Garden at Stasis

Garden at Stasis

Maxine Merryll Panlilio

Our relationship with plants has long been one-sided; humans control how they are grown, used, and altered, always assuming they lack intelligence or agency. In Dark Ecology, Timothy Morton (2016) challenges this bias, exposing how agricultural systems reduce plants to passive resources. Yet thinkers like James Bridle argue that plants can sense, adapt, communicate, and act, just not in the same way as humans.

This project speculates on a future where plants evolve, reshaping ecosystems on their own terms. It imagines a plant world not dictated by humans but by plant growth, behavior, and survival. Through an interactive application, humans are forced to confront plant temporality and fragility.

Callous human activities cause plants to transform into biological statues, revealing their devastating ability to halt the ecosystem.

Human bias toward plants does not stem solely from domination or utility, but from a deeper mismatch with temporal reality. We struggle to recognize plant intelligence because they operate in a timescale hugely different from our own. What appears inert or passive is often too slow for our perception to register.

In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton (2013) introduces a more diverse concept of intelligence as ecological, an interaction across time and space rather than solely based on human cognition. It is a form of coexistence between humans and nonhumans in which time serves as a critical lens that bridges the two.

This is evident in Bleached by Erez Nevi Pana, where it initially functions as a call to action about our mineral consumption and its ecological damage to the Dead Sea. The project allows the sea to transform the furniture through a five-year salt-crystallization process that ultimately reveals the interaction and coexistence of two nonhumans, amplified by time.

With time as a crucial ingredient, the Dead Sea becomes a hyperobject that transcends time and space, where each year of the furniture’s submersion reveals differences in crystal formation until the five-year mark. It reflects Tim Ingold’s (2007) view of materiality, where the properties of materials are not just physical attributes but stories and histories manifested over time.

During my site visit, I focused on sensory engagement: listening to the environment, feeling the climate, and touching accessible plants. I documented visually those that were out of reach or unsafe, while also noting surrounding sounds from birds, human activity, and, where possible, the presence of plants themselves.

What emerged was a striking diversity of plant and moss species across varying stages of growth and decay. This encounter revealed the differing temporal realities of nonhumans and our entanglement with them, prompting me to forage specimens and begin tracking their lifecycles.

As I visited the site during winter, it was an opportunity to observe how nonhumans respond to cold. Scans showed that the lilies by the canal were the coldest, not only because of their proximity to the water, but also because they could survive colder temperatures. Even far from water, thriving plants and grass registered as cold, suggesting they can live with cold temperatures.

The asphalt, on the other hand, emerged as the warmest, highlighting how man-made materials, especially those used in urban environments, are heat-absorbing.

Despite having prior knowledge about nonhumans from the book group, when the discussion turns to plant agency and intelligence, my bias towards them comes through clearly.

A big part of the bias is how we are left to imagine plant intelligence without direct, sensorial engagement that can show nonhuman behaviour. My site experiments became a critical method for challenging this. As Blise Orr and Christie Swallow emphasize, ecology is the ethics of sensing—an immersion in which we listen, observe, and attune ourselves to nature without immediately extracting design solutions. Walking, mapping, and documentation become modes of understanding rather than control, echoing Alicia Storie’s notion of Ecosophy, where humans are part of nature.

Through my site experiments, such as foraging, clay impressions, decay mapping, and smell mapping, I began to build a physical understanding of plant behaviour. While these methods don’t fully capture the subtle and often microscopic actions of plants, they provide experiential evidence for me to reframe my perception of plants. It allows me to move beyond my biases and gives me an embodied understanding of plants and their sentience.

Building on this understanding, the question now shifts from how plants behave to what happens when their agency becomes more active and direct in the future. If at this point our engagement with plants begins to unsettle us, imagine a future where plant sentience becomes a force that reshapes our ecologies and roles.

Building on the narrative of plants evolving into “biological statues” as a defense against extreme environments and human activity, I chose to focus on the temporal gap between human and plant realities. My initial approach was to create a digital archive that captures plants through a macro lens, revealing details and behaviours that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

This is inspired by YeonWoo Kim’s speculative project The New New Mutant, which presents animated mutated plants highlighting texture, form, and movement. Accompanied by a 100-page encyclopedia detailing each plant’s origin, habitat, and environmental conditions, the project immerses viewers in the plants’ lifeworld, making their existence more perceptible beyond human-scale perception.

The final design still follows the system of having one plant assigned per row. It also has varying designs of planters per stage, the same as the third iteration, with the addition of a hanging hydroponic system which is reserved for ivy plants.

An additional moss wall connected to the interior’s waterproofing and buffering system is also included as part of acoustic buffering because the doocot, being made of galvanized metal roofing, reflects sounds from the exterior. Water for the plants is achieved through a rainwater collection system gathered from the roof.

The final design adds an emphasis on supporting plant growth by recognizing that during these times, although the blooms of the plants are larger and tougher, the roots may be longer but a lot more fragile. With these characteristics, the planters should be able to assist plant and root growth by incorporating a Voronoi geometry, the most organic and common pattern formed and found in nature (cells, roots, leaves, etc.) (Bellelli, 2025), mainly to support root growth, either by maximizing oxygen access for roots or allowing roots to undergo thigmotropism, or to wrap around certain paths or materials.

This project began by challenging our bias towards plants, particularly our tendency to see them as inferior because of differences in temporality and perception. Through several site visits and experiments within the Firhill doocot, I was able to engage with the site and reveal layers of coexistence between human activity and plant life. These encounters highlighted how plants and humans continuously shape one another, but also exposed a limitation: much of plant intelligence, such as its subtle movements, vibrations, and microscopic processes, remain beyond human perception, despite our immersion and attempts to record plant evidence as much as we can.

Defining plant sentience further unsettles our understanding of plants. Plants are intelligent, but not in human terms. They have encompassed evolution and history through their ability to adapt to stress and retain survival traits. Reframing how we see plants across the evolution of the environment can make us realise that plants have been active agents that have shaped our world all along.

The project started with multiple design iterations of planter systems that reveal conflicts between human interaction and plant sensitivity, mainly because I am still operating within a human-centred approach to design rather than looking deeper into the overall health and lifecycle of the plants. Early concepts of the planters tend to prioritise the blooms, which are visible to the human eye, rather than focusing on helping the plants grow by accommodating their needs for water, light, and a healthy root system, given their projected fragility in the future. This is also true of the digital archive, where early experiments were visually interesting but did not fully embody plant sentience.

Ultimately, the project aims to reframe our relationship with plants by foregrounding plant responses to human activity, which can be adaptive and, most of the time, defensive behaviours that can reshape our understanding of nature, with plants as the active agents.