The Gardener's Construction of Nature in "The Sensitive Plant"

After reading Shelly’s “The Sensitive Plant,” I couldn’t help but think that the he is making a critique of the act of tending to a garden as an authentic experience with nature. Upon the death of the lady who tends to the garden, it almost immediately falls into utter ruin. In Part 3 of the poem, the garden is overrun with weeds, toadstools, and the like. As I see it, these are simply the parts of nature which the gardener has selected as undeserving of a place in her garden based on her constructed ideals of beauty and nature. We are told that “…the gusty winds waked the winged seeds,/Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,/Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem,/Which rotted into the earth with them” (212-215). Although Percy makes it seem unnatural and destroying nature’s “beauty,” this rotting is in reality part and parcel of natural processes.

The woman who tended to the garden has constructed her own definition of what constitutes nature. This definition creates an environment for the plants which, Robert Maniquis nicely defines in his article “The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism,” as “solipsistic isolation” (145). This woman defines nature as that which she allows to grow and flourish inside of her garden, but in reality nature in its truest form appears only appears after her death. Nature, therefore, is not something which humans should attempt to control in order to experience authentically, nor should it be something so delicate as needing the constant tending to of a human.