Either way, it seems time to dim the lights on the idea of plants as individual entities with neat borders. Where a plant starts and stops is not clearly understood. It may not even be a useful question. Ignoring the many ways plants and their collaborators interact—and, ultimately, constitute the plant itself—leaves us with a very partial view of reality. Plants are composites of interpenetrating forms of life that resist an either-or classification. Perhaps much like us.
