Thinking Like a Plant!

Thinking Like a Plant: What a Leaf Can Teach Us About Art, Community & Connection

I recently returned to Craig Holdrege’s quietly compelling book Thinking Like a Plant, and found myself seeing my own art and creative journey in a new light. It’s not just about plants. It’s about how we engage with the world, how we make, how we relate.

Holdrege invites us to shift from seeing plants as objects to seeing them—and ourselves—as beings of relation, process and place.

Plants as Relational Beings & Artists of Form

Plants don’t exist in isolation. They grow in response to light, to soil, to air, to neighbours. Their forms emerge through those relations. Holdrege writes:

“Plants are dynamic and resilient, living in intimate connection with their environment.” 

And:

“The study of nature thus becomes a process of self-transformation … by learning from genuine presences such as plants … we can begin to internalize the qualities of dynamism, interconnectedness and wholeness that plants so clearly embody.” 

In my art practice—through layered collage, texture, found materials, marks made and erased—I’m responding to textures, memories, substrate, light and time. The artwork becomes less about a pre-fixed shape and more about emergence. Like a plant, it is formed through its unfolding.

That capacity to live in the making—rather than simply execute a plan—is something that deeply connects with what Holdrege emphasises: a form that is not static, but alive.

Thinking With, Not About

A central thread in the book is the shift from object-thinking to living thinking: from seeing nature as “out there” to becoming part of the interplay—and letting our thinking change as a result. Holdrege writes:

“If we want to behold nature in a living way, we must follow her example and become as mobile and malleable as nature herself.” 

This felt like a reflection of my own ethos: as an artist, I’m not simply making but listening and holding space for materials, time, and context. When I lead a workshop, or sit with a painting, I’m inviting the unexpected, the shifting, the revealing.

Art, Ecology & Community

Holdrege’s writing underscores something I’ve long felt: our creative lives are deeply ecological—embedded, connected, reciprocal. We do not create in a vacuum. We respond, we recognise, we belong. He observes that plants teach us:

“…thinking like a plant means being receptive to new possibilities instead of being bound by fixed ideas.” 

As an artist whose values centre around community, communication and interconnectedness, this resonates strongly. Just as plants adapt, reach, respond and contribute, so too do our creative acts. In my upcoming retreat, for example, the theme of “reconnect with your creativity” isn’t simply a workshop—it’s an invitation to embody that relational quality, to foray into materials, the land, the process, the others.

Final Thoughts

Thinking Like a Plant offers more than insight—it offers an attitude: rooted yet reaching, responsive yet grounded, emergent yet connected. It reminds me that growth—whether in our art, our communities, our lives—is not a straight line. It is a becoming, a conversation, a pattern of unfolding.

It helps me see my paintings—not as final objects but as records of emergence; it helps me see you, the viewer or retreat-participant, not as an audience but as fellow companion in creativity; it helps me see our world not as separate parts but as living wholes.

If you’re curious, I encourage you to look at a leaf, a root, a tendril, a mark on a page. Notice the gesture, the emergence, the relation. And maybe ask: what might we learn when we begin to think like a plant