EXPLORING PORTRAYALS OF plant bodies in the Age of Goethe is not for the delicate; plants have long functioned as seemingly empty vessels for wild and often absurd assumptions about gender, race, colonialism, slavery and plantations, the materiality or spirituality of human bodies, potential profit, and power. A lthough plants are the basis of virtually all life on Earth, views of their relevance range from being a meaningless and either aesthetic or nearly invisible vegetal backdrop for our animal activities to being our exuberant and enabling older cousins, as per many ancient and nonindustrial cultures. Debates flourished in the nineteenth century and persist even today across the sciences and humanities about whether plants should be viewed mechanistically and instrumentally, or whether they have intrinsic value, any form of intelligence, or even “souls.” The era at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany certainly offers a rich array of views on plant bodies. These include, for example, the colonial/scientific explorations documenting the endless spread of plants across the planet, the expanding coffee houses, the aim of naming and categorizing all vegetal beings (and other lives), the ongoing popularity of greenhouses for the transplanting and growing of “exotic” species and the condemnation of others for being “weeds” or seemingly less aesthetic, and the racist perspectives on the darkness of foreign forests or jungles. Gender misconceptions regarding “passive” plants and clingy, vine-like females deserve more (negative) attention than I can offer here, as do, in contrast, the provocative and promising fairy tale plants that evoke traditional animism. The field of critical plant studies reconsiders the plethora of vegetal imaginings; the 2022 volume, Literaturen und Kulturen des Vegetabilen: Plant Studies—Kulturwissenschaftliche Pflanzenforschung states that such studies “begegnen Pflanzen nicht länger mit der auf Aristotles zurückgehenden Haltung, dass sie in der Hierarchie unter den Menschen und den Tieren stehen und zum Nutzen des Menschen frei verfügbar sind” (no longer encounter plants with the attitude that goes back to Aristoteles, indicating that they [plants] stand in the hierarchy under human beings and animals, and are readily available for the use of humans).2 Such plant visions take on new resonances in eighteenth-century Europe's and Germany's impending modernity, early industrialization, and emergence of plantation/slavery-based capitalism that continues the transformation of agriculture into a mechanized system of soil-and environment-destroying profitability.