Dark Botany activates the material and sensorial wonder of plants-their energy, their mysterious allure, their capacities and skills, their independent might. In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the Herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages. What one discovers is that herbaria are not static: they are as vital, energetic and enigmatic as the plants in their collections-and as diverse. With contributions by Giovanni Aloi, Matthew Beach, Tamryn Bennett, Edward Colless, Prudence Gibson, Ryan Gordon, Lisa Gorton, Sigi Jöttkandt, Nick Koenig, Verena Kuni, Anna M. Lawrence, Vanessa Lemm, Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deirdre Martin, Arina Melkozernova, Elaine Miller, Jacob Morris, Anna Perdibon, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Georgina Reid, Heather Rogers, Betty Russ, Erica Seccombe, Marie Sierra, Christina Stadlbauer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Bart Vandeput, Juliann Vitullo, Anna Westbrook and Maya Martin-Westheimer. Prudence Gibson is author of The Plant Contract (2028), The Pharmacy of Plants: Janet Laurence (2015) and The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium (2023) in addition to trade books, essays and peer-review papers. Sigi Jöttkandt is Associate Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, and co-founding Director of Open Humanities Press. She is author of Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (2005), First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (2010), and The Nabokov Effect (2024). Anna Westbrook is an interdisciplinary queer feminist storyteller, critic, creative producer, poet, and freelance educator. Her work has been anthologized in Herding Kites (Affirm Press) and online in The Disappearing (Red Room Poetry), and published in harlequin creature (USA), The Bastille (France), Voiceworks, Slit, Scum, Cuttings, Pony, and WQ (Australia). Her debut, Dark Fires Shall Burn (Scribe; 2016), is a literary crime novel exploring the impact of the real-life unsolved murder of a young girl in Newtown in 1946.