Plants, for early modern people, were a locus of meaning and knowledge production that provoked some of their most profound questions about embodiment, the ontological permeability and limits of human bodies, and the diffusion of sentience in the natural world. The many appearances plants make in the literature and science of the period often complicate the Aristotelian hierarchy of human-animal-plant. In this essay I posit a practice in early modern literature, not of anthropomorphism (a charge that could be, and has been, levelled at Shakespeare, whose plays I consider) but of botanomorphism, according to which humans or human characters are endowed with the characteristics, physical and ontological, of plants, in a kind of extreme metaphor. I focus on Richard II but turn briefly to The Winter’s Tale, examining metaphors that suggest deep relations between human and vegetable. In both plays, the characters take on qualities of vegetable life, as imagined in a necessarily limited human way. Early moderns understood human ontology to be comprised of or to intersect at least partly with vegetable ontology, arguably making plants fundamental to human identity. I submit that these plays are partly about what it means to be a plant. Metaphor was understood not only as an artificial or discursive construct, but also, at times, as an indicator of material reality.