Renata Sõukand, the Estonian ethnobotanist in Venice, on plants, memory and home
Estonian ethnobotanist Renata Sõukand, an associate professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, studies what societies remember through plants – and what they lose when that knowledge is broken; in Venice, she spoke to Estonian World about Soviet rule, foraging, artificial intelligence, Ukraine, and why the future of local knowledge may depend on something as simple as taking your grandmother into the woods.
For Sõukand, the story begins not in a laboratory or lecture hall, but in the forest. Long before she became one of the most cited scholars of Estonian local knowledge, she was a child roaming freely among trees, watching her mother collect medicinal plants and beginning, without yet knowing it, to notice how fragile such knowledge can be.
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5/25/2026 6:39:00 AM