| Sumario: | In this review of works in the plant humanities, I focus on how five major publications from 2024 engage with and amplify some of the major concerns of the knowledge-field: considerations of plant alterity and intelligence, colonialism and its afterlives, explorations of phytophenomenology, and a provincialization of the Eurocentric beginnings of the field via engagements with non-Western and Indigenous perspectives. The essay is divided into five sections, each reading a major published work from last year: 1. Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry ; 2. Edward Casey and Michael Marder's Plants in Place ; 3. Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters ; 4. Sumana Roy's Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal ; 5. Banu Subramaniam's Botany of Empire. While the books consider human–plant relationalities and mutual coshaping, there is a shift toward contentions with plant intelligence and rethinking history, philosophy, and theory by centering plants as actors and agents. Placing the five texts in conversation with each other, I conclude by reflecting on some of the future directions that the plant humanities can take, most importantly the consideration of small plants and microflora.
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