Why have our writers, artists, thinkers and scholars been compelled to turn their attention towards the ‘plant script’ in the last one hundred years? Beginning from Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘torulipi’ – literally the plant script, through which he hoped plants would write their autobiography – and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the ‘language of flowers’ to poets writing about the syntax of the falling of leaves to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants or creating a ‘tree alphabet’, I shall speak about the quest for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.