I Ghostly fl ora?It is several years now since Jones and Cloke noted that, while there had been considerable recent interest in animals and society within human geography and anthropology, 'fl ora … remains an even more ghost-like presence in contemporary theoretical approaches ' (Jones and Cloke, 2002: 4; see also Hitchings and Jones, 2004). In this second progress report on cultural ecology, we identify and trace emerging trends in human-plant geographies. Human-plant interactions have been the stuff of cultural ecology since the days of Julian Steward, and many aspects of that tradition are alive and well. Following a previous progress report (Head, 2007), we are not interested in assuming an ontological and unproblematic separation between 'cultures' and 'their [vegetative] environment' as the basis on which straightforward 'interactions' or 'adaptations' can be analysed (Blute, 2008). Rather we aim here to elucidate the contributions of relational geographies, sometimes referred to as more than human geographies, to the understanding of humanplant relations (eg, Whatmore, 2002, on soybeans, and Robbins, 2004, on invasive networks).The challenges of global environmental change provide good reasons why such geographies should be nurtured, and why the notion of a clear separation between culture and environment should be long gone. Even a cursory roll call of the pressing issues of the next few decades -food security, biofuels, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, quality of urban life -immediately involves messy and malleable confi gurations of plants and people. Plants are fundamental players in human lives, providing our food supply and contributing to the air we breathe, and vice versa -humans have transformed many aspects of plant lives. Physical biogeographers now recognize that the vegetation patterns they are studying refl ect both deep time evolutionary pathways and the 'muddy and indecipherable blur' of human infl uence (Mackey, 2008: 392).At one level it is puzzling then that humanplant geographies have been less commented on than human-animal geographies. We touch here on several reasons. First, animal geographies have been spurred on by questions of ethics. Between plants and humans, there is arguably a greater ethical distance, and the unit of ethical standing (individual, species,

It is increasingly acknowledged that invasive plant management, although a significant global issue, is a matter of coexistence rather than control. Nevertheless an adversarial rhetoric dominated by discourses of war and winning persists. This paper focuses on the bodies of plants, the animals with which they become entangled, and the humans who are charged with eradicating them. Plants help to rethink bodily difference beyond the human, extending feminist theories that have contributed to increased recognition of nonhuman difference. Bodies are a barely acknowledged scale of invasive plant management, which is usually conceptualised in landscape terms. Our empirical focus is the eradication of three species in northwestern Australia: Mimosa (Mimosa pigra), Gamba Grass (Andropogon gayanus), and Neem (Azadirachta indica). By paying attention to plant difference and illuminating the experience of invasive plant managers, we show how eradication manages the intersecting timespaces of different bodies in order to stop plants becoming collectives. We identify contradictions in the regulation and applicationof borders, which are less permeable for some animals than for all humans. We also draw attention to the questions of risk-for humans and others-in the process of killing plants. For embodied geographies, a plant perspective opens up new ways of thinking about bodily boundaries: in particular the individual/collective divide. The implication for invasive plant management is that, even at the eradication end of the spectrum, effective management is an uncertain process that involves living in association with invasive plants rather than living separately from them.

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The lower status of plants relative to animals, one of the defining characteristics of Western thought, is under challenge from diverse research in botany, philosophy and the more-than-human social sciences including geography. Although the agency of plants is increasingly demonstrated, scholars have yet to fully respond, for plants, to Lulka's call to attend more carefully to the details of nonhuman difference (Lulka D 2009 The residual humanism of hybridity: retaining a sense of the earth Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34 378-93). This paper advances the concept of the shared capacities of plants, in order to take them seriously in their own terms, and to consider what that means for human-plant relations more generally. We identify four capacities illustrated through plant lives: distinctive materialities; moving independent of humans; sensing and communicating; and taking shape as flexible bodies. Together these provide a sense of plant worlds in which distinct but highly variable plant forms have their own lives, interacting with humans and others in contingent ways. As empirical illustration we explore the adversarial relationship between rubber vine (Cryptostegia grandiflora) and invasive plant managers in northern Australia. In this case biosecurity strategies are affected by and affecting of rubber vine, assembling plants (as individuals and collectives), feral and stock animals, fire and helicopters, human skills and legislation. Recognition of plant capacities challenges us to rethink several concepts often framed against a human norm, including agency, subjectivity and the ethics of killing.

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human-plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This special issue aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. In this introduction, we explore themes of belonging, practices and places, as discussed in the contributing papers. Together, the papers suggest new kinds of 'vegetal politics', documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The papers also raise methodological questions and challenges for future research. This special issue grew out of sessions we organised at the Association

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