Do Cultivated Plants Mean the Same to Everyone?

Cleidi Hearn

Cultivated plants are easy to recognise. Many are grown in different parts of the world, often under the same name. At first, this familiarity can give the impression that they carry a shared meaning wherever they are found.

They do not.

A cultivated plant enters people's lives in different ways. It may belong to everyday meals, to family memory, to seasonal work or to local celebration. Elsewhere, the same plant may be inseparable from histories of forced labour, land dispossession or economic dependence. These differences are not added to the plant afterwards. They emerge from the histories of cultivation itself.

This becomes difficult to ignore when returning to the same cultivated species in painting. The plant never arrives as form alone. It also arrives with the knowledge that its history cannot be assumed to be the same for everyone who stands before it.

Distance can make this increasingly apparent. For instance, remembering cultivated plants from Brazil while painting in Ireland does not detach them from where they come from. If anything, the distance makes those histories more present. The paintings do not attempt to resolve them or translate them into symbols. They begin by accepting that a cultivated plant always carries more than can be contained within its visible appearance.

This is one reason the same species can be painted again and again. A new painting is not made because the previous one was incomplete. It is made because the relationship between cultivated plants and human life has never been singular. Every encounter brings different histories into view, while others remain beyond reach.

Looking therefore asks for a certain humility. Recognising a plant is not the same as recognising what it has meant across different places and generations. Its form may be familiar, but familiarity should not be mistaken for understanding.

Even if cultivated plants are recognisable everywhere, their meanings rarely travel with them.