Seven Plants for a Herbarium
Andrée Chedid
'I thought I loved the sunflower for its fiery mane, its sturdy stem, its broad head turned towards the sun. And for Van Gogh.'
Andrée Chedid was a French poet and novelist born in Cairo in 1920 to Lebanese and Syrian parents. She settled in Paris after 1946, and composed in French the bulk of her literary work, though her roots and sensibility remained deeply transnational. The present volume, Seven Plants for a Herbarium, first published in 1985 by Éditions Folle Avoine, stands as a curious yet quietly significant work within her vast and varied oeuvre – short, witty, botanical, and just slightly off the beaten path of her better-known poetry and fiction.
Although Chedid published more than forty volumes of poetry, numerous novels, plays and children’s books, this particular collection occupies a distinctive, liminal space: a micro-herbarium of seven poems, each centred on a plant, each combining botanical observation with human metaphor and light irony. It is not one of her major prize-winning tomes, yet precisely because of its brevity, its botanical scheme and its tone of gentle humour, it deserves reconsideration and preservation. In this new 2026 edition, richly illustrated with the very plants she evokes, the book is brought out from obscurity into fresh visibility.
Chedid’s biography helps situate this text. Born Andrée Saab in Cairo, she grew up in a multilingual milieu, educated in French schools and at the American University in Cairo, before relocating to France. Her heritage – Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian-French – inflected a lifelong attention to identity, exile, belonging and the human condition. Her poetry is characterised by spare, luminous language, always alert to suffering, hope, the everyday and the transcendent.
Seven Plants for a Herbarium manifests a slight departure from her more familiar concerns of war, diaspora and human suffering; instead it invites the reader into a garden of metaphor – truly a herbarium of sorts – where the vegetable, the flower, the root and the blade of grass become avatars of human life, labour, desire, resilience. The poems, though playful, are textured with Chedid’s humanistic concerns: labour and gender in “Cotton”, the self-reflexive critique of poetic cliché in “The Rose”, the quietly revolutionary endurance of “The Blade of Grass”.
In the landscape of Francophone Middle-Eastern writing, the book illustrates how a poet born by the Nile, rooted in Levantine traditions, working in French, turned outward toward the world – not just in grand thematic concerns of exile and war, but in the tender gesture of attending to a plant, a root, a blade of grass. The sequence invites reflection: what does it mean to cherish a gourd or ginger root? What labour, what nourishment, what metaphor? And in asking these questions, Chedid returns to her abiding concerns: the body, the world, hope, endurance.
This edition, then, does not seek to re-appraise Chedid’s major legacy; rather it seeks to preserve for posterity one of her more delicate and under-read texts, to remind us that the poet who wrote of war and suffering could also smile at a zucchini and find in a sunflower’s seeds the echo of art-and-life. Seven Plants for a Herbarium thus occupies a special place in her oeuvre, on its own terms, and distinctly on Chedid’s own, too: light, witty, botanical – and quietly profound. May this new edition bring it back into readership, and may readers of Chedid discover in these seven plants a garden of many more pathways.
In “The Squash” she writes of the bloated, pot-bellied gourd, “more calabash than edible … makes me laugh,” before admiring the courgette’s “sunny dwarf” flight. The tone is light, self-aware, humorous – but the metaphor remains human: the body, appetite, desire, dismissal. In “The Orchid, The Chrysanthemum” she resists both the exotic opulence of the orchid and the funerary stiffness of the chrysanthemum; the botanical becomes the social. In “Cotton” she evokes arid soil, women and children gathering the fibre, men clothed in its fabric – labour, modesty and universality quietly interwoven. The sequence culminates with “The Blade of Grass”, anonymous, unremarkable, yet pushing through rock and paving stones, “mends me with hope!” – and finally “The Sunflower”, which begins with familiar admiration and deepens into an appreciation of utility, transformation and kinship with artichoke cousins.
The title, Seven Plants for a Herbarium, reveals Chedid’s quietly modest ambition: to gather, specimen-like, seven living things and allow them to speak. A herbarium traditionally collects pressed plants as archival specimens; Chedid presses metaphor, humour, human presence, into each specimen. This is not heavy thematic weight but light allegory with weight. It aligns with her broader poetics: minimal, tactile, alert to the ordinary while courting the transcendent.
That the volume has remained relatively obscure may stem from its scale and tone – smaller, more playful, less overtly political than, say, Cérémonial de la violence (1976) or Le Message (2000). And yet this very modesty is the reason this new edition is necessary: to restore to circulation a text that shows Chedid in a playful guise, attentive to nature, metaphor and subtle human reflection. The illustrations in this edition, insert-facsimiles of those of the original, emphasises the botanical dimension, and invites readers to linger. It stands as a complement to her major works, a companion piece rather than a detour.
January 2026
Japanese Hand-Sewn Paperback
148.5 x 210 mm – 36pp, 6 insert illustrations
+ Insert – 105 x 148.5mm – 8pp