Vegetal Diaspora and the Restless Life of Plants

Diaspora (from the Greek word for “dispersion”) commonly refers to the dispersal of a people with shared cultural and geographical ancestry who now live scattered across the globe. Throughout human history, countless migration events have given rise to such diasporic communities. These are often defined by migrants’ reasons for leaving their ancestral lands: exile, trade, violence, or hope. But what if we unearth the term from its strictly anthropocentric soil? What if we let it drift, seed-like, into other kingdoms of life?

To speak of plant diasporas is to propose a conceptual mischief, an act of re-worlding. To think with plant diasporas is to unlearn the human-centered map of existence and to reimagine the world as an entangled garden where all life participates in shaping reality. It is to accept that the world is not one but many, constantly reassembled through cross-species exchanges: “A world that holds many worlds,” as the Zapatista Movement proposes.

To talk about vegetal diasporas is to recognize that migration is not solely a human story, but a biological condition of all life on Earth. It is to acknowledge plant agency: a will to voyage, to drift, to escape.

To Set Forth [without return] Into the World

Plants migrate without passports or maps, their journeys untethered from the logics of empire and discipline. The forms their travels take are many: a voyage in a jar, in the folds of a pocket, between ship planks, in straw, in the sole of a shoe. When humans migrate, plants often tag along. Humans have long been agents of plant movement, acting as seed-sharers and carriers. They weave vegetal stories across hands, seasons, and soils. Sometimes these movements are guided by reciprocity, sometimes by coercion.

Many species have been forced into voyage under the shadows of empires, carried across oceans in the name of growing capital: sugarcane, wheat, cotton, corn, soy. They were turned into monocultures, governed first by colonies, and later by corporations and states. Others traveled as delightful ornaments: jasmine, rosemary, lavender. The oldest living immigrants among us are, in fact, ornamental trees, passed from garden to garden, square to square, living on long after those who first planted them have returned to the soil. Each one could fill a book of its own.

This essay, however, attends to another kind of migration: the unexpected voyage, the kind in which plants travel irrespective of human intention. Seeds carried in sheep’s wool, on the breath of the wind, in ocean currents, or in the hush of tides. When the plant outgrows its designated place, slipping the leash of a garden or plantation. When it follows the call of its seed-logic, its germinal desire.

These vegetal wanderings are often unwanted, unnoticed, uninvited by humans. Their presence can become an economic nuisance or even an ecological “threat.” These so-called weeds, or malas hierbas, speak in tongues of resistance, rebellion, or refusal. They sprout where they will and will cause all kinds of trouble in human systems.

The Vegetal Other

To speak of plants in this way is to step into a multispecies framework: an approach to storytelling and research that attends to the lives and agencies of those beyond the human. Here, flora, fauna, fungi, bacteria, and viruses become not objects, but kin. The “Other”—once applied to non-Western humans—is now extended to the more-than-human. This shift gestures to the long, entangled histories of humans and plants, from co-domestication to allyship to war. To recognize the plant’s capacity to voyage is to draw us closer: to become a little more like them, to become more like us. A chorus of Earthlings weaving life together on this restless, animate planet.

To call these vegetal movements “diasporas“ borrows from anthropologist Laura Ogden’s “beaver diaspora.” She describes the 1947 introduction of Canadian beavers to Tierra del Fuego (a remote southern island shared by Chile and Argentina). The beavers are now deemed the region’s most pressing ecological crisis. Instead of labeling beavers as “invasive,” though, Ogden reframes them as a diasporic, migratory kin forging new worlds. In so doing, Ogden explores the tangled and contradictory relationships they hold with scientists, ranchers, and environmentalists alike.

Colonizing settlers have long introduced foreign animal and plant life to new geographies, a process Alfred Crosby calls ecological imperialism. But, as Ogden argues, imperialism reshapes not just land, but life itself, producing new multispecies assemblages in its wake. To adopt the language of diaspora here destabilizes the idea of a “species” as fixed or apolitical.

The Exotic Versus the Native—An Endless War

For decades, biologists have enlisted militarized terms like “invasive,” “alien,” and “exotic“ to describe species they deemed out of place. These labels reflect not ecological truth but geopolitical imaginations of empire. These names appear when species cause damage to agriculture, forestry, or native ecologies. These categories have shaped the way we think about biodiversity loss and anthropogenic change.

I prefer to call these plants “wanderers,” “travelers,” or “vagabundas.” More academically, I also find kinship with categories like “neophytes,” “adventives,” and “ruderal species”—words that invite curiosity rather than fear. To move away from the colonial language of war towards a vocabulary of emergence and relation is to dismantle the invasion paradigm. This shift also calls for new ethical and political frameworks for caring for Earth in times of grief and metamorphosis.

In the southern lands of Chile, gorse, lupine, blackberry, and Scotch broom provoke frustration among agronomists and conservationists. Their presence recalls colonial histories, yet also mirrors the mestizaje—the mixed, hybrid ecologies—we now inhabit. Thinking of the traveling plant as part of a diaspora reminds us that its history is entangled with ours. Let us follow one such travelers now, into its journey from South to North.

The Guardian of the Commons

The nalca (Gunnera tinctoria), or pangue, is a perennial herb with giant, Jurassic-looking leaves that can reach two meters across, rough to the touch, thick-veined, and thorny along the stem. It grows in southern Chile and Argentina, thriving in humid valleys and riverbanks. Nalca is a pioneer species, a nitrogen fixer that collaborates with cyanobacteria to enrich the soils it inhabits.

In Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche, “nalca” refers to the petiole and “pangue” to the leaf, though both are used to name the whole plant. Its peeled stalk is eaten fresh with salt or merkén, and its roots used for dyes, hence its Latin name tinctoria. Its leaves are also used for wrapping curanto, the traditional earth-oven dish of Chiloé. The plant’s vitality and its culinary and textile uses all make it central to southern lifeways.

In the countryside, looking for nalca means more than foraging. It is an annual ritual of spring: a walk to damp places with family, a taste of the first green shoots after winter. Nalca is a wild and abundant food. It symbolizes the rugged generosity of the southern landscape. Its image appears in crafts, souvenirs, and even as costume. During the 2019 social uprising, the figure of “Nalcaman” emerged as a leafy guardian of the commons.

Nalca’s huge leaves are the vivid emblem of what is known as the “cold jungle of the South”: the Valdivian Temperate Rainforest, the world’s southernmost jungle, spanning southern Chile and Argentina. This unique ecosystem is characterized by abundant rainfall, mild temperatures, and lush, dense vegetation. In the ravines, creeks, and muddy ponds that form within this exuberant landscape, pangales emerge—areas thick with nalca. The gathering of nalca is a long-standing economic and cultural practice, though it has historically been rendered invisible and subordinated to the extractivist transformation of the landscape. The expansion of the forestry industry—turning vast territories into pine and eucalyptus monocultures—has fragmented and marginalized these pangales, altering their distribution and ecological balance.

In recent years, groups of women foragers have emerged as key actors in the restoration and care of pangales, grounding their efforts in a deeply territorialized ethic of care that intertwines ecological restoration with social and cultural renewal. In this context, nalca stands as a symbol of native landscapes that resist the neocolonial extractivism represented by industrial agriculture and monoculture forestry.

The nalca is part of my own childhood in the South—its rugged texture, its bittersour taste, the humid shelter of its huge leaves. Yet in the Biobío region, where I’m from and where pine and eucalyptus plantations have replaced much of the native forest, pangales have become rare. I remember a single nalca growing in the ravine behind my house, its glossy green rising from the mud of the creek. And I remember its disappearance: One day it was simply gone, perhaps cut carelessly, perhaps unable to survive so much solitude amid the silent rows of plantation trees. Its absence felt like losing a friend. I like to think it went looking for company—perhaps for new horizons far to the north.

The Invader from the South

The first time I saw a nalca in Europe was under the rain in an English park. Learning that it had migrated there startled me. Introduced to Britain in 1849 as an ornamental curiosity, Gunnera tinctoria became beloved by gardeners for its jungle grandeur. But it soon escaped cultivation, spreading along rivers, cliffs, and roadsides. Its vigor, once admired, turned threatening. In the UK and Ireland, nalca is now listed under the Wildlife and Countryside Act as an invasive species, forbidden to grow or trade.

British websites such as Environet have entire pages devoted to its eradication. One can read about its “ecological damage” and find detailed removal guides. Companies offer professional elimination services for the nalca alongside treatments for Japanese knotweed or Himalayan balsam, other foreigners in the British flora.

The same plant that gives food in southern Chile is, in northern eyes, a menace. Its success unsettles hierarchies of belonging: a southern migrant thriving in imperial soil. Nalca, an unwanted sudaca—pejorative word for South American immigrants in Europe, also unsettles power relations between humans and plants. This vegetal diaspora reshapes the landscapes it spans. Its expansive travel and adaptability testify to a kind of borderless spirit, a proclivity for wandering, a (perhaps evolutionary) desire for exploration.

Here, ecological management and immigration politics intersect subtly. The nalca’s exile reveals the moral weight we place on categories like native and foreign, as if purity were still the measure of ecosystems. Nalca complicates the premise of “native ecology,” reminding us that ecosystems have never been static archives but always restless diasporas.

The Planetary Garden

In farming and gardening, “transplanting” refers to the act of relocating a plant from one place to another. Humans have long moved plants across landscapes. Such relocations have taken place under the weight of power structures, histories of colonization, and expanding economies. From forced displacements and acts of theft to extractive expeditions, plants carry with them the violence of human uprooting, transplanting, and ultimately, displacement. The circulation of plants for capital accumulation—more broadly, the rapid relocation and repackaging of germplasm, genomes, cuttings, and all the other forms and names of plants, animals, and displaced people—is a defining feature of the Plantationocene/Capitalocene/Anthropocene, an illustration of each operating in concert.

The concept of the “vegetal diaspora” opens new spaces for interspecies care—spaces that nurture collaboration, critical thought, and mutual questioning across disciplines and institutions, all through shared acts of listening and planetary gardening. From invasive to generous, from outcast to cosmopolitan, the plant entangles itself in forms of vegetal solidarity with the world.

We glimpse this possibility through nalca’s journey. In the South, it provides food and meaning; in the North, it challenges and transforms. It unsettles the idea that life belongs neatly to any one geography. For in truth, all that we call local has arrived from elsewhere: elsewhere in space, or elsewhere in time.

In the end, “vegetal diaspora” is not a metaphor but a planetary condition. Every seed, every spore, every transplanted cutting participates in an ancient movement of life. So do we. Species reinvent themselves in foreign soils; cultures germinate through exchange. The world itself is a garden of migrants. To live on Earth is to live among travelers.

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Featured image: Nalca growing in Southern Chile. Photo by Rjcastillo, 2024.

Jens Benöhr is an anthropologist based in the Maullín watershed, southern Chile. He explores rivers and forests by kayak or on foot, listening to the stories they hold. Jens has co-edited and co-authored publications including Revista Endémico, Descolonizar Naturalezas, and “Multispecies Resistance: A Cartography of Love and Disaster” (2021). Currently, he investigates the use of role-playing games for environmental education. Jens holds an Anthropology degree from the University of Concepción (2015) and a Master’s in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Munich (2022). Contact.