Plants do not sit inside their environment in the way that a chair sits inside a room.
Instead, the plant is formed by its environment. A tree in open ground spreads wide and low. However, the same species in a crowded wood grows tall and narrow, reaching for what little light gets through.
This is the same plant, with the same genes, that expresses itself differently depending on its habitat and environment.
The plant isn’t following a fixed blueprint. Instead, it adapts its form in response to its surroundings. It does this through wind, light, soil, and the neighbours that gather around it. All of this shapes how it grows.
Let’s take ivy as an example. If you observe it long enough, you will begin to notice how deeply its life weaves into everything around it. Ivy flowers late, from October into November, when most other plants are shutting down. It’s one of the last major nectar sources in the British year.
The ivy bee times its entire life cycle around this short, single flowering window. It emerges only in September, then mates and forages almost exclusively on ivy nectar and pollen.
It builds its nest cells with ivy pollen and then is gone before winter. The whole species exists inside this narrow window that ivy has created.
Ivy also benefits from this relationship, as the bee provides reliable pollination when few other insects are active. This partnership creates a mutual bond where the survival of one is woven into the timing of the other.
This dance, this love affair, this relationship that began far back in evolutionary time, has been pulling each of them into perfect alignment.
The bee’s emergence, its tongue length, and its method of carrying pollen are all shaped around this one plant.
Likewise the plant fruits on time because the bee shows up on time. If you try and draw a line between ivy and the ivy bee, you can’t because they have been shaping each other for too long.
This is not cooperation as a moral, ethical, or ideological choice. It’s what happens when two lives become so intertwined that one cannot exist without the other.
The ivy bee would die without ivy and the ivy would die without the ivy bee.
The same is true for you, on a different scale. Your body and being are shaped continuously by what you are surrounded by. The quality of the air you breathe, the food you eat, the microbial life inside and on you: all this is inseparable from what you call your self.
If you sit with a plant long enough, the boundary you normally experience or expect to find (plant here, world there) gradually disappears.
The logical mind can no longer maintain this separation. You realise that you are in a continuous partnership with your surroundings. This partnership is old, intimate, and essential.
This entangled intimacy is how you and the rest of the living world survive.