The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: plants

  • (on)zichtbaar

    (on)zichtbaar

    “If we open our eyes and look further, we realize a mistake has been made, and the wrong story has been told.” Words: Marloe Mens. Photography: Kiki Muyres.

  • Observation Journal

    Observation Journal

    In WWII, Nazis and Soviets fought for control over a seed collection. Now, artist Sergey Kishchenko plants fields to reconstruct these forgotten histories.

  • Farming Awareness

    Farming Awareness

    Visionary Farms In 1969, House & Garden magazine commissioned Patricia Johanson (b. 1940) to design estate gardens. In the letter inviting her to design gardens, landscape architect James Fanning clearly anticipated her using gravel, water, concrete blocks, wood or metal, rather than the natural materials her gardens deploy. When one examines the nearly 150 drawings…

  • Kenyan Roses for the Kingdom

    Kenyan Roses for the Kingdom

    During a residency in London in 2019, I developed a research and artistic project around the cut rose industry in Kenya. This was linked to on the one hand to the biography of wildlife activist Joan Root and on the other to past British colonial entanglements that are nevertheless still valid and problematic until today….

  • Earth Turned Honey

    Earth Turned Honey

      Moksha The desert has no memory. Sun beats on its chest, collarbone glistens: I wait for rain, an angry sea filling the sky to break, blow, burn, make a new world order. Agave pierces clouds while amethyst mountains rest in heavy sleep. I have asked permission to make this desolate ground my home. Beneath…

  • Dicksonia Antarctica

    Dicksonia Antarctica

      The Tree Fern I once had a Tree Fern (Dicksonia Antarctica) For many, many years my First view each morning From our upstairs window. Beautiful, sweeping fronds So elegant in light breeze. I took care each winter to Wrap the crown, protect From frost and bitter winds. One spring it still stood tall Yet…

  • A Foraged Map

    A Foraged Map

    Spread over my kitchen table, emptied from the various cloth bags and tubs, were the wild plants that I’d gathered that day. As I viewed them from above, deliberating as to what kind of meal I could make that would include them all, the array of textures conspired to suggest a visual record of the…

  • Living Symphonies

    Living Symphonies

    Between Liverpool Street and Chingford, the heatwave had cooked the train carriage and all who rode in her to fetid ripeness. On the other side of the parting doors, the air thickened with an elegant stink. Gutsy lilies dressed in flouncy ribbon-tied bouquets languished in buckets of water just beyond the ticket barriers, insistent that…

  • Notes from the Field

    Notes from the Field

    An amateur entomological and botanical study in four locations, at five different times of day, by artist Anna Garrett.

  • Unravelling Gardens

    Unravelling Gardens

    Along the Ijssel, a river that partly forms the border between the two eastern provinces Gelderland en Overijssel in the Netherlands, one can find a beautiful biodynamic garden known as De Oosterwaarde. For over a timespan of twenty-five years, its farmers have been growing all sorts of vegetables and have recently dedicated a part of…

  • Gardening in the Tropics

    Gardening in the Tropics

        Brief Lives Gardening in the Tropics, you never know what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones. In some places they say when volcanoes erupt, they spew out dense and monumental as stones the skulls of desaparecidos – the disappeared ones. Mine is only a kitchen garden so I unearth just occasional skeletons. The…