AMONG WILLOWS, essays on plant form and family

119pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Batis, Edinburgh, 2026

ISBN: 9781918073034

Blending scientific observation with personal memoir and photography of her sculptural floral arrangements, these essays by plant scientist and florist Cynthia Fan explore the mysteries of how plants adapt, deceive, and think, and the fluid boundary between the natural world and human environments, whether in the South Africa of her birth, the China of her parents, or Britain, where she currently works.

"Dialogues of duality and precipices of balance recur in Fan’s practice. Perhaps mirroring her own lived history, she moves lightly between disciplines and materials, as if to propose a method of querying rather than asserting one. In gravity-defying floral installations, the structural potential of plants and flowers becomes focal and calls forward a further tilting of perspectives. Straddling scientific inquiry, creative writing, and ephemeral intervention, Fan creates works that centre plants, humans, and their environments in an investigation. She writes about reciprocity. Across the book’s pages, she traces the push and pull of her history through plant analysis, folding it into inquiries around morphological development." Clare Patrick, SAAG

Cynthia Fan was born in Durban in 1991 and grew up in KwaZulu-Natal. A fine artist, writer and plant biologist, her work encompasses research, curation, and sculpture in the medium of plant arrangement. She has a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, and is a contributing writer to The Plant magazine, a former artist-in-residence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York City. She is also one half of Pear_ed collective, which spends time with plants between Cape Town, London and Amsterdam. Her plant sculpture work has been exhibited internationally. She lives in London.