Thoreau once noted that all animals are beasts of burden, “made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” Plants too provide us with metaphors and meanings and images, with stems, offshoots, grafts, roots and branches, information trees, seeds of ideas, fruits of our labor, cross-pollinations, ripeness and greenness, and with the symbolic richness of the things we do to our domesticated plants: weeding and pruning, sowing and reaping, and so much more.
