ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between monuments and plants using queer ecological theorists Catriona Sandilands and Jeffrey J. Cohen. It traces ancient traditions incorporating cut flowers in mourning, to their use in John Milton’s pastoral poem ‘Lycidas’. The chapter considers the use of living plants as nonhuman monuments and looks at Paul Harfleet’s The Pansy Project. This symbolic use of plants is developed by considering Derek Jarman’s diary entries on cruising for sex, gardening, and the AIDS pandemic and the potentiality for living plants to become mnemonic, erotic providers of nonhuman abundance. The chapter turns to living trees, and their inhabitation of ‘deep time’, in particular the radical queerness of ancient yews. Trees as monuments are explored in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery and the conflict between an eco-politics of remembrance and the human desire to clear trees in order to restore the cemetery to a pre-Holocaust time. The relationship between trees and witnessing is explored at Chełmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka concentration camps. The chapter concludes by analysing A.M. Rosenthal’s essay ‘The Trees of Warsaw’ to advocate for a stepping out of stone culture, embracing queer ecologies of remembrance and the monumental.
