From Seed to Seed: Material Activities and Vegetable Life in Grew’s Philosophy of Botany

In 1682, Nehemiah Grew inserted An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants as the first text of his Anatomy of Plants. The former consists of a broad programme to study vegetation from a material standpoint. Besides the mechanical and chymical investigation of plants, generally supported by microscopic observations, something that was at the core of the Royal Society’s methodology, in the text Grew engaged with a few more philosophical and theoretical issues. Still, despite Grew’s formidable attempt to produce a coherent and comprehensive science of plants, the absence of a definition of vegetable life has some consequences in understanding plants in their own right. For instance, a few questions surface as Grew addressed zoophytes and other bodies that blurred the line between vegetables and animals. Only in Grew’s later Cosmologia sacra (1701) does a definition of vegetable life with a more complete scheme arise. Is the philosophy of plants a bridge between Grew’s works? In this article, I contextualize his philosophical approach, explore the features of his text, and advance the possibility to answer this question positively, although a remarkable distance from Grew’s experimental study of plants of the Anatomy and the physico-theology of the Cosmologia makes a connection between the two texts difficult. In the end, this unbridgeable gulf broadly shapes early modern botanical studies.