Kerry Ferguson Essays — The Intelligence of the Natural World
Art, Botanical Science and Nature-Informed Thought Essay | 2026
Abstract
A plant is immediately recognisable through visible form, yet much of its biological activity cannot be seen. Plants produce complex mixtures of specialised metabolites, release volatile compounds into the atmosphere, alter their chemistry following damage and environmental stress, interact chemically with organisms above and below ground, and change across developmental, daily and seasonal time. (Taiz et al. 2015; Theis and Lerdau 2003)
Contemporary analytical science makes aspects of this otherwise inaccessible botanical world perceptible through chromatography, mass spectrometry, spectroscopy and related methods. These technologies create a different kind of botanical visibility. A chromatogram does not resemble a plant, yet it can reveal dimensions of botanical identity that appearance cannot disclose. This essay examines the plant as a chemical as well as morphological organism and considers how scientific knowledge changes the meanings of scent, colour, damage, time and environmental relationship. Analytical visibility remains partial: instruments select what can be detected, while measurement never becomes identical to the living system from which the data originated. The resulting botanical subject exists across multiple scales, from visible organism to molecular mixture, atmosphere, soil and ecological relationship. For art, this creates a field extending beyond representation towards diffusion, concentration, transformation, instability, invisible boundaries and processes whose consequences may emerge before they can be seen. (Lu et al. 2017)
The Limits of Visible Botany
The history of botanical art and scientific representation has been dominated, understandably, by what can be seen.
Leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, stems and roots provide visible structures through which plants can be recognised, compared and classified. Dissection exposes structures concealed within the organism. Microscopy extends observation beyond unaided sight.
Photography records surfaces and details with extraordinary precision. A leaf can change physiologically before the change becomes visible. Damage can alter chemical activity. A flower can release volatile compounds into the surrounding atmosphere while appearing unchanged. Roots can modify the chemical conditions immediately around them without producing any obvious transformation above ground.
Visible morphology remains fundamental to botanical knowledge. The distinction is that some aspects of plant life must be detected rather than simply looked at.
Contemporary botanical science has consequently created another form of botanical representation. Instead of drawing the outline of a leaf, it can separate chemical mixtures. Instead of recording the colour of a flower, it can investigate pigments. Instead of describing scent alone through sensory experience, it can identify volatile compounds and examine how their emission changes.
The plant does not disappear when science moves beyond appearance. It becomes perceptible in another way.
The Plant as a Chemical System
Plants contain extraordinarily complex chemistry. Traditional biochemical terminology often distinguished compounds required directly for growth and fundamental metabolism from those described as secondary metabolites. Contemporary literature increasingly uses specialised metabolites for many compounds historically placed in the secondary category, recognising that they can perform significant ecological and physiological roles.
These compounds include enormous chemical diversity across groups such as terpenoids, phenolics and alkaloids. Their functions and effects vary. They can participate in defence, attraction, pigmentation, interactions with microorganisms, responses to environmental stress and relationships with other organisms.
The chemical plant is not static.
Composition can vary between species and varieties, between roots, leaves, flowers, fruits and seeds, and across developmental stages. Temperature, water availability, light, nutrition, disease, herbivory and other environmental conditions can influence metabolic processes. Daily and seasonal rhythms can also affect aspects of plant chemistry and volatile emission.
A plant has a chemical state as well as a morphological identity. Two leaves that appear almost identical may not be chemically identical. Plants of the same species growing under different conditions may develop different chemical profiles. The same plant sampled at different stages can present a changing chemical landscape. This introduces time into chemical identity. The plant is not simply a container holding a fixed inventory of compounds. Its chemistry belongs to a living process.
Making Chemistry Perceptible
Analytical instruments allow selected dimensions of this chemical complexity to become measurable. Chromatography separates components within mixtures according to their interactions with a particular analytical system. Mass spectrometry provides information related to the mass-to-charge characteristics of detected ions. Spectroscopic techniques investigate interactions between matter and electromagnetic radiation. Used individually or together, these approaches can assist in identifying and characterising compounds that cannot be distinguished through ordinary observation. Their outputs are unlike conventional botanical pictures. A chromatogram does not resemble a flower. A spectrum does not resemble a leaf. (Lu et al. 2017)
The chromatogram can nevertheless be understood as another kind of botanical image. It converts a chemical separation into a form that can be inspected, compared and interpreted.
Identification may depend upon combinations of retention behaviour, reference standards, spectral information, mass data and other evidence. Compounds may overlap. Some occur below detection limits. Some are unstable during preparation or analysis. A technique optimised for one chemical class may reveal another poorly.
Scientific measurement is not arbitrary; its strength comes from defined methods, calibration, validation, reproducibility and critical interpretation. Its limitation is that every analytical method reveals selected dimensions of a system rather than the entire organism.
The Plant Extends Into the Atmosphere
The visible boundary of a plant appears relatively clear. A leaf ends at its surface. A flower occupies a definable volume. A tree has a visible canopy. Chemically, those boundaries are less stable. Plants release volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere from flowers, leaves, fruits and other tissues. These compounds disperse beyond the visible organism and can participate in relationships involving pollinators, herbivores, predators, parasitoids, neighbouring plants and microorganisms.
The plant consequently has an atmospheric presence. A fragrant flower provides an obvious sensory example. What is experienced as scent is produced by a mixture of volatile molecules moving through air and interacting with sensory systems. The mixture is dynamic.
Emission can change with developmental stage, time of day, temperature and biological interaction. A flower is not necessarily emitting an identical chemical signal continuously throughout its visible existence. Scent introduces a different conception of botanical space.
The plant extends beyond its surface through molecules that move. Its presence can reach another organism before physical contact occurs.
Scent as Ecology
Fragrance is culturally associated with perfume, memory, pleasure and identity. Botanical science adds another dimension. Volatile compounds can participate in pollinator attraction, defence and interactions among plants and other organisms. Vegetative tissues can release different mixtures following damage. Some volatile compounds affect herbivores, while others can influence organisms associated with herbivores or contribute to interactions with neighbouring plants. (Dudareva, Pichersky, and Gershenzon 2004; Pichersky and Gershenzon 2002)
The same compound does not necessarily carry one fixed ecological meaning. Its effect depends upon concentration, mixture, receiver and context. Scent is an ecological phenomenon as well as a sensory one.
This changes its possibilities within art. An artwork concerned with botanical scent does not need to treat fragrance merely as atmospheric decoration. Scent can imply movement, chemical presence, memory, attraction, defence, distance and disappearance. Sissel Tolaas’s work with odours demonstrates how smell itself can become material for investigation. Odours can be collected, analysed, reconstructed, archived and relocated, separating smell from the visual object conventionally assumed to produce it. The sensory environment becomes another form of knowledge.
The Smell of Damage
Few botanical scents demonstrate the complexity of sensory and scientific perception as clearly as the smell of freshly cut grass. The scent is commonly associated with freshness, summer, gardens and landscape. Biologically, cutting is tissue damage. Mechanical injury disrupts cells and can rapidly initiate chemical reactions associated with compounds commonly described as green leaf volatiles. Knowledge changes the meaning of the sensory experience. The smell can remain pleasurable. It can still evoke memory. It also becomes evidence that the plant’s chemical condition has changed. The familiar scent is connected with a biological event. This relationship between sensory pleasure and tissue damage provides an early glimpse of the paradox explored in the final essay. What appears pleasurable or beautiful does not necessarily describe the complete biological condition producing the experience. (Fürstenberg-Hägg, Zagrobelny, and Bak 2013; Schuman and Baldwin 2016)
Change Before It Becomes Visible
Plant responses can also involve histories that are not immediately apparent from visible form. Research into plant priming, for example, examines circumstances in which prior exposure to stress or biological interaction alters subsequent responses. (Conrath et al. 2015)
The conceptual implication is that present appearance does not necessarily reveal the complete biological state of the organism. A plant may appear unchanged while its capacity to respond has been altered. Change can exist before it becomes visible.
This idea expands the botanical subject beyond static appearance. The organism contains history. Previous conditions can influence subsequent responses. Chemical and physiological states can change across time before those changes become apparent through morphology. For artistic practice, this opens a field concerned with latency, anticipation and altered potential. An artwork need not represent the visible consequence of an event. It can investigate the condition in which something has already changed but has not yet become perceptible. Time becomes part of invisible botany.
The Plant Also Extends Below Ground
The atmospheric plant is only one part of the invisible organism. Roots occupy another chemically active boundary. The region surrounding roots, commonly described as the rhizosphere, contains intense interactions among plant roots, soil, microorganisms, water, minerals and organic compounds. Roots can release compounds into their immediate environment, while microbial communities influence nutrient availability and plant condition. (Bais et al. 2006)
The plant extends chemically below ground as well as into the atmosphere. This complicates the familiar visual hierarchy of botanical representation. Flowers and leaves dominate botanical imagery partly because they are accessible to sight. Roots are less visible, and the chemical relationships surrounding them are more difficult to represent still. The below-ground environment can be fundamental to the life of the organism. Water acquisition, nutrient relationships and interactions with fungi and bacteria occur within a world largely concealed from ordinary perception. The botanical organism is not bounded neatly by its visible tissues. It participates in chemical environments above and below ground. The invisible plant extends into air and soil.
Colour Is Also Chemistry
Colour appears to belong firmly within the visible plant. Scientific knowledge complicates even this apparently straightforward relationship. Plant colour can arise through pigments, cellular structures, optical effects and the way light interacts with biological material and visual perception. Chlorophylls, carotenoids and anthocyanins contribute to familiar botanical colours while participating in physiological processes. Green is not merely a surface property. Red is not simply ornament. Yellow is not only visual effect. Pigment concentration can change during development, ripening, senescence or environmental response. A leaf changing colour carries a history of physiological transformation. A fruit changing from green towards another colour may signal developmental change. Floral colour can participate in relationships with pollinators while remaining aesthetically significant to people. Scientific explanation does not invalidate artistic colour. It multiplies its possible meanings. An artist can reproduce the red of a flower using a pigment chemically unrelated to the plant itself. The visible resemblance can be convincing while the material chemistry is entirely different.
Appearance and botanical chemistry are not identical. When botanical pigments themselves become artistic material, another layer emerges. Their response to light, oxygen, acidity, temperature and time can make instability part of the work. Colour becomes process.
Extraction and the Creation of a New Botanical Material
The difference between visible plant and chemical plant becomes especially clear when botanical material is processed. Drying, grinding, distillation, infusion, fermentation, solvent extraction, concentration and other processes transform the original material. An extract is not simply the plant converted into liquid or powder.
Different compounds have different solubilities and stabilities. Solvent composition, temperature, time, particle size, plant-to-solvent ratio and subsequent processing can influence what is recovered, excluded, concentrated or transformed. (Zhang, Lin, and Ye 2018)
It has a biological history determined by species, variety, plant part, development and growing conditions. It also has a processing history created after harvest. These histories become part of botanical identity. Two extracts carrying the same plant name can differ chemically because their raw materials or processing histories differ. This distinction has implications well beyond analytical chemistry. The botanical material used in food, fragrance, medicine, cosmetics, pigments or art is often no longer identical to the living organism from which it originated. Transformation creates another botanical object. Scientific characterisation asks what remains, what has changed and what the new material actually contains.
Complexity and the Limits of the Chemical Portrait
Metabolomic approaches attempt to examine broad patterns of small molecules within biological samples and can be used to compare species, tissues, developmental stages or environmental conditions. They enormously expand the chemical portrait of the plant. No single analytical method detects every metabolite equally well. Compounds differ in polarity, concentration, stability, volatility and chemical behaviour. Sample preparation changes what becomes accessible. Different analytical platforms reveal different portions of the chemical system. Greater resolution does not produce the whole plant. It produces more detailed partial knowledge. (Lu et al. 2017; Li and Gaquerel 2021)
The botanical illustrator selected diagnostic morphology. The photographer selected a specimen, view and moment. The microscope selected a scale. The analytical instrument selects measurable chemical characteristics. Different systems of observation make different plants perceptible. Scientific knowledge becomes stronger when the limits of each method remain visible.
Art Beyond Molecular Illustration
Scientific images offer obvious possibilities for artistic appropriation. Molecular structures, chromatograms, spectra, microscopic images and data visualisations can all become visual motifs. The deeper artistic possibilities lie beyond resemblance. Diffusion introduces the idea of boundaries that cannot remain fixed. Concentration introduces gradients and intensity. Volatility introduces movement, disappearance and atmospheric presence. Oxidation makes exposure transformative. Extraction becomes selection. Instability introduces time. Chemical interaction connects organisms across distance. Priming makes history part of future response.
These concepts can influence material, process, duration and spatial organisation without requiring an artwork to illustrate the science literally. The scientific source may disappear from the final appearance while remaining central to the work’s conception.
This is where interdisciplinary learning becomes particularly productive. Scientific knowledge provides more than imagery. It provides processes through which artistic thought can change.
Living Processes as Artistic Material
Several contemporary practices demonstrate how invisible biological processes can enter art without becoming scientific illustration. Ackroyd & Harvey have worked with living grass and photosynthetic processes to create images through differential chlorophyll production. The living plant material participates in image formation and continues to change.
Mel Chin’s Revival Field, developed in collaboration with agronomist Rufus Chaney, investigated the capacity of plants to accumulate metals from contaminated soil. Scientific measurement was integral to the project. Chin’s concept of an “invisible aesthetic” is particularly relevant: an environmentally significant transformation could occur even where the most change was not visually spectacular.
Sissel Tolaas approaches smell as material, working with chemistry and sensory experience rather than requiring odour to remain attached to a visible source.
Janet Laurence brings botanical specimens, laboratory references, scientific apparatus and environmental vulnerability into installations in which aesthetic and scientific languages coexist without becoming identical.
These practices do not constitute one movement or one methodology. Their shared relevance lies in the recognition that the natural world contains processes that art can engage without converting them into conventional botanical pictures. The invisible does not always need to be made visible. It can be made perceptible through process, material, time, scent or consequence.
Scientific Visibility and Artistic Freedom
Science must support claims through appropriate evidence and method. Art can work through metaphor, ambiguity, sensory experience and imaginative association. An artwork concerned with plant communication is not a demonstration that a particular signalling mechanism occurs. An installation using botanical scent is not chemical ecology research. An artwork derived from chromatographic data is not analytical validation. These distinctions do not restrict interdisciplinary practice. They make it possible for each field to retain its intellectual integrity. Scientific knowledge can inform artistic thought without determining artistic form. Art can interpret scientific ideas without claiming evidentiary authority.
The Invisible Landscape
Once chemical and ecological relationships enter perception, the landscape changes conceptually. A meadow is not only a field of visible plants. A forest is not only trunks, leaves and spatial depth. A garden is not only an arrangement of botanical forms. These environments also contain changing chemical relationships.
Flowers release volatile compounds. Leaves respond to herbivory and environmental stress. Roots interact with soil and microorganisms. Plants alter their chemistry through development and season. Organic material decomposes. Atmospheric conditions influence emission and dispersal. The landscape visible to the eye and the landscape accessible to chemical analysis occupy the same place. They are not competing realities. They are different dimensions of one system. Knowledge does not replace the landscape. It multiplies it.
Beyond Appearance
Across the history traced in these essays, the botanical subject has steadily expanded.
The botanical illustration made selected visible structures legible. Morphology revealed form as development. Plant geography connected organisms with environmental conditions.
Biophilia shifted attention towards participation and relationship. The interdisciplinary study of nature extends those relationships across fields of knowledge. Contemporary botanical science moves still further into chemical processes that ordinary sight cannot disclose. The plant can now be encountered simultaneously as visible form, developmental process, chemical mixture, atmospheric presence, below-ground participant and ecological relationship. No single scale is sufficient. A volatile compound has no botanical silhouette. A chromatographic peak does not resemble the molecule whose presence it helps establish. A primed physiological state may produce no immediately visible form. Root-associated chemical relationships occur largely beyond ordinary observation. Scientific knowledge can change perception even when it does not change what the eye can see.
The flower remains visible, but scent acquires another meaning. The damaged leaf remains damaged, but its chemistry becomes part of the event. Colour remains colour, but it also becomes physiological history. The extract remains material, but its processing history becomes part of its identity. The landscape remains beautiful, but invisible relationships complicate the appearance of stillness.
Botanical chemistry reveals defence, toxicity, damage and competition alongside attraction, growth and reproduction. Ecology reveals disturbance, vulnerability, death and regeneration alongside cooperation and persistence. Knowledge begins to unsettle the idealised natural world. Beauty remains it simply ceases to tell the whole story.
The final essay enters that territory through Dangerous Beauty and Beautiful Danger.
Research Context
The Intelligence of the Natural World is an interdisciplinary research series by Kerry Ferguson examining how botanical and scientific knowledge changes the ways in which the natural world can be perceived, interpreted and represented. The research brings together botanical science, art, environmental aesthetics, biophilia, biomimicry, material inquiry and the histories through which living systems have been observed, classified and understood.
The essays distinguish scientific evidence from artistic and philosophical interpretation. Scientific knowledge can inform artistic thought and creative practice, while artistic analogy, metaphor and abstraction are not presented as biological proof. The purpose of the series is not to collapse art and science into a single discipline, but to investigate what becomes possible when different forms of knowledge encounter the same living systems.
The research is intellectually independent while intersecting with scientific research undertaken through Botanical Innovations and artistic and design investigations developed through Dangerous Beauty. Together, these fields contribute to a broader inquiry into the intelligence, complexity and continuing creative significance of the natural world.
References
Bais, Harsh P., Tiffany L. Weir, Laura G. Perry, Simon Gilroy, and Jorge M. Vivanco. 2006. “The Role of Root Exudates in Rhizosphere Interactions with Plants and Other Organisms.” Annual Review of Plant Biology 57: 233–266. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.arplant.57.032905.105159.
Conrath, Uwe, Gerold J. M. Beckers, Caspar J. G. Langenbach, and Michal R. Jaskiewicz. 2015. “Priming for Enhanced Defense.” Annual Review of Phytopathology 53: 97–119. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-phyto-080614-120132.
Dudareva, Natalia, Eran Pichersky, and Jonathan Gershenzon. 2004. “Biochemistry of Plant Volatiles.” Plant Physiology 135 (4): 1893–1902. https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.104.049981.
Fürstenberg-Hägg, Joel, Mika Zagrobelny, and Søren Bak. 2013. “Plant Defense against Insect Herbivores.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 14 (5): 10242–10297. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms140510242.
Heil, Martin, and Richard Karban. 2010. “Explaining Evolution of Plant Communication by Airborne Signals.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25 (3): 137–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.09.010.
Karban, Richard. 2015. Plant Sensing and Communication. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226264844.001.0001.
Li, Dapeng, and Emmanuel Gaquerel. 2021. “Next-Generation Mass Spectrometry Metabolomics Revives the Functional Analysis of Plant Metabolic Diversity.” Annual Review of Plant Biology 72: 867–891. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-arplant-071720-114836.
Lu, Wenyun, Xiaoyang Su, Matthias S. Klein, Ian A. Lewis, Oliver Fiehn, and Joshua D. Rabinowitz. 2017. “Metabolite Measurement: Pitfalls to Avoid and Practices to Follow.” Annual Review of Biochemistry 86: 277–304. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-biochem-061516-044952.
Pichersky, Eran, and Jonathan Gershenzon. 2002. “The Formation and Function of Plant Volatiles: Perfumes for Pollinator Attraction and Defense.” Current Opinion in Plant Biology 5 (3): 237–243. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1369-5266(02)00251-0.
Schuman, Meredith C., and Ian T. Baldwin. 2016. “The Layers of Plant Responses to Insect Herbivores.” Annual Review of Entomology 61: 373–394. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-010715-023851.
Taiz, Lincoln, Eduardo Zeiger, Ian M. Møller, and Angus Murphy. 2015. Plant Physiology and Development. 6th ed. Sinauer Associates.
Theis, Nina, and Manuel Lerdau. 2003. “The Evolution of Function in Plant Secondary Metabolites.” International Journal of Plant Sciences 164 (S3): S93–S102. https://doi.org/10.1086/374190.
Trewavas, Anthony. 2014. Plant Behaviour and Intelligence. Oxford University Press.
Zhang, Qing-Wen, Li-Gen Lin, and Wen-Cai Ye. 2018. “Techniques for Extraction and Isolation of Natural Products: A Comprehensive Review.” Chinese Medicine 13: 20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13020-018-0177-x.
Continue the Research
The Intelligence of the Natural World forms part of Kerry Ferguson’s continuing interdisciplinary research into botanical science, art, biophilia, biomimicry and nature-informed thought.
Explore the complete essay series and related research through Kerry Ferguson, discover scientific research and botanical innovation through Botanical Innovations, and explore the translation of these ideas into art, textiles, pattern, material and spatial design through Dangerous Beauty.