Simona Vermeire is researching and exploring the common grounds between the botanical world and walking, relating to vegetal or plant thinking to promenadology. She introduces us in her talk in the concept and visions of Plant(e)scape, into plant-thinking and plant-philosophy, relating her ideas to walking in nature, walking with plants and walking as becoming plants. 

In an etymological path this can be followed back to the planta – the sole of one’s foot. Henry David Thoreau, in his essay, “Walking,” says that half of one’s walk is but a retracing of earlier steps, so that even if we do not know where we are (ultimately) going, at least we might know where we have been.

But we are also “carried away” in two other corporeally-conscious ways: first, by the sights, sounds and smells which we encounter and which walk us toward and through them. The elements in the atmosphere, for example, or the mood (as in the weather or song) frequently bears and guides us. Secondly, we are carried by the places we walk and which hold us.  And “place” relates to plat, meaning broad or flat.

To carry this point a final step further, it should be (foot) noted that Thoreau, too, conjectured that there exists in nature a “subtle magnetism” which carries us, often unconsciously, in the “right” direction, and his speculations may relate in a sense to the recent discovery of magnetic zones in areas of wilderness, attracting us.

Philosophy, in this sense, begins not simply in wondering but also – quite literally – in wandering. Walking facilitates meditation, in part, because it provides mediation between us and the earth; it initiates conversation between the feet and the ground; it introduces our bodies to and into the world, the surrounding medium. Ideas and images start to flow; they form their own form of kinesthesia.