Plants as Memory: Phytomorphic Perspective on Landscape Heritage in a Former Village

This paper applies a phytomorphic perspective to landscape memory in a forcibly depopulated and subsequently destroyed village. Landscape memory is an umbrella term for diverse ways of researching how landscapes preserve, shape, and reproduce memory through material form, collective participation, embodied practice, and narrative interpretation, including emotions and affective responses to specific places. We introduce the concept of vegetal memory to argue that landscapes also remember through the ongoing lives of plants. Drawing on theories of landscape memory and heritage and on anthropological approaches to more-than-human sociality, posthuman witnessing, and phenomenological accounts of rootedness, we develop a framework that reconceptualizes memory as a multispecies ecological process rather than an exclusively human one. Our argument emerges from transdisciplinary research in the former village of Židlov (Schidel, Sidlow) in northern Czechia, whose inhabitants were forcibly displaced after World War II. The village was subsequently destroyed through military use. Despite these transformations, some cultural plants persist in situ. We show that the remaining plants do not merely symbolize a lost past but bodily enact continuity through persistence, regeneration, reproduction, and their attachment to place. Vegetal memory shifts attention from memory as representation to memory as persistence in collective life, expanding understanding of heritage.