On Feb. 28, Professor Jess Gersony opened the Spring 2025 Bulb Show at the Smith College Botanic Garden with an hour-long lecture on drought. Her slides highlighted bleak statistics on climate change and rapidly depleting Northeastern water sources — but they also showcased student sculptures, collages and poems. At the end of the talk, students from Gersony’s Plant Physiology lab cheered and led the crowd in a standing ovation.
Gersony isn’t your typical scientist. She’s a performer, poet and plant physiologist — in that order. She’s danced in professional tap companies, and she’s been writing poetry for years. “I was an artist first,” she says, “that was very much my driving identity.”
In October, Gersony spoke with me about the art-forward way that she approaches scientific inquiry. With her craft, she engages a different kind of audience than typical research publications do. In the rapidly changing Northeast climate, creative ways of interpreting the environment could be the key to understanding — and protecting — our local landscape.
On Friday, Gersony read from her chapbook “I Could Collect a Lake,” published by Bottlecap Press in 2023. “It’s about plants, and water, and also queerness, and how those three things interact,” she says. “Most of what I write about is related to water, more so than plants, because our lab thinks about water so much. And what it means to hold on to water, that’s a question that’s both poetically and scientifically very interesting to me.”
Gersony leads the PLACE lab at Smith: short for PLant physiology, Art and Community Engagement, the cohort researches the effects of global climate change on trees of the Northeast, anticipating less water and more struggling species in the coming years. And right now, the lab’s work is crucial.
Mass. is in the midst of a statewide water crisis. The entire Commonwealth is suffering some level of drought — from significant to critical, according to the Commonwealth of Mass. This past fall, NBC10 Boston reported on brush fires that swept the state, and despite recent snowfall, there still isn’t enough water on the ground. Biologists like Gersony are trying to piece together what a repeated pattern of dryness, beyond just this winter, could mean for our local environment.
“Drought is projected to get worse in the future,” Gersony explains. “So we’re trying to understand how plants will tolerate that stress through looking at a few different forms of functioning.”
Gersony’s past research has investigated the way that plants store their energy when they’re saving up for tough conditions, like winter frost. How that storage changes depends on climatic factors, such as drought. She explained her research, and the work of the PLACE lab to advance it, in her recent talk.
“We’re looking across species of Northeastern trees, and figuring out whose xylem can tolerate more stress,” she says. The xylem are what Gersony calls “the transport pipes of the plant,” moving water up a tree’s trunk. “If we can figure that out, we can have a better understanding of who will be more resilient to climate change. And that will inform forest managers who are on the ground trying to figure out how to manage forests in the Northeast.”
Gersony’s research is important as New England gets drier and warmer. But the end goal isn’t to share that information strictly with fellow scientists, or to confine study to the walls of a laboratory. The PLACE lab might, as Gersony says, “[investigate] which trees can tolerate drought the best, figure that out, publish some papers about it, and present that data at conferences.” But they also find out-of-the-box ways to communicate plant life and death to a wider audience. Poems, vlogs, collages, paintings and zines are just a few examples of the work they’ve produced. Last year, the lab created an exhibit for Smith Arts Day, and Gersony says they plan to do it again.
“We actually just had our lab meeting,” Gersony says. “And the theme of the lab meeting was art. We have so much science going on, that we’ve had no time for art. We’re all excited about the science, but I’m like, ‘wait! We have to come back to our grounding forces! We also care about art and communication and community engagement, and we need to spend time thinking about what that will look like.’”
Through their artistic interpretations, members of the PLACE lab are able to connect with community members who otherwise feel isolated from jargon-filled papers, written primarily for other scientists to understand. Interacting with the work from Gersony’s lab, somebody who reads a poem or watches a short film about oak trees in Western Mass. might be able to get plant physiology in a way that they weren’t able to before — to become invested in the plant life that surrounds them, in the same way that a biologist in the field does. The work also allows biologists to interpret their quantitative data emotionally, providing an artistic and exploratory outlet for heavy research.
Unfortunately, the institutions supporting researchers don’t always see it that way. “I think it’s becoming more and more accepted,” Gersony says, “but I don’t have a ton of models for it, which is tricky. But it’s also really fun. We’re just making it up.”
Gersony attributes much of her ability to combine art with science to a grant awarded to her by the National Science Foundation. “I owe it to the taxpayers who funded that. I have to be making art. That was in the grant,” she says.
There are more scientists who practice an art form, Gersony insists, even within the Smith faculty. Through opportunities like the Arts Afield Program, faculty are being given the chance to integrate concepts from opposite corners of campus. If more were encouraged to do so, Gersony says, understanding between artists and scientists might change.
Gersony’s lab is beginning to bridge that gap. “I just really believe in the importance of engaging with different ways of knowing and not living in our departmental ways of thinking, or disciplinary ways of thinking,” she explains. “And it’s just really helpful for me to engage with all these different projects, too, as a human more than as a scientist. And so I’m trying to think about how to expand what we mean when we say we know truth, or we know something about the natural world.”
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