The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: gardens

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Garden Dystopia

    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…

  • How to see climate through plants

    How to see climate through plants

    Sensory-visual notes across three greenhouse rooms at Brooklyn’s Botanical Gardens This past August in Berlin, I joined 10 other Perennial Institute participants for an all-day excursion to the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Gardens as part of a week-long programme together exploring creativity through the lens of plants. After touring the garden’s extensive greenhouses, the artist Shota Nakamura…

  • On the Edge [extract]

    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…

  • Plant Migrations

    Plant Migrations

    With human civilisation comes ecological engineering. Over 10,000 years we have changed the world in increasingly dramatic ways. Many of these changes have been deliberate. Many have been the unintended consequences of our unquenchable curiosity and our anthropocentric thinking. How soon did early modifications of grasses in the fertile crescent of our imagination become commodities?…

  • Beauty and Revolution / A Token of Concrete Affection

    Beauty and Revolution / A Token of Concrete Affection

    Now is the time to visit Cambridge if you’re a fan of concrete poetry. At Kettle’s Yard is Beauty and Revolution, an exhibition of work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, while the Centre of Latin American Studies plays host to a group exhibition entitled A Token of Concrete Affection. Both are furnished from the private collection…

  • Phytology

    Phytology

    “And though thou seemst a weedling wild – Wild and neglected like to me – Thou still art dear to nature’s child And I will stoop to notice thee For oft like thee, in wild retreat, Arrayed in humble garb like thee, There’s many a seeming weed proves sweet As sweet as garden flowers can…