Tag: writing
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The Garden as Form
This is not your garden-variety reflection on gardens. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to think about gardens, at a carefully calibrated distance thinking requires, because our minds are awash with positive, sentimental, and nostalgically inflected cultural associations with these cultivated, carefully manicured green spaces. Forests connote danger and darkness, disorientation and wild life, both…
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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…
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![The Book of Feral Flora [extract]](https://thelearnedpig.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/0033-1.jpg)
The Book of Feral Flora [extract]
I planted a garden and removed the weeds because they were getting too tall and too abundant. Some were choking my other plants and some smelled of decaying spinach or mint. Then when summer came I noticed lichens (plants that eat light and nothing more) growing on the trunks of my fruit trees like tiny…
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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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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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Editorial: Tuin Stemmen (Garden Voices)
Situated in the small town of Hummelo in the east of the Netherlands is the private garden of the renown Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, that poignantly reflects his usual loosely planted meadow style. The surrounding landscape is however a characteristic polder: flat and wet. Walking into the garden of Oudolf is like entering a…
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The Look Away
Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…
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We Were Strangers
A friend of mine passed away a few months ago and, although we were never especially close, his death affected me deeply. For a time afterwards I found myself impelled, on my lunch breaks, to leave the office block in central Manchester where I work and spend an hour walking – briskly yet purposelessly –…
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Unsent Letter to an Old Art Teacher
Dear Adrian, I’m not drawing anymore. There, I’ve said it. I didn’t become an artist like you always said I could. I write stories now instead. I have always wanted to write a story for you in fact, but no matter how many times I try, or think of trying, I never seem to strike…
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Beggars, Sinners, and Barbeque
Honeysuckles line the drive as you ramble down our old gravel road and pull into the front yard. Past the rose bushes and satsuma trees, the first thing you see is an oak stretching its great arms over the addition daddy built with his own two hands and a series of pickup trucks and beater…
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Pig Dreams Pig Life
In some dreams we are dead. It is never a surprise. Life doesn’t last long after all. Someone did ask, what is a life? Does it feel like something? Is it solid or a shadow? Comfortable? Forgiveable? ‘A pig is an unlikely bird’, grunted a pig. It couldn’t speak the answers and it wanted to…