Literature , ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 193; and Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers (New York: Ballantine Books, 2011).

68. George, Botany, Sexuality , 107.

69. Isabel Kranz, “Slowly Unfolding: Molly Peacock Reads Mary Delaney’s Flowers,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 50 (2020): 22; and Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).

70. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1802).

71. Theresa Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 14 .

72. Alan Bewell, “Keats’s Realm of Flora,” Studies in Romanticism 31, no. 1 (1992): 71.

73. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 2 .

74. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 11.

75. Meeker and Szabari, Radical Botany , 201.

76. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire , 4.

77. Aaron Pinnix, “Sargassum in the Black Atlantic: Entanglement and the Abyss in Bearden, Walcott, and Philip,” Atlantic Studies 16, no. 4 (2019): 423.

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Essay on Medicinal Plants

Students are often asked to write an essay on Medicinal Plants in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Medicinal Plants

Introduction.

Medicinal plants are nature’s gift, providing remedies for various diseases. They’ve been used since ancient times for their healing properties.

Types of Medicinal Plants

There are many types of medicinal plants like Neem, Tulsi, Aloe vera, and Ginger. Each has unique benefits – Neem for skin, Tulsi for respiratory issues, etc.

Medicinal plants are important as they offer natural, side-effect free treatments. They’re also economically beneficial, providing income for farmers.

In conclusion, medicinal plants play a vital role in health care. It’s essential to preserve and understand them for future generations.

250 Words Essay on Medicinal Plants

Medicinal plants, also known as medicinal herbs, have been discovered and used in traditional medicine practices since prehistoric times. They form the backbone of traditional healing practices, providing the foundation for modern pharmaceuticals.

The Significance of Medicinal Plants

Plants synthesise hundreds of chemical compounds for functions including defence against insects, fungi, diseases, and herbivorous mammals. Many of these phytochemicals have beneficial effects on long-term health when consumed by humans, and can be used to effectively treat human diseases. At least 12,000 such compounds have been isolated so far; a number estimated to be less than 10% of the total.

Medicinal Plants in Modern Medicine

Modern medicine recognizes herbalism as a form of alternative medicine, as the practice of herbalism is not strictly based on evidence gathered using the scientific method. However, many modern medicines are directly or indirectly derived from medicinal plants. For example, aspirin was developed based on the healing properties of willow bark, which has been known for centuries.

Challenges and Future Prospects

Despite the immense potential, the use of medicinal plants is not without its challenges. Overharvesting and habitat loss threatens many medicinal plant species, and the lack of regulation and standardization raises concerns about the safety and efficacy of herbal drugs. However, with the growing interest in natural remedies and the advancement of scientific research methods, the future of medicinal plants looks promising.

In conclusion, medicinal plants play a critical role in health care. With sustainable use and further research, they could provide solutions to many of the health challenges facing humanity today.

500 Words Essay on Medicinal Plants

Introduction to medicinal plants.

Medicinal plants, also known as medicinal herbs, have been discovered and used in traditional medicine practices since prehistoric times. These plants produce a rich array of medicinal substances that can be used to treat a wide range of diseases. In the modern era, they continue to serve as the foundation for a large portion of pharmaceuticals.

Medicinal plants play a crucial role in health care, with about 80% of the world’s population relying on them for some part of primary healthcare. They are critical sources of drugs for allopathic medicine, ayurvedic, homeopathic, and folk medicines. Furthermore, they serve as raw materials for the extraction of active ingredients used in the synthesis of chemical drugs.

Examples and Uses of Medicinal Plants

There are countless examples of medicinal plants and their uses. For instance, the plant Digitalis purpurea, commonly known as foxglove, contains digoxin, a substance used to treat heart conditions. Salix alba, or white willow, is a source of salicylic acid, which is used to make aspirin. Curcuma longa, turmeric, is a potent anti-inflammatory and antioxidant. Cannabis sativa has been used for its psychoactive and medicinal properties, including pain relief.

Medicinal Plants and Biodiversity

The use of medicinal plants promotes biodiversity. They form an integral part of the ecosystem, contributing to its health and productivity. The cultivation and sustainable harvesting of medicinal plants can help conserve biodiversity while providing economic benefits. However, the overexploitation of these plants from the wild threatens their survival and the biodiversity they support.

Despite their importance, medicinal plants face several challenges. Habitat destruction, overharvesting, and climate change threaten their survival. Additionally, the lack of standardization and quality control in the use of medicinal plants raises concerns about their efficacy and safety.

The future of medicinal plants, however, looks promising. Advances in biotechnology, such as plant tissue culture and genetic engineering, can help conserve and enhance the production of medicinal plants. Furthermore, integrating traditional knowledge with modern scientific methods can lead to the discovery of new medicines.

Medicinal plants offer a treasure trove of potential for new drug discovery and health care. Their importance extends beyond their direct use in health care to their role in maintaining biodiversity and providing economic benefits. As we move forward, it is crucial to address the challenges they face and harness the opportunities they offer, ensuring their sustainable use and conservation for future generations.

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• Tree Plantation Essay

Essay on Tree Plantation

Tree planting is the process in which tree seedlings are transplanted generally for forestry, land reclamation, or landscaping purposes. Tree plantation is very necessary because trees provide oxygen to the environment and make the air quality better. If more trees are planted, then the world's environment will become a safer place to live in. Tree plantation also reduces pollution, thus making the life of future generations secure. Through this tree plantation essay, one will have a clear overview of this topic.

Tree Plantation Essay in English

The tree is the key to a pollution-free environment for a long time because they are responsible for providing oxygen, improving the quality of air, climate amelioration, conserving water, soil preservation, and supporting wildlife. Due to all these reasons, tree plantation has become necessary in the present scenario as pollution is at a peak. Tree plantation is the only way to control pollution to some extent.

Afforestation in Tree Plantation

In silviculture, the tree plantation activity is known as afforestation or reforestation. This process involves planting seedlings in an area where the forest has been damaged by a fire, disease, or harvested or got destroyed by some human activity. As we know that pollution is increasing at an alarming rate, different countries are making various strategies to fight with this situation, and tree plantation is one of the most important strategies that is being adopted. Many reforestation companies have also been formed, which are responsible for planting trees in the deforested lands. Trees remove carbon dioxide and release oxygen to the air, thus making the air quality better for living beings. The knowledge gained through this paragraph shows the importance of tree plantation essays.

Benefits of Tree Plantation 

Plants have a complete cycle of taking in Carbon DiOxide (CO2) and giving out Oxygen. Co2. Thus planting more trees would help in reducing the amount of CO2 that is present in the atmosphere.

The more the number of trees are planted, the cleaner the air will get. Having enough oxygen and reduced CO2 would make the air clean and free from pollutants. 

Plants also have the ability to naturally filter dirty water. Thus planting more trees would not only result in cleaner air, but it would also make the water clean too. 

Temperature has been constantly fluctuating due to a decrease in the number of plants. Plants can maintain atmospheric temperatures. In hot regions, having more plants would help regulate the heat. 

Trees and plants are home to many wild creatures. A lot of birds build their nests on trees. Plants support wildlife. Planting more trees would not only help humans but it will support the whole biodiversity.

Planting trees makes the environment immediately more beautiful. Trees help prevent soil erosion. They also absorb different pollutants and thus make the air-water and earth cleaner.  

Deforestation

Deforestation can be described as voluntary cutting down forests. Trees are usually cut in large numbers to provide more space for humans. This is a direct result of the population explosion. People are looking for more land to build their homes or to make space for growing more crops. Forests are also being cut down to provide more wood that is used as a building material as well as fuel.      

Up until a century ago, a lot of lands were covered by forests. Around 2000 years ago, almost 80% of the planet was covered in forests. However today only 20%-30% of those forests exist. The rate of destruction of forests is more than the rate of its replenishment. This means that if we continue to destroy our environment at this rate, soon no tree will be left on earth. Therefore humans need to control the destructive nature and plant more trees.    

Disadvantages of Deforestation 

Cutting down forests does not only destroy the beauty of nature but is also very harmful to every living creature.

Humans and animals produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and inhale Oxygen. This oxygen is not present naturally on the Earth. Rather it is created by the plants through a process that is known as photosynthesis. Cutting down a large number of trees will reduce the amount of oxygen that is present on the planet. 

Forests are home to different types of living organisms. They support a lot of animals, insects, reptiles, and plants. Cutting down forests means the complete destruction of biodiversity. Many species of animals have already become extinct due to deforestation. The constant activity of deforestation will soon lead to an episode of mass extinction.

Trees not only support flora and fauna but are also responsible for maintaining the fertility of the soil. The roots of the plants hold the most fertile top layer of soil in place. When trees are cut, their roots are destroyed too. This leads to the problem of soil erosion. 

Cutting down forests is like bringing a permanent change that is almost irreversible in nature. A lot of trees take 20- 30 years to grow back. During this time the birds and animals that have been surviving due to the trees, become extinct.

Tree Plantation in Different Countries

After European colonization, the forests in Australia have suffered a lot and were heavily affected. The Government and many individuals have attempted to restore the forests by massive tree plantations. One of the non-profit organizations known as Greening Australia has planted a total of 1 million trees in different regions of Australia and has become one of the major tree planting companies in the globe. As per the tree plantation essay, you can imagine how important it is.

In Canada, tree plantation is carried out by private reforestation companies. These reforestation companies fight with one another for getting the contract from the logging companies. Planting of the tree is done according to the logging companies, and the planters should always maintain the qualities of trees as similar to the qualities mentioned in the contract.

Climate Change

Deforestation is one of the main reasons for the earth's climate change. As per some scientists, it is said that deforestation is responsible for around 18-25% of climate change. This is why some big organizations like the United Nations, World Bank, and other leading organizations are encouraging tree plantations worldwide. From this tree plantation essay, one can see the importance of tree plantation. The amount of carbon dioxide is increasing in the air, and that is because it is absorbing the UV rays of the sun and making the atmosphere warmer. Trees are the only way to overcome this problem because they absorb carbon dioxide from the air, thus making the air cleaner. From the tree plantation essay in English, it is proved that tree plantation is very much needed in today's time.

A Short Essay on Tree Plantation

In simpler words, tree plantation means to plant seedlings in the ground for growing more trees in an area. Tree plantation is very much required in countries where deforestation has increased a lot. With tree plantation, one can restrict the problems that may arise due to deforestation. One of the major problems of deforestation, which is pollution, can be reduced to some extent through the increased rate of tree plantation. In this short paragraph on tree plantation, it is cleared that tree plantation is very important.According to a tree plantation paragraph for Class 10, it is said that a reduced rate of tree plantation on heavy deforestation areas can cause climate change because deforestation increases the level of carbon dioxide, and without the required amount of tree, it is difficult to remove it from the air.Through this short essay on tree plantation, one can get some idea of what are the true requirements of tree plantation in today’s time and why it is so important for the world.

With this tree plantation essay, it is clear that tree plantation is the key to save the earth from pollution. This is why many countries have now started to concentrate on increasing the rate of tree plantation to make the earth a safer place to live for the future generation. One may have learned all this in tree plantation in school essays. Every country should aim to increase afforestation rather than deforestation. Tree planting is cost-effective, thus making it simpler to achieve the goal of making the earth a safer place by making it free from pollution. The effects of climate change can also be controlled by increasing the rate of tree plantation.

FAQs on Tree Plantation Essay

1. Which Trees Produce More Oxygen?

As we all know that the oxygen is decreasing in the air, and the carbon dioxide level is increasing at an alarming rate. Therefore we need to plant trees that can extract more oxygen into the air, and such trees are Douglas-fir, spruce, true fir, beech, and maple. These trees are capable of cleansing the air by giving more oxygen to the air.

2. What is the Importance of Tree Plantation?

The tree is the key to making the environment a safer place to live in, and they do that by providing oxygen into the air, improving the air quality, climate amelioration, water conservation, soil preservation, and supporting the wildlife of the earth. This is why tree plantation is important in today's world.

3. What is Climate Change?

Climate change can be described as the unnatural shifts that have taken place in the weather of any region. For example, areas that have never witnessed a snowfall have been facing the problem of snow blizzards. The inexplicable changes and spikes in the temperature of a region can be called climate change. Climate change has taken place due to deforestation and high carbon emissions while burning fossil fuels.

4. How can Tree plantations help manage the problem of Climate Change?

Plants absorb carbon. Planting more trees can help the planet by solving the problem of climate change. The carbon emitted due to fossil fuels will be used by plants during photosynthesis. The problem of constant rise in temperature can be solved by afforestation. Apart from this having more trees will also help in making the environment clean and free from toxins. Planting trees will help solve the issue of climate change. 

5.   What is deforestation?

Deforestation has been described as the deliberate act of cutting down more forests. Throughout history, humans have been clearing forests to make space for living and cultivating food. At the beginning of civilization, it was not extremely harmful. But today very little area is left that is covered by forests. Cutting down trees destroys and disrupts the whole life of that area. This is because a lot of other creatures are dependent on trees for their survival. 

English that goes straight to the heart

Short Essay Writing

An essay is a piece of writing that revolves around a particular theme and contains the academic opinions of the person writing it. To write an essay you need an Introduction, a Body (Supporting Paragraphs), and a Conclusion.

A basic essay mainly consists of three parts: Introduction , Body , and Conclusion . The following parts will help you write a good essay.

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Introduction

It constitutes the opening paragraph of the essay.

• It helps the reader get oriented with the topic.
• It states the purpose of the essay.
• It captures the interest of the reader.
• It presents the general idea of the essay.
• It often ends with the thesis or the main idea of the essay.

Body (Supporting Paragraphs)

They constitute the supporting sentences and ideas.

• They provide the reader with additional details about the main idea.
• They support the thesis of the writer.
• There is no fixed number of supporting paragraphs.
• Ideally, every supporting paragraph should contain a different idea.

It constitutes the ending paragraph(s) of the essay.

• It ties up loose ends of the paragraph.
• It helps in reiterating or highlighting the main idea.
• It summarises all the arguments.
• It brings the essay to a logical close.
• It never ends in detail.

Short Essay Writing Examples

Short essay writing #1, short essay writing on my family (250+ words).

Family is the place where you learn your first lesson in life. Your family members are the only assets that will remain with you forever. Whatever the circumstances, family members are always there for each other to support us. Good values and good morals are always taught in a family.

In the family, we are prepared to respect our elders and love younger ones. We learn lessons consistently from our family, about honesty, dependability, kindness and so on. Although I am a student in my final year, my family always treats me like a child but always provides us with a sensation of so much love and care. My family is the best family for me. I live in a nuclear family of four members.

My father is a teacher. He is the man who heads and leads our family. My mother is a housewife as well as a beautician. She is a lovely woman. My mother is everything to me. She is the one who understands me best and most closely. My grandmother is the cutest person of all.

I love my family because they are the jewels of my life. They work hard so that we can get anything we desire makes me love and respect my parents considerably more. We play games every night and discuss various topics to spend quality time together. I give deep respect and pay the highest regard to my family not just because they are my family, but for their unmatched and incredible sacrifices for me.

Short Essay Writing #2

Short essay writing on christmas (250 words).

Christmas is one of the most famous and light-hearted festivals which is celebrated across the world by billions of people. People of the Christian religion celebrate Christmas to remember the great works of Jesus Christ. 25th December is celebrated as Christmas Day across the world. Christians celebrate Christmas Day as the birth anniversary of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ of Bethlehem was a spiritual leader and prophet whose teachings structure the premise of their religion.

Christmas Day is celebrated every year with great joy, happiness and enthusiasm. Everyone whether they are poor or rich gets together and partakes in this celebration with lots of activities. On this day people decorate their houses with candles, lights, balloons etc. People decorate Christmas trees on this day in their homes or a public square. They decorate Christmas trees with small electric lights of various colours, gift items, balloons, flowers, and other materials. After that, the Christmas tree looks very appealing and wonderful.

People follow popular customs including exchanging gifts, decorating Christmas trees, attending church, sharing meals with family and friends and, obviously, trusting that Santa Claus will arrive. Children eagerly wait for Christmas day very anxiously as they get lots of beautiful gifts and chocolates. In most cases, the fat person in the family dressed up as Santa Clause with a bell in his hand which attract kids and they get lots of beautiful gifts and chocolates from Santa Clause. 25th December, Christmas Day, has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1870.

Short Essay Writing #3

Short essay writing on health is wealth (250+ words).

The greatest wealth is our own health. A healthy body can earn great wealth but, a wealthy person cannot earn great health. We live in a fast-moving world where individuals have no time for themselves. Most part of their life withers away in search of materialistic wealth in order to outshine others but, along the way, they lose their health.

Recent studies have shown that the increased stress of the present speedy life is leading to various medical conditions. Major among those are heart and neurological problems. Good health assists an individual to keep a positive attitude toward work and life in general. Wealth matters, but, is not as important as health.

Spending lots of money on junk food in five-star hotels or on other entertainment sources like watching films for a day and so on has no advantages other than self-satisfaction. Being physically and mentally healthy helps an individual to be socially and financially healthy as well. A healthy person can earn lots of money however an unhealthy person cannot because of a lack of motivation, interest, and concentration level.

Money is the source to carry on with a healthy life however good health is the source of living a happy and peaceful life. So, everyone should take many precautions in maintaining good health. Everyone should be away from bad habits and unhealthy lifestyles. Being healthy isn’t only the condition of being free of disease, ailment, or injury but also being happy physically, mentally, socially, intellectually, and financially. Good health is an actual necessity of happy life and the greatest gift from nature.

Short Essay Writing #4

Short essay writing on balanced diet (250+ words).

A diet that contains all kinds of necessary ingredients in almost the required quantity is called the “Balanced Diet”. A Balanced diet is one that helps to maintain or improve overall health. We should consume a balanced diet consisting of essential nutrition: liquids, adequate proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and calories. We must eat fresh fruits, salad, green leafy vegetables, milk, egg, yoghurt, etc. on time in order to maintain a healthy body.

Among the minerals, we require chiefly iron, calcium, sodium, potassium, and small quantities of iodine, copper, etc. They are found in green vegetables and most fruits, Vitamins have a number of kinds like A, B, C, D, etc. Vitamin A is found in fish oil, butter, carrot, papaya, etc., and Vitamin B is found in green leafy vegetables, wheat grain, etc. Vitamin C is found in green chilli, green vegetables, amla, lemon, and citric fruits. Vitamin D is found in the first oil, butter, and rays of the sun. We also need Vitamins E and K for our health. Milk is perhaps the only single item that can be called a balanced diet in itself.

Animal protein is found in meats, poultry, and fish. The white of an egg also contains protein. Another kind of protein is found in milk (casein), cheese, curd, pulses, soybean, dry fruits, etc. Fat is found in butter, pork, coconut, all edible oils, cod liver oil, the yolk of an egg, etc. We should drink more water at least 7-8 glasses of water. A healthy body also needs some daily physical activities, proper rest and sleep neatness, a healthy environment, fresh air, and water, personal hygiene, etc.

Short Essay Writing #5

Short essay writing on science and technology (250+ words).

In a fast-changing world, the fate of the country can be moulded through our ability to harness modern science and technology, which is a road to boost the development programs of the country. Rapid technological advances have reduced the dependency on natural resources or the factors in proportion to it.

Man is performing precisely by machines with a regular improvement in his work because of quick technological changes by virtue of scientific advancement all around the world. We have accomplished desired scientific and technological advancement and have succeeded in boosting various important international activities like information and telecommunication, television, meteorological services, medical advancement, industrial development, nuclear research, Space Research Oceanographic Research, etc.

Over the years a strong science and technology infrastructure base has been established for giving modern shape to world industries. It covers a chain of laboratories, specialized centres, various academic and research institutes, training centres, and useful development programs, which continuously provide skill, technically trained manpower, and technological support to industries for better execution. Science has advanced a great deal in the field of medical care. New technology has given a compelling medical care framework at a reasonable cost. Medical research has been carried out, broadly on nutrition, tuberculosis, reproduction, child care, leprosy, drugs, communicable diseases, cholera, and malaria, which has an extremely certain result.

If we look at the global scenario, the modern world is moving exceptionally fast. There are rapid scientific and technological changes that are occurring in a steady progression. Our country, as a global competitor, in the race of becoming a world power, needs to accomplish more in the area of Science and Technology emphasizing it as its foremost national priority in order to accomplish its objective.

Short Essay Writing #6

Short essay writing on co-education (250+ words).

Co-education is a system of education in which boys and girls study together in a common school or college. Co-education was not prevalent in ancient times. It is a groundbreaking thought. Co-education is exceptionally practical. The number of schools required is less. The strength of the teaching staff is diminished. The government spends less money on infrastructure and laboratories. The balance of money so saved is spent on better maintenance of schools and colleges, which facilitates the students for better study.

The parents supported the case for adequate education for the children irrespective of their sex. The countrymen realized that the boys and girls have to move together and shoulder to shoulder in every walk of life in the free world. They started educating their children in co-educational institutions. That is the reason why the students of co-educational institutions do better in every walk of their life.

It is useful in producing a sensation of solidarity and a feeling of equivalent obligation among boys and girls. When young boys and girls come closer to each other, they take more care in understanding each other. That helps in creating a friendly atmosphere between the two. The boys and the girls partake in their joint exercises consistently in schools and universities.

If we want that our country ought to sparkle, we need to bring young boys and young girls together for making a power of working hands in the country, which can give a compelling reaction for greatness by accelerating the advancement in every one of the fields.

Also, Read Examples of Informative Essay

Short Essay Writing #7

Short essay writing on education (250 words).

There are two basic purposes behind education. The first is to free people from ignorance, superstition, bad habits, and many wrong ideas. Secondly, to provide the citizens of a country with some skill or special kind of knowledge that would enable them to earn a decent living. In a highly populated country like India education is a must for both the purposes mentioned. First, there must be a hundred per cent literacy if the so-called democracy that the constitution guarantees for its citizens is to have any true meaning.

Only educated citizens can utilize democratic rights usefully. But as the population of this country rises by leaps and bounds, mere knowledge for its own sake will not suffice. People, educated people, must learn to produce things that are in daily demand. We need more technicians, more carpenters, more well-informed farmers and cultivators, and more skilled workers of different categories who can increase the goods and services they demand which are constantly rising.

There should be close coordination between producers of necessary goods and educational planners. Turning out graduates from colleges and universities would not help things because such ordinary graduates are not employable in industries. Colleges, universities, and other seats of higher education must train young men and women who are able to show tangible results in the form of useful goods needed by society. Such education alone can exorcise the spectre of unemployment that is stalking the country today and is at the root of all its serious troubles.

Short Essay Writing #8

Short essay writing on save environment (250 words).

Environment means a healthy natural balance in the air, water, animals, plants, and other natural resources. The environment influences the existence and development of an organism. Pollution is the process of creating the environment dirty by adding harmful substances thereto. Owing to indiscriminate industrialization man has created a polluted environment. He has continuously tampered with nature which led to a threat to the sustenance of mankind.

The constant more in the world population is the main reason for environmental pollution. More population means more industry. Factories release toxic gases into the air, and filthy poisonous waters from factories and mills For also released into the waters of rivers; trees are cut down for fuel and other commercial purposes, or for procuring land for building houses. This results in a fall in the supply of oxygen that the trees provide With the felling of trees animals and birds also lose their shelter and this destroys the balance in the ecology.

To prevent these hazards from endangering human, animal, and plant life measures should be taken before the situation goes out of control. More trees should be planted. Anti-pollution scientific methods should be devised, so that toxic gases and poisonous effluents are not released by factories and mills into the air and water respectively. Cutting down trees should be made punishable by law. Poaching and hunting of animals for monetary gain and recreation should also be stopped. Finally, from early life, people should be so educated that they become aware of the vital importance of a healthy, natural, and toxic-free environment.

Also, Read Top 10 Essay Examples

Short Essay Writing #9

Short essay writing on cleanliness (230+ words).

There is truth in the common saying: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Cleanliness is a great virtue. It makes a man healthy and happy. The healthy habit of cleanliness should be formed from childhood in our everyday routine. A clean environment keeps us free from pollution. Cleanliness comes out of a taste for decency.

Cleanliness is of two types—cleanliness of body and cleanliness of mind. Cleanliness of the body makes for physical health. Health is an impossibility without bodily cleanliness. The disease is the handmaid of dirt. The germs of disease breed and multiply in the dirt. Epidemic diseases like cholera and typhoid which often sweep over villages and towns and take a heavy toll on life are the result of dirty habits and the surroundings of the people.

Cleanliness of the mind is as necessary as that of the body for self-respect. No one loves and respects a man if he is not clean in mind-free from impure desires, and evil thoughts. Mental cleanliness makes for one’s success in any sphere of life. The effects of cleanliness are great. It contributes to the character of a noble personality not only with clean clothes but also with clean ideas, clean thoughts, and clean ways of life. In every walk of life, it is necessary to maintain cleanliness in body and mind as well as indoors and outdoors. Cleanliness is truly next to godliness. All should cultivate it.

Short Essay Writing #10

Short essay writing on water pollution (250+ words).

According to the World Health Organization, any foreign matter either natural or other sources which contaminates and pollutes the water or the water supply making it harmful to human and aquatic life is termed water pollution. Household detergents and wastes pollute water bodies. When detergents and fertilizers containing phosphates are discharged into water, it promotes the growth of algae. Drilling oil under the sea may prove dangerous for marine life.

Water pollution may severely affect human, plant, and animal life. When contaminated water is consumed, the pathogens enter the human body. It may cause various water-borne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, and jaundice. Metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium dissolved in water may cause several diseases if they enter the human body. When water contaminated with cadmium was consumed by the Japanese, they were affected by a disease called Itai-Itai.

Similarly, a disease known as Minamata affected the Japanese after they consumed fish that had a large concentration of mercury. When phosphorus and nitrates from fertilizers are disposed of in water bodies, they promote the growth of algae. The presence of algae in water bodies in a large number reduces the amount of dissolved oxygen in water resulting in the death of fish and other water organisms. Thermal pollution increases the temperature of the water which in turn reduces the level of oxygen in the water. This results in the death of many species of fish. Measures should be taken to prevent water pollution before the situation goes out of control. Anti-pollution scientific methods should be devised.

Short Essay Writing #11

Short essay writing on child labour (250+ words).

Child labour has been quite a problem down the ages. Child labour means the labour done by children below the age of eighteen. Employing little boys and girls not only saves money but also helps the employer avoid labour unrest. Young boys and girls can be paid lesser wages and they do not form unions to realize demands for higher pay.

The types of work children have to do are many and various. In tea stalls and small hotels, they clean the utensils, mop the floors and serve at the table. In garages, they wash the cars, buses, and lorries. The female children serve as maid-servants in various families. Though child labour is a cruel practice it saves many families from starvation. The income of the adult members of these families is not sufficient even for their hand-to-mouth living. If the children do not work to supplement their income, the families will have to starve. So simply banning the use of child labour one could not solve the problem.

In recent times the government of India has become aware of the evils of the system. But it can be hard to do away with it all of a sudden. Abolition of the employment of child labour must be preceded by a process of improving the economic condition of the families concerned. Proper methods should be adopted so that the children are educated and not sent to workplaces that destroy both the body and the soul of these unfortunate creatures.

Short Essay Writing #12

Short essay writing on my hobby (250 words).

A hobby is voluntary work done in leisure with pleasure. There are many fashionable hobbies such as stamp-collecting, coin-collecting, photography, etc. But my favourite hobby is gardening. I started it when I was only ten. I have a small plot of land beside our house. There I cultivate gardening. I spend one hour every day gardening. Back from the morning walk, I go to my garden with a spade and a waterful bucket. I dig up the soil, trim the plants, and water them. I also spray insecticides and apply fertilizers.

When I see the plants swaying in the wind, my heart leaps in joy. I experience heavenly pleasure as I see them grow day by day. I have chosen this hobby because it gives me not only joy but also enough physical exercise to keep my body fit.

I face some problems in cultivating gardening. Entellus often eat up flowers and destroy the plants, though I am at pains to scare them away. Gardening brings me both joy and health. Every afternoon I work for an hour in my garden and watch the buds come up and the branches nod in the breeze. Although a hobby is a source of pleasure and not of profit, my hobby combines the two. My mother looks upon it very kindly, as a part of my garden serves as a kitchen garden. A hobby is an index to a man’s character and I believe my hobby reflects my character.

Also, Read Academic Essay Examples

Short Essay Writing #13

Short essay writing on my ambition in life (200 words).

Ambition is a goal or objective to achieve in life. In order to succeed in life, one must have a goal. An aimless man is like a ship without a compass. So, I have to select an ambition in my life. Very soon I shall be a citizen of my country. I shall have some duties to society and my country. I must perform them. I think no country can prosper without education. So, my ambition in life is to spread education. Any noble work needs money.

So, after completing my graduation I shall join my father’s business. Business is the best source of earning money. I shall spend a large part of my profit on spreading education and treatment for the poor and sick villagers. I shall set it up. schools for children. I shall start night schools for the adults to make them literate. I shall set up a library. Books on various subjects will be issued without any subscription. I shall open training centres for young boys and girls to provide them with jobs. I do not know how far my ambition will be successful. But I shall try my best.

Short Essay Writing #14

Short essay writing on value of time (250 words).

There is a saying, “Time and tide wait for none. The value of time is very great. We can regain lost money and lost health. But lost time is gone forever. So, we should know the use of time. We should remember that we cannot recall the time that is gone. We can stop the clock but we cannot stop the time. And so we must make the best use of every moment. This knowledge and habit of proper use of time are the secrets of success.

Our life is short. But time passes swiftly. Our life is made of moments. So, to lose a moment is to waste a valuable part of life. By making the right use of the time we can do a lot. We should avail ourselves of every opportunity. If we do not know the use of time our life becomes miserable. We should know that a stitch in time saves nine. Idle time is said to be a thief of time.

If we idle away our time, our appointed work will suffer and success will be hard to achieve. Time lost is lost forever. We are born to do a lot of work. Great men realize it. They never lose a moment. Gandhiji always used to keep a watch to watch his time. He who performs his duties punctually prospers in life positively. What can be done today should not be put off for tomorrow. We should not say ‘later’, we should do ‘now’.

Short Essay Writing #15

Short essay writing on value of trees (250+ words).

Trees are of great importance in our everyday life. They provide us with thatch for huts, timber for buildings and furniture, firewood, food like fruits, honey, etc., and medicine. We are dependent on trees for our very existence on earth. They produce oxygen which keeps us alive. They also absorb carbon-di-oxide exhaled by us and thereby help to create a pollution-free atmosphere. Trees help to prevent the erosion of soil and floods.

Both the urban and rural people gain advantages from growing more trees. The former enjoys a pollution-free atmosphere and the latter gets fruits, fuel, goods of economic importance, and medicines. Road-side trees are planted to beautify the roads and purify the air. Trees supply fresh air to reduce pollution in urban areas and help in rural economic growth. It is important to note that 33% of the land is required as forests in any country to maintain ecological balance. Hence we must take utmost care to grow more trees and stop deforestation. Trees give men shelter and shade. They protect wildlife. Trees help men fight against environmental pollution.

So we all must grow more trees and stop deforestation. We must care for trees for our own sake. We should not forget that the great scientist Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose proved that trees are living beings. The festival, Vano-Mahotsav is observed every year during the rainy season. Thousands of saplings are planted on the occasion. More and more areas are brought under forest cover and people are taught “Plant trees and save a life.”

Short Essay Writing #16

Short essay writing on morning walk (250 words).

Morning walk and early rising go hand in hand. One who wants to go for a morning walk has to get up early. A morning walk is a healthy habit. It removes the physical lethargy caused by the night’s sleep, helps in the circulation of blood, and makes one healthy. It is good exercise after a long night’s rest and provides us with fresh oxygen from the cool morning air. It gives a good start to a man’s whole day’s work. He can finish a large amount of his work before others get out of bed. He need not hurry over any part of his work.

A morning walk enables a man to have closer contact with nature. He can see the calm, quiet and complete beauty of nature- the beauty he cannot see by day. A morning walk provides independent exercise. He need not go to the gymnasium for exercise. Morning walk, like early rising, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Even doctors advise their patients to have a morning walk daily, as a remedy for various types of physical ailments, especially diabetes. Moreover, a morning walk is certainly a good start for the whole day’s work. During our walk in the morning, we come into greater and closer contact with nature. A morning walk is advantageous as an independent exercise. If anyone wants to ensure proper care of his or her health, he or she can undertake a morning walk as it is very simple as well as beneficial.

Short Essay Writing #17

Short essay writing on science (250 words).

Science is a great boon to human civilization. All signs of Progress in civilization have been made possible by science. Science has made our life easy and comfortable. It has given us electric fans, and lights. fans cool us, lights remove darkness. Lift, washing machine, etc. save our labour. Car, train, bus, and aircraft have made our travel speedy and comfortable. The computer has taken the excess load off our brains. Science has given us life-saving medicine. Surgery can do something miraculous. Space flight is another wonder of science.

Thus through the gifts of science, the man who had once lived in the cave has now landed on the science of the moon is a blessing to us. But it is a curse at the same time. Science has given us speed but has taken away our emotions. It has made our machine. The introduction of the mobile phone has destroyed the art of letter writing. Science has made war more dreadful by inventing sophisticated weapons. Peace has become scarce. Yet there are some abuses of science. It has given us the frightful nuclear weapons that can destroy the whole world.

But who is responsible for making Science a curse? Certainly, it is the evil intention of a few scientists and malignant politicians. We can use fire for cooking our food or burning other’s houses. It is not the fault of fire, but of its users. Likewise, man is responsible for the uses and abuses of science. But science cannot be blamed for this.

Short Essay Writing #18

Short essay writing on noise pollution (250+ words).

Any unwanted loud sound which causes stress and irritation can be termed noise pollution. Of late, sound or noise pollution has adversely affected our normal life in a major way. It is chasing us at almost every step. In schools, colleges, offices, and even hospitals we have an explosion of deafening sound. The main sources of noise pollution are Means of transport, the Use of loudspeakers, the Industrial sector, and the Celebration of festivals and wedding ceremonies. We are almost deafened by the blaring mikes or the record players which are often played at full volume.

Secondly, we have noise pollution caused by various groups of people shouting out their slogans or impatient automobiles always honking their horns. During some social and religious festivals, crackers are burst indiscriminately. Noise pollution can have serious effects on human health. It may cause impairment of hearing and can cause sleep disruption. People who are frequently subjected to a high level of noise pollution may suffer from hypertension, depression, and panic attacks. It may lead to an abnormal increase in heartbeat and heart palpitation. It can also cause migraine headaches, nausea, and dizziness.

Some Measures to Minimise Noise Pollution are Prohibiting the blowing of horns, The use of loudspeakers should be banned, Airports should be located away from residential areas, and People should restrain themselves from lighting firecrackers. In recent times laws have been passed to take effective steps to control sound pollution. People must also be made aware of the dangers of noise pollution.

Short Essay Writing #19

Short essay writing on television (250+ words).

Television is one of the many wonders of modern science and technology. It was invented in England by the Scottish scientist J.N. Baird in 1928 and the British Broadcasting Corporation was the first to broadcast television images in 1929. Previously the radio helped us hear things from far and near and spread information and knowledge from one corner of the globe to another. But all this was done through sound only. But television combined visual images with sound.

Today we can watch games, shows, and song and dance programs from all corners of the world while sitting in our own homes. TV can be used for educating the masses, for bringing to us the latest pieces of information audio-visually, and can provide us with all kinds of entertainment even in colour.

But as in all things, too much televiewing may prove harmful. TV provides visual images but the televiewer has a limited choice of programs. He has to adjust himself to the scheduled programs of a particular television channel. But as for the book, a reader’s imagination plays a vital role. He can freely read a book which is a personal activity and it cannot be shared with others at the same time. In many cases, the habit of watching TV has an adverse effect on the study habits of the young. When we read books, we have to use our intelligence and imagination. But in most cases, TV watching is a passive thing. It may dull our imagination and intelligence.

Short Essay Writing #20

Short essay on newspaper (250+ words).

The Newspaper is the mirror of the world. Modern life cannot be imagined without newspapers. A newspaper is a regular source of important news from home and abroad. It represents the current and living history of the world. Newspapers are of various kinds dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies, etc. The main function of a daily paper is to publish news of general interest while the others mostly contain literary pieces and articles on important topics.

Nowadays every newspaper has some special sections dealing with politics, everyday problems, off-beat news, business, sports, editorial page, feature pages, etc. So, the newspaper is one of the most powerful organs for the dissemination of news and views among the public. It plays a very important role in educating people and guiding them along the right path. If it wants to it can fight social evil successfully. A newspaper can also do us much harm. Used wrongly it can create hatred and enmity between man and man, section and section, nation and nation.

Sometimes it publishes baseless reports or stories to create deliberately confusion in the minds of gullible people. A newspaper is as powerful as any potent weapon. It can be used for both good and evil. Much depends on the outlook and motive of the people who are at the helm of the paper. It shapes Public opinion. It can mislead people with false and fabricated news. The newspaper should give impartial and correct pieces of information. It must not feed false news.

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There’s an Explosion of Plastic Waste. Big Companies Say ‘We’ve Got This.’

Big brands like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé say a new generation of plants will help them meet environmental goals, but the technology is struggling to deliver.

Recycled polypropylene pellets at a PureCycle Technologies plant in Ironton, Ohio. Credit... Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

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By Hiroko Tabuchi

• Published April 5, 2024 Updated April 8, 2024

By 2025, Nestle promises not to use any plastic in its products that isn’t recyclable. By that same year, L’Oreal says all of its packaging will be “refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable.”

And by 2030, Procter & Gamble pledges that it will halve its use of virgin plastic resin made from petroleum.

To get there, these companies and others are promoting a new generation of recycling plants, called “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, that promise to recycle many more products than can be recycled today.

So far, advanced recycling is struggling to deliver on its promise. Nevertheless, the new technology is being hailed by the plastics industry as a solution to an exploding global waste problem.

The traditional approach to recycling is to simply grind up and melt plastic waste. The new, advanced-recycling operators say they can break down the plastic much further, into more basic molecular building blocks, and transform it into new plastic.

PureCycle Technologies, a company that features prominently in Nestlé, L’Oréal, and Procter & Gamble’s plastics commitments, runs one such facility, a $500 million plant in Ironton, Ohio. The plant was originally to start operating in 2020 , with the capacity to process as much as 182 tons of discarded polypropylene, a hard-to-recycle plastic used widely in single-use cups, yogurt tubs, coffee pods and clothing fibers, every day.

But PureCycle’s recent months have instead been filled with setbacks: technical issues at the plant, shareholder lawsuits, questions over the technology and a startling report from contrarian investors who make money when a stock price falls. They said that they had flown a drone over the facility that showed that the plant was far from being able to make much new plastic.

PureCycle, based in Orlando, Fla., said it remained on track. “We’re ramping up production,” its chief executive, Dustin Olson, said during a recent tour of the plant, a constellation of pipes, storage tanks and cooling towers in Ironton, near the Ohio River. “We believe in this technology. We’ve seen it work,” he said. “We’re making leaps and bounds.”

Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and L’Oréal have also expressed confidence in PureCycle. L’Oréal said PureCycle was one of many partners developing a range of recycling technologies. P.&G. said it hoped to use the recycled plastic for “numerous packaging applications as they scale up production.” Nestlé didn’t respond to requests for comment, but has said it is collaborating with PureCycle on “groundbreaking recycling technologies.”

PureCycle’s woes are emblematic of broad trouble faced by a new generation of recycling plants that have struggled to keep up with the growing tide of global plastic production, which scientists say could almost quadruple by midcentury .

A chemical-recycling facility in Tigard, Ore., a joint venture between Agilyx and Americas Styrenics, is in the process of shutting down after millions of dollars in losses. A plant in Ashley, Ind., that had aimed to recycle 100,000 tons of plastic a year by 2021 had processed only 2,000 tons in total as of late 2023, after fires, oil spills and worker safety complaints.

At the same time, many of the new generation of recycling facilities are turning plastic into fuel, something the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t consider to be recycling, though industry groups say some of that fuel can be turned into new plastic .

Overall, the advanced recycling plants are struggling to make a dent in the roughly 36 million tons of plastic Americans discard each year, which is more than any other country. Even if the 10 remaining chemical-recycling plants in America were to operate at full capacity, they would together process some 456,000 tons of plastic waste, according to a recent tally by Beyond Plastics , a nonprofit group that advocates stricter controls on plastics production. That’s perhaps enough to raise the plastic recycling rate — which has languished below 10 percent for decades — by a single percentage point.

For households, that has meant that much of the plastic they put out for recycling doesn’t get recycled at all, but ends up in landfills. Figuring out which plastics are recyclable and which aren’t has turned into, essentially, a guessing game . That confusion has led to a stream of non-recyclable trash contaminating the recycling process, gumming up the system.

“The industry is trying to say they have a solution,” said Terrence J. Collins, a professor of chemistry and sustainability science at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s a non-solution.”

‘Molecular washing machine’

It was a long-awaited day last June at PureCycle’s Ironton facility: The company had just produced its first batch of what it describes as “ultra-pure” recycled polypropylene pellets.

That milestone came several years late and with more than $350 million in cost overruns. Still, the company appeared to have finally made it. “Nobody else can do this,” Jeff Kramer, the plant manager, told a local news crew .

PureCycle had done it by licensing a game-changing method — developed by Procter & Gamble researchers in the mid-2010s, but unproven at scale — that uses solvent to dissolve and purify the plastic to make it new again. “It’s like a molecular washing machine,” Mr. Olson said.

There’s a reason Procter & Gamble, Nestlé and L’Oréal, some of the world’s biggest users of plastic, are excited about the technology. Many of their products are made from polypropylene, a plastic that they transform into a plethora of products using dyes and fillers. P.&G. has said it uses more polypropylene than any other plastic, more than a half-million tons a year.

But those additives make recycling polypropylene more difficult.

The E.P.A. estimates that 2.7 percent of polypropylene packaging is reprocessed. But PureCycle was promising to take any polypropylene — disposable beer cups, car bumpers, even campaign signs — and remove the colors, odors, and contaminants to transform it into new plastic.

Soon after the June milestone, trouble hit.

On Sept. 13, PureCycle disclosed that its plant had suffered a power failure the previous month that had halted operations and caused a vital seal to fail. That meant the company would be unable to meet key milestones, it told lenders.

Then in November, Bleecker Street Research — a New York-based short-seller, an investment strategy that involves betting that a company’s stock price will fall — published a report asserting that the white pellets that had rolled off PureCycle’s line in June weren’t recycled from plastic waste. The short-sellers instead claimed that the company had simply run virgin polypropylene through the system as part of a demonstration run.

Mr. Olson said PureCycle hadn’t used consumer waste in the June 2023 run, but it hadn’t used virgin plastic, either. Instead it had used scrap known as “post industrial,” which is what’s left over from the manufacturing process and would otherwise go to a landfill, he said.

Bleecker Street also said it had flown heat-sensing drones over the facility and said it found few signs of commercial-scale activity. The firm also raised questions about the solvent PureCycle was using to break down the plastic, calling it “a nightmare concoction” that was difficult to manage.

PureCycle is now being sued by other investors who accuse the company of making false statements and misleading investors about its setbacks.

Mr. Olson declined to describe the solvent. Regulatory filings reviewed by The New York Times indicate that it is butane, a highly flammable gas, stored under pressure. The company’s filing described the risks of explosion, citing a “worst case scenario” that could cause second-degree burns a half-mile away, and said that to mitigate the risk the plant was equipped with sprinklers, gas detectors and alarms.

Chasing the ‘circular economy’

It isn’t unusual, of course, for any new technology or facility to experience hiccups. The plastics industry says these projects, once they get going, will bring the world closer to a “circular” economy, where things are reused again and again.

Plastics-industry lobbying groups are promoting chemical recycling. At a hearing in New York late last year, industry lobbyists pointed to the promise of advanced recycling in opposing a packaging-reduction bill that would eventually mandate a 50 percent reduction in plastic packaging. And at negotiations for a global plastics treaty , lobby groups are urging nations to consider expanding chemical recycling instead of taking steps like restricting plastic production or banning plastic bags.

A spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics makers as well as oil and gas companies that produce the building blocks of plastic, said that chemical recycling potentially “complements mechanical recycling, taking the harder-to-recycle plastics that mechanical often cannot.”

Environmental groups say the companies are using a timeworn strategy of promoting recycling as a way to justify selling more plastic, even though the new recycling technology isn’t ready for prime time. Meanwhile, they say, plastic waste chokes rivers and streams, piles up in landfills or is exported .

“These large consumer brand companies, they’re out over their skis,” said Judith Enck, the president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional E.P.A. administrator. “Look behind the curtain, and these facilities aren’t operating at scale, and they aren’t environmentally sustainable,” she said.

The better solution, she said, would be, “We need to make less plastic.”

Touring the plant

Mr. Olson recently strolled through a cavernous warehouse at PureCycle’s Ironton site, built at a former Dow Chemical plant. Since January, he said, PureCycle has been processing mainly consumer plastic waste and has produced about 1.3 million pounds of recycled polypropylene, or about 1 percent of its annual production target.

“This is a bag that would hold dog food,” he said, pointing to a bale of woven plastic bags. “And these are fruit carts that you’d see in street markets. We can recycle all of that, which is pretty cool.”

The plant was dealing with a faulty valve discovered the day before, so no pellets were rolling off the line. Mr. Olson pulled out a cellphone to show a photo of a valve with a dark line ringing its interior. “It’s not supposed to look like that,” he said.

The company later sent video of Mr. Olson next to white pellets once again streaming out of its production line.

PureCycle says every kilogram of polypropylene it recycles emits about 1.54 kilograms of planet-warming carbon dioxide. That’s on par with a commonly used industry measure of emissions for virgin polypropylene. PureCycle said that it was improving on that measure.

Nestlé, L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble continue to say they’re optimistic about the technology. In November, Nestlé said it had invested in a British company that would more easily separate out polypropylene from other plastic waste.

It was “just one of the many steps we are taking on our journey to ensure our packaging doesn’t end up as waste,” the company said.

Hiroko Tabuchi covers the intersection of business and climate for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York. More about Hiroko Tabuchi

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“Buying Time,” a new series from The New York Times, looks at the risky ways  humans are starting to manipulate nature  to fight climate change.

Big brands like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé say a new generation of recycling plants will help them meet environmental goals, but the technology is struggling to deliver .

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Did you know the ♻ symbol doesn’t mean something is actually recyclable ? Read on about how we got here, and what can be done.

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The Psychology of Short-Form Content: Why We Love Bite-Sized Videos

Updated: April 10, 2024

Published: April 09, 2024

Let me tell you the most challenging part of my job. Often, I will delete TikTok and Instagram from my phone because I can't help but waste time endlessly scrolling through these apps, watching dozens of short-form videos in one sitting.

Then, like clockwork, I redownload these apps because I must write about them for work. Thus, the cycle of endless scrolling continues.

Sure, I could blame the nature of the job, but my endless scrolling stems from the fact that I love short-form videos.

And I'm not the only one. 73% of consumers prefer to watch short-form videos to learn about a product or service, and 56% of marketers reported that short-form video was the top trend they planned to invest in in 2024.

So, why are short-form videos so popular? Turns out there are a few reasons, one of which involved a bit of psychology. Let's get into it!

What are short-form videos?

Why are short-form videos so popular.

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Short-form videos are videos that are less than 60 seconds in duration. However, some marketers and content creators agree that short-form videos can be up to 3 minutes. But, if you want my opinion, I would stick to the 60-second rule.

I take this stance because attention spans are getting shorter, but we'll get into that later.

Anyway, short-form videos deliver information in a digestible, bite-size format so viewers can quickly watch and bookmark the content if they're on the go or watch it multiple times.

There are a few reasons short-form videos are more popular than ever among consumers and marketers, and I‘ll visit those in a bit. For now, I want to get into the psychology of it all—that’s why we're here, right? Walk with me.

Consumer Attention Spans are Shrinking

Science tells us that one of the crucial reasons we love short-form videos is that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist, recently wrote a book called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity , and she says her research indicates people's attention spans have been shrinking over the last 20 years.

Dr. Mark shared her findings on Speaking of Psychology , an American Psychological Association podcast.

Her findings came from a decades-long experiment she participated in, which was first conducted by shadowing participants and tracking their activities via stopwatches.

“We would record the start time and the stop time,” she said.

She explains, “So you're on a screen where you're working in a Word doc. As soon as you get to that screen, we click start time. As soon as they turned away and checked the email, we clicked stop time for the Word document and start time for the email.”

Over time, logging techniques became more sophisticated as technology advanced, and it only made the pattern of shrinking attention spans clearer.

“So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average,” Dr. Mark recalls during the interview. “Throughout the years, it became shorter. So around 2012, we found it to be 75 seconds.”

Dr. Mark says the number continued to dip as the years went on.

“And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds—and others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust,” she says.

And this trend of dwindling attention spans is affecting how we consume content. And I'm not just talking about social media videos — even television and film shots are getting more brief, according to Dr. Mark.

“They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length,” she says. “If you watch MTV music videos, they're much shorter. They're only a couple of seconds. So we've become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film.”

Dr. Mark explains during the interview that it‘s a chicken vs. egg situation — she’s unsure which came first or what's influencing the other.

However, the fact remains that we‘re becoming more accustomed to shorter bursts of content, and it’s bleeding into the kind of content we consume and what's being created.

Studies found that most consumers will only watch an entire video if it's less than 60 seconds long . Then you have apps like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels that push short-form videos to users in an infinite scroll format.

Furthermore, our 2024 Marketing Trends Report found that almost a third of marketing professionals say their company will leverage short-form video content in 2024, and 53% said they'll boost their investment in the content type this year.

This makes sense since most marketers in our survey say short-form video content yielded them the highest ROI last year.

In case you're curious, here are a couple more reasons why many of us love short-form videos.

1. They are cost-effective and easier to create than long-form videos.

With long-form videos, marketers and creators must work extra hard to keep their audience engaged. That means strengthening the content with dynamic shots, mood-setting music, and a long but compelling script.

All that takes more time, effort, and (most importantly) money.

Short-form videos are more to the point and often require fewer frills to be effective.

For example, language learning platform Duo Lingo's TikTok account has over 10.8 million followers and is one of the most well-known accounts on the app due to its short, funny, and slightly unhinged videos.

Its most popular video has 57.7 million views and is super simple in terms of execution.

It shows a plushy of the Duo Lingo owl getting tossed down the stairs at the company's office, sitting outside on a rainy day, and getting soaked in a shower.

The caption of the video is “When you ignore my notifications.”

The video was clearly shot on someone's smartphone without fancy angles or lighting. The music is from a viral song already available via its sound archives. So simple, so cheap, yet so effective.

@duolingo sad g(owl) hours #duoplushie #duolingo #languagelearning #emo ♬ Rio romeo - .𝖒𝖊𝖓'🎧★

2. They can provide valuable information in a short amount of time.

According to a recent Adobe Survey , 2 in 5 Americans use TikTok as a search engine, and nearly 1 in 10 Gen Zers are more likely to rely on TikTok than Google as a search engine.

I even find myself taking to TikTok to look up recipes or figure out how to style a denim maxi-skirt (the trick is to experiment with different layers and silhouettes).

Between work, family, hobbies, and rest — time is precious, and short-form videos allow us to absorb the information we need in under a minute. Who doesn't love that?

3. You can watch them almost anytime, anywhere.

Bored on the train downtown? Scroll through TikTok. Need to kill some time in between classes or appointments? Pull up YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels on your phone.

Want to use your 5-minute break between meetings to figure out why everyone is talking about the latest JLo documentary? Let's circle back to TikTok.

Short-form videos are easy to watch almost anywhere and anytime from our smartphones.

Not only is this convenient for consumers, but it also helps marketers because it means we can repurpose our content on various platforms knowing someone will see it from somewhere.

There are different reasons to love short-form videos.

Some reasons are a little more concerning than others (seriously, why are our attention spans so short?), but no matter the reason, the fact remains the same —short forms aren't going away anytime soon.

Don't forget to share this post!

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