The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Garden Voices

  • Paradise Past

    Paradise Past

    In The Land of Black Gold (which is part of the collection of Tintin books and happens to be one of my favorites) there is an episode where Thomson and Thompson are traveling through the desert and they come upon a set of tire tracks in the sand and they follow them believing that it…

  • Un(in)tended Garden

    Un(in)tended Garden

    Notes on that which grows without us Urbs en Horto – City in a Garden – that is my town’s motto.  To its architects, this was a matter of greenspace and planned esplanades sprinkled throughout the sprawl of a relentless grid. To me, it is more a statement of symmetry, if not synonymity, in the…

  • 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…

  • Growing in Greece

    Growing in Greece

    A-1 Publishers introduces its publications on Moria Refugee Camp: two selections The garden is alive, taking root. As the plants grow, they meet other travellers. Some come here to talk, calling those near and far in languages familiar and new. Others come here to recline, to relax during the hottest hours of the day amidst…

  • The Garden as Form

    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…

  • 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…

  • The Book of Feral Flora [extract]

    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…

  • Feral Phytocracy

    Feral Phytocracy

    Vegetal Apparitions for the 21st Century Late May, about a month into my three-month residency at the Nida Art Colony (NAC) in Lithuania, a thought from my incessant internal monologue stopped me dead in my tracks. As most afternoons, if the swarms of mosquitoes permitted, I had been wandering along the sandy paths criss-crossing the…

  • Gardens Speak

    Gardens Speak

    The Political Performance of Mourning Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation based on the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in gardens across Syria during the first two years of the uprising. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories,…

  • Nature Studies

    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…

  • Archiving garden sounds

    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….