Fernando Pessoa identified Alberto Caeiro as his master and as the core of his poetic universe. Caeiro, in turn, chose plants as his masters, their unassuming simplicity and resistance to metaphysical categories an inspiration for his writings. In this article, I analyze Caeiro’s relationship to plants as a proto-phenomenology and as an example of what I call “superficial realism,” an approach to the real that has abandoned the search for depth, considered an obsolete metaphysical construct. I conclude by interpreting Pessoa’s heteronymy and inauthenticity as an example of phytographia, a kind of writing influenced by the plants’ mode of being in the world.
