Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Thoreau's Vegetal Ontology: The Aerial, the Rootless and the Analogous / Branka Arsic (Columbia University, USA) -- 1. Thoreau Experiments with Natural Influences / Jane Bennett (John's Hopkins University, USA) -- 2. A Material Faith: Thoreau's Terrennial Turn / Laura Dassow Walls (Notre Dame University, USA) -- 3. Auto-Heteronomy: Thoreau's Circuitous Return to the Vegetal World / Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country, Spain) -- 4. Plant is a Verb: Botanic Power in Thoreau and Coccia / Antoine Traisnel (University of Michigan, USA) 5. 'Wild Thinking' and Vegetal Intelligence in Thoreau's Later Writings / Michael Jonik (Sussex University, UK) -- 6. Astral Plantations / Monique Allewaert (University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA) -- 7. The Riddle of Forest Succession / Mark Noble (Georgia State University, USA) -- 8. Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seeds / Jason Gladstone (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA) -- 9. Chastity & Vegetality: On Thoreau's Eco-erotics / Cristin Ellis (University of Mississippi, USA ) 10. 'Wild only like myself': Thoreau at Home with Plants / Mary Kuhn (University of Virginia, USA) -- 11. Thoreau's Wild Apples / Vesna Kuiken (University at Albany -- SUNY, USA) -- 12. Roots, Seeds, & Thoreauvian Trans-temporality: Poetry in the Common Sense / Gillian Osborne (Harvard Extension School, USA)

"Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics? Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies, Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those questions by pondering such concepts as co-dependence, the continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness, fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and receptivity."-- Provided by publisher.