Where plant personalities are sharing their folklore and science, connecting you to the world of plants
The Book Series: Letters from Elceti
Letters from Elceti is a book series where every word is written by the plants themselves.
There are 28 chapters across the book — seven plants, one letter per season
Each plant writes to you four times across the natural year, and what they share changes with the season. In spring you might find a plant emerging from the ground, cautious and curious. In summer, abundant and generous. In autumn, preparing and reflecting. In winter, resting — or watching.
Every letter reveals where a plant is from, the land it calls home, the cultural traditions that shaped it, the science that explains it, and the ways it has helped — and been helped by — humans throughout history. You discover their relationships with each other: the friendships, the rivalries, the debts and loyalties built across centuries of growing alongside one another.
Each of the seven plants comes from a distinct place in the Elceti — their own land, their own cultural anchor, their own history.
Together they form a community. A world called Elceti.
Where health knowledge becomes friendships and rivalries, cultural traditions become personal stories and complex science becomes conversations we'll never forget.
What is Ethnobotany?
Ethnobotany is the study of the relationship between people and plants — how cultures around the world have grown, used, named, feared, celebrated, and been shaped by the botanical world across centuries. It sits at the intersection of science, history, anthropology, and ecology. It asks not just what does this plant do but what has this plant meant — to healers, to farmers, to poets, to grandmothers, to entire civilisations.
Why everything we create is rooted in seasonal thinking.
Plants do not experience time the way we do. They live in alignment with the natural year — emerging, flowering, fruiting, resting, and beginning again. Every process has its season. Every season has its purpose.
At Elceti we believe there is something quietly radical about returning to that rhythm. Not as a lifestyle trend, but as a genuine framework for understanding the world. When you learn why a plant behaves the way it does in winter, or what a spring emergence actually means, you start to see the natural year differently.
You start to see yourself within it.
That is why everything we create is rooted in seasonal thinking.
Why Elceti exists?
This all started with a feeling that something had gone wrong with the way we talk about plants, health, and cultural tradition.
Somewhere along the way, health became a performance of self-improvement. Cultural knowledge became content. Ancient traditions became trends stripped of their context. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the message quietly became: you are broken, and this plant will fix you.
That never sat right.
The knowledge was never the problem — the framing was. Because when you actually sit with ethnobotany, when you follow a plant back through centuries of human relationship, what you find isn't a list of benefits. You find stories. You find people. You find a world that was always more connected than we remembered.
Letters from Elceti exists to tell those stories differently. Not as instructions. Not as content. As characters worth knowing, in a world worth visiting.
Because a curious child — or the curious child still living in any of us — deserves better than clickbait.