Are plants stuff? Contemporary North Americans often see environmental resources as the materials for creating stuff, such as furniture, food and clothing, rather than stuff itself. British colonists, however, did not clearly distinguish between nature and useful object. My term, “lived botany,” captures how non-elite settlers used tactile and material cultural ways of knowing to analyze plants. Settlers believed plants were divinely designed as proto-stuff whose physical properties suggested their ultimate utility after transformation within the household. They identified plants by comparing them to objects. Through lived botany, settlers sought to translate indigenous knowledge into forms of information that were familiar to Europeans. Settlers’ lived botany provided data to local elites participating in transatlantic scientific networks, but it primarily aided settler families whose prosperity dispossessed indigenous peoples, turning lived botany into a destructive knowledge.