Food, food culture, food as culture and the cultures that grow our food

Vegetation and art

January 13, 2006


(image: herman’s meadow, copyright herman de vries)

This is an image of a meadow surrounded by farmland. Left to it’s own devices, the meadow has developed it’s own ecology, separate from the agricultural land surrounding it. The meadow is also an artwork by herman de vries, artist/botanist/publisher, who spells his name with small letters on purpose. As a land artist using the natural world as his medium, edible and medicinal plants feature frequently in his oeuvre. In an art in the public space work in the Netherlands, he planted a suburban neighbourhood with more than thirty-six species of heirloom pear and apple trees.

de vries’ work aims to create a heightened awareness with our ‘life-space’. A botanist trained in applied biology, his innovative publications frame natural products such as rose petals, thistledown, barks, mosses and roots, provoke a response far from scientific detachment. Think of an encyclopedaeic herbaria, dripping with passion and scribbles in Sanskrit, and you will have a good idea of his ‘Natural Relations, eine Skizze’. The herbarium includes more than two thousand plants and herbs, collected and logged, but the selection comes from de vries’ own memory! How’s about them apples!

The text below is de vries’ 10 theses on vegetation and art that I plucked from a book titled, ‘Transplant, Living vegetation in contemporary art’, edited by Barbara Nemitz.

vegetation and art
10 theses

* living things should be treated with repsect for their own message.

* nature is our primary reality. the experience of nature is a universal human value. vegetation is the basis of our existence.

*in art, nature becomes revolution.

* bonsai, constricted and malformed trees or plants are not art. they are perversion.

* in dealing wtih vegetation of plants in art, the artist needs in-depth knowledge about what he is working with.

* to bring plants and art together is a challenge for art.

* art in nature is totally superfluous. art can add nothing of significance to nature. the statements of nature are perfect.

* the restoration of natural relationships can be an artistic act.

* in view of what we imagine nature would do without human intervention, a park is, generally speaking, culturally impoverished nature.

* the ideals of the zen garden – asymmetry, simplicity, spontaneity, the absence of formalism – are nowhere as clearly accessible to visual experience as in naturally flourishing vegetation.
what wonderful things are “abandoned lots”, terrain vague, where mugwort, blackberries, thistles and wasteland take over.

– herman de vries

(used without permission from the publication; Transplant, Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art, edited by Barbara Nemitz / Hatje Cantz Publishers, ISBN 3-89322-971-X) www.hatjecantz.de


(image of herman de vries, copyright herman de vries)

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Weedy plot, commuting, cover crops and humble pie

January 11, 2006

People who know me well would never say that I’m a practical woman. Now, all the more so. I’ve left my winter quarters in Occitania to return to the Polar Circle, where paid work is calling. Screaming, really. In gardening there’s a time and a place for everything, and ever since I’ve had this garden, my commuting life-style has forced me to ignore this simple rule of nature and do things at the wrong times. Sunday, I finished turning the earth by hand on both allotments. One hundred and sixty square metres. That’s seven in dog years, carry the three, and if you’re not impressed, I don’t care. I’m totally impressed with myself.

It’s a funny thing in our allotments, all the women are organic gardners, and all the men are not. I don’t know if that corresponds with some kind of hippy statistic, but that’s the way it is. And there’s a great deal of social control, you can’t just let your garden go to pot, just because it’s yours. I decided for this reason to experiment with growing cover crops, a crop just meant to keep out the bad weeds and condition the soil in the process. It’s absolutely unconventional around here, and for this reason, I’d been preparing my neighbour, spending time talking to him about my experiment, to let him get used to the idea.

I’m talking about my very sweet neighbour AlGouche. The one who built the retaining wall/serre without my even asking for it, the one who waters my garden when I’m up north, the one who makes me sit down and eat a lunch of barbequed chicken and wine that he’s prepared on his little fire when he thinks I’m working too hard (il faut manger), the one that feeds his garden little red and blue pills. I’ve been telling him for a week now, that before I leave Occitania, I’m going to plant a crop full of weeds, on purpose. Buckwheat, alfalfa, mustard, soybeans and adzuki beans, not for eating, but to improve the soil composition, keep down the real weeds, and give me an excuse to use that turquoise blue rototiller that we just bought. (I read that each time you use a rototiller you have to add 6% organic material to the soil so as not ruin it’s texture.)

Plants not for eating? Al Gouche shakes his head, and tells me in a Moroccan-Occitanian dialect that I’m meshuggah.

The last days, I turned one hundred and sixty square metres of earth with a spitfork. The men of the allotments, bored out of their skulls with winter-lack-of-work, gather daily at AlGouche’s shed for gossip and beer. That’s ‘man’ for tea and sympathy, I guess. But on Monday, my last day in the garden, before departing for Amsterdam, I was completely shocked to overhear AlGouche defending me to the other men. ‘She’s not planting real weeds, just some plants that will improve the soil.’ My heart lept.

And now I’m praying, and looking at the Occitanian weather report from Amsterdam, that the seeds that I have ever-so-crazily planted in January, and that really is meshuggah, will somehow sprout and thrive, beat the weed-race on my little plot of land, between now and March.

Subsistance farming really is a nerve wracking affair, part-time susbsistance farming, even more so. I keep telling myself that if this experiment doesn’t work, nothing will be wasted but a few handfulls of seeds, one day of planting and a huge amount of pride. Which is expensive. Upon leaving the garden Monday evening, I say a little prayer for all the microbes and the earthworms, hoping they enjoy the oysters shells I crushed into the soil, hoping they enjoy the leaves and rotted corn husks, hoping the little legume seeds will grow, and win the growing race for the most light, water and nutrients. Please little legumes, winter cover crops, fix the nitrates in my soil, and produce as much biomass as you possibly can. I’m counting on you.

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2006 Bloggies, that blog awardish time of year again…

January 7, 2006

Wing-flapping all around! Thanks to the kind folks for nominating culiblog in the 2006 Bloggies. If you want to show your appreciation to the author of your daily dose, you can still nominate culiblog for the categories: best food blog, best under-represented blog (!) or… dare I say it, blog of the year?

But only until the 10th of January, so carpe diem your tochas on over to the 2006 Bloggies. I’ve nominated about thirty of my favourite blogs in the various categories: Doors of Perception weblog, BLDGBLOG, Pruned and FutureFeeder, to name just a few. In the food blog category, I’m keeping my nominations shtum for the time being. Well, as shtum as one can be with the linkage in the flanks of my blog…

debra at 13:55 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

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