Rooted in place.
Held in relations.

About Sammie

Hi, I'm Sammie Yang—a high-school senior, a curious traveler, and someone who has never been very good at sitting still.

Ever since I was little, I've loved walking, jumping, and exercising. I love heading somewhere new, taking the long way around, and seeing where my feet—and my thoughts—take me. Moving helps me think; sometimes a question feels a little clearer after a good walk.

I'm also a committed volunteer. I've taken part in different kinds of volunteer work in different places, and I care about showing up, listening, and helping where I can. Volunteering is another way I get to know people and the places they call home.

Over the past two summers, I've carried that curiosity into fieldwork in Danba Zhonglu Village, Sichuan, Tibetan Plateau. Roots and Relations Lab is my way of exploring the connections between plants, people, and everyday life—and sharing the questions that keep me looking, listening, and wandering.

What the Lab explores

Through Roots and Relations Lab, I bring together plant portraits, spoken accounts, field observations, and drawings. I want to understand how people come to know the plants around them, and how that knowledge moves through households, landscapes, and generations.

Danba Zhonglu Village is where I spent the past two summers doing fieldwork, and it is the starting point for this project. My current essays also draw on reference materials, with narrators and page references kept alongside their accounts.

Read the collection introduction

Listening to local knowledge

Plant names carry histories that do not always fit a botanical catalogue. I retain the local names recorded in the reference materials and credit the people who shared their accounts. Where a source does not establish a scientific identification, I leave that question open.

I present accounts of healing and ritual as cultural records of the narrators’ experiences and beliefs, rather than instructions for treatment or foraging.

The reference collections

Credits & editorial approach

I write and edit this project as Sammie Yang. The English essays adapt reference materials, with individual narrators credited alongside their accounts. Archive images retain their collection and page references; the two photographs above are from my personal collection.

I distinguish reference accounts and illustrations from my own fieldwork. I do not treat their specific plant identities and community practices as independently verified findings from Danba Zhonglu Village. My reflections develop the details of those accounts without adding new field testimony.

For the structure of this project, I took inspiration from the Plant Humanities Lab. Roots and Relations Lab is an independent project.