Some plants do not stay on their side of it.
Field Notes
We tend to imagine plants as the quiet beginning of the food chain: rooted, passive, and waiting to be eaten. Then a pitcher plant appears—a leaf reshaped into a trap that lures and digests insects and, on rare occasions, even small rodents. It is still a plant, still photosynthesizing, but it is also taking nutrients from an animal body. Veganism is a human ethical choice, not a rule the rest of nature follows, yet this makes the categories feel much less tidy. What else have we divided too neatly simply because it helps us understand the world?