The heart was once a plant

I read something recently that I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about.

Apparently the heart symbol may originally have come from the seed of an ancient plant called silphium.

An actual plant rather than a symbolic idea of the heart.

Silphium grew around Cyrene, in present-day Libya, and became one of the most prized plants in the ancient world. The Greeks and later the Romans used it medicinally and economically, while it also became associated with love, desire and contraception. The shape of its seed appeared on coins centuries before the modern heart symbol became attached to romance.

Eventually the plant disappeared.

Overharvested, badly managed and unable to survive the loss of ecological knowledge that had sustained it for generations, silphium became extinct — or at least was believed extinct for nearly two thousand years.

I ended up reading far more about ancient agriculture and Roman trade routes than I had intended to late one evening when I should probably have gone to sleep.

Something about the story kept resurfacing afterwards.

Partly because there is something deeply strange about one of the world’s most recognisable symbols of love possibly originating from a plant people harvested into extinction. Partly because the story feels uncomfortably familiar once you start thinking about the systems modern societies still build around extraction.

Attention extracted by platforms. Housing extracted by speculative markets. Workers extracted by cultures that quietly reward exhaustion and availability as signs of value. Nature extracted faster than ecosystems can repair themselves.

I also found myself thinking about how easily societies separate emotion from systems, or culture from ecology, when in practice they constantly shape one another.

We inherit symbols long after forgetting the conditions that produced them, and public institutions sometimes feel similar. Language connected to community, belonging, participation or care continues circulating widely even when the relationships and social conditions that once gave those words weight have become far more fragile.

One detail about silphium especially held my attention. Apparently the plant struggled to reproduce without careful cultivation. Pollination depended on ecological relationships people may not have fully understood scientifically, although they had learned through practice and stewardship how to protect them.

As Roman trade expanded, the plant increasingly became treated as a resource to extract rather than part of a wider ecological relationship people had sustained over generations. Eventually the balance supporting silphium collapsed.

The story kept reminding me of tensions that feel increasingly visible now. Economies reward mobility while people search for rootedness. Technologies promise connection while loneliness rises. Institutions become more efficient while many people feel less visible inside them.

At the same time, there also seems to be a growing appetite for experiences that feel grounded, tangible and socially real.

You can feel it in repair cafés, community gardens, local food projects, walking groups, co-operatives and neighbourhood spaces, alongside the quiet popularity of places where people can spend time together without feeling pressured to buy something constantly.

I thought about conversations I’ve had with neighbourhood groups trying to hold onto community spaces that always seemed one funding cut away from disappearing. Many of those conversations were ostensibly about buildings or budgets, although underneath them sat anxieties about whether places still existed where people could form relationships slowly enough for trust and mutual support to grow.

Sometimes it feels as though people are searching for ways back into forms of connection that modern life steadily thins out — relationships with places, neighbours, the physical world and even parts of themselves that become harder to hear inside permanently accelerated lives.

The rediscovery of a possible surviving relative of silphium in Anatolia interested me partly because it disrupted the idea that disappearance is always final or complete.

Seeds survive in strange places sometimes, just as forms of solidarity, care and imagination can remain dormant for long periods before conditions allow them to grow again.

I increasingly think public services are wrestling with versions of this question too, although we rarely describe it in these terms.

How do institutions do more than process people efficiently? How do they help sustain the conditions that allow people to trust one another enough to build things together again? How do public systems avoid consuming the very relationships they depend upon? And how do we recover forms of ecological, communal and emotional knowledge that older systems dismissed because they did not appear sufficiently measurable or modern?

There was a line in the piece describing silphium as “the lovers’ plant”.

I’m still not entirely sure what I think the story means, although I found myself returning afterwards to the idea that love and stewardship may overlap more than modern societies often acknowledge, particularly when something fragile depends on people paying close enough attention for it to keep living.