Tag: plants
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Nature Studies
Plants Plants are deceptive. You see them there looking as if once rooted they know their places; not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces. Yet from the way they breed (excuse me!) and twine, from their exhibitionist and rather prolific nature, we must infer a sinister not to say imperialistic…
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Archiving garden sounds
Every time I visit Australia, my home country, my senses are overwhelmed with the smell of native plants and the sound of native animals. The morning after I arrive, I am usually woken by a fury of local bird going about their morning ritual, perched in a tree in the garden just outside my window….
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The Garden Dystopia
The dull necessity of weeding arises, because every healthy plant is a racist and an imperialist; every daisy (even) wishes to establish for itself an Empire on which the sun never sets. — Ian Hamilton Finlay In one of his short stories, Dolce notte (Sweet night), the Italian writer and poet Dino Buzzati…
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![On the Edge [extract]](https://thelearnedpig.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Schermafbeelding-2018-11-20-om-13.11.53.png)
On the Edge [extract]
This is a little story of a garden that lies there, by night, when no one can see it and also at the first light of day The garden lies on an island The island in a sea Between two countries, two continents There, where the East begins and on the other side the West…
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Concrete Music – Artificial Plant – October
Concrete Music over six foot lying on its back damp-worn sides as souvenirs of basement tenure unmoved to the top floor a sun-bleached face now that the upstairs neighbours are rubble ears within shouting distance. With shells, the BLOCK was returned to itself though imprecisely scythed; concrete lines don’t demarcate but are breached…
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INN I DE DYPE SKOGERS FAVN
Epigenetic Memory in the Spruce Tree Foresti covers 37% of Norway’s combined area, almost half of which is made up by the tree species called Norway spruce. The rest consists of mostly pine and birch. It is therefore only natural that spruce forests should feature so heavily on black metal album covers and lyrics. The…
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Apples & Other Languages
Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas to follow. Here, the intangible and the inanimate take on new form: windpipes ‘sound themselves furiously’, a song ‘breaks the ice we stand on’. But…
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Fruiting Bodies in the Forest School
Fungi are unusual. They are easier to define through a process of elimination, by identifying what they are not. They are not animal, mineral or vegetable, but ‘fruiting bodies’, strange forms of life growing out of decay, with their own fecund vocabulary: hymenium, volva, universal veil, inner veil, sporangium, spore, apocethium. Since beginning my artist…
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Epicormic Psychology
The regeneration of Australia’s flora and fauna after fire is swift; or is this just a misconception of a nation’s psyche? The winding trail of sandstone rubble ascends before me through a pocket of dorsal-fin shaped bushland in Lapstone, in Australia’s Blue Mountains. This ecosystem is not granted a name. Even though it…
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The Chernobyl Herbarium
Chernobyl and Plant Life: Silent Witnessing It is incredibly difficult to talk and write about Chernobyl. No serious book on the subject has been able to dodge the task of thinking about the conditions of possibility for thinking in proximity to this theme or this scene. Still before commencing, a work on Chernobyl must first…
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Not Just Fir Christmas
The fir tree has had a part to play in traditional winter festivities across Northern Europe for centuries, and a plaque marks the spot where an evergreen was first displayed in Riga town square as part of Latvia’s New Year celebrations in 1510. Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert is credited with popularising the Christmas tree…