Planting begins the visible commitment of a new crop, requiring suitable soil, timing, spacing, and trust in future conditions. It can be performed by hand or machine, but in either form it embodies hope joined to labour. In poetry, planting often symbolises beginnings, intention, parenthood, memory, and investment in a future one may not live to see. The act can also carry political or spiritual meaning, suggesting that ideas, communities, or virtues are established gradually and must be tended after their first introduction.

Planting includes placing seed, bulbs, tubers, or young plants in prepared soil. It differs from sowing, which usually refers specifically to distributing seed. In poetry, planting represents intentional beginnings, hope, inheritance, and work undertaken for a future harvest. Planting trees can imply faith in generations yet unborn. Related terms include sowing, seed, seedling, transplanting, orchard, crop, row, furrow, cultivation, and germination.