After making the incision, the pericranium must be raised a little from the bone with the edge of the knife, to clear the bone, and the scalprum employed.

Later today in Finsbury Park, the cameras would spend hours panning across 35,000 festivalgoers in search of pickpockets, drunken brawlers, and other assorted agents of petty mischief.

This collocation, Marder posits, may have less to do with plants’ actual botanical mysteries and our human investigations into their biological truths and more to do with the ways that they inhabit and make sense of the world, what he calls their ‘phytophenomenology’, an extension of ecophenomenological work by scholars such as David Wood.

The game Half-Life, for example, begins with a movie in which Gordon Freeman, the player's avatar, takes a tram ride through the Black Mesa research complex while a voice explains why he is there.