Ringing in my ears are the words “this is the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime” - the sub-heading of this post - a quote taken from a briefing on extreme weather by Prof Hayley Fowler for the National Emergency Briefing. As Fowler says in her briefing, “I’ll let that sink in.”

With these crazily high temperatures we’re having and records being broken yet again, my thoughts returned to a screening of the film of this briefing, which I caught at the beginning of this month

The film, People’s Emergency Briefing, is presented by Chris Packham and is a condensed, accessible account (designed for community screenings) of the National Emergency Briefing that took place in London in November last year, where experts set out the evidence on the climate and nature crisis and the positive responses available to us.

The unseasonable heat (and some disagreements) of this week prompted me to go and watch the recordings of the briefings in full.

Here are some (of the many) points from the briefings that caught my attention:

• Heatwaves in Europe are intensifying faster than anywhere in the world and faster than climate models predict.

• If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels, the temperature will just keep rising. The idea that we cut fossil fuel use doesn’t help. We have to eliminate fossil fuels, or the temperatures will just keep going up.

• Collectively, the top 1% of global emitters [including many of us reading this post] have lifestyles that give rise to twice the level of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• We need urgent legislation to drive down energy use within high income, high emitters group. We need fair and deep reductions in energy use. This means we have got to move the resources and labour that furnish the private luxury of a relative few of us to the public well-being for all. To a future of private sufficiency and public luxury.

• We are one of the most nature depleted nations on the planet. The UK ranks in the bottom 10% of countries globally on the biodiversity intactness index, with only about half of our biodiversity remaining. 1 in 6 of our wildlife species is at risk of extinction. Only 14% of our rivers are in good ecological health. Only 7% of our woodlands are in good ecological health.

• The Office for Environmental Protection warns that the Government is largely off track on almost every target set under the Environment Act.

• Right now, billions in public and private finance flows into activities that degrade soils, pollute rivers and destroy habitats. We have to end these subsidies, strengthen enforcement, and apply a simple universal test to spending and investment: Does this harm the biosphere or can it help it?

• We need to create an economy that values nature not as a resource to extract, but as a partner in prosperity. We have to stop funding its destruction, invest in its repair, and make it the foundation of our economic and security strategy.

• We need to redirect finance and measure what actually matters to us.

• We need a great food transformation built on four main pillars: shifting to plant-rich diets, reducing food waste, improving production and increasing climate resilience. One of these pillars is much bigger than the others: a shift to healthy, plant-rich diets. We’ve got to place the focus on eating high fibre whole food plants for the sake of our own health and for the planet’s health.

• It is too late for non-radical futures. The choice is between a deep, rapid and fair decarbonisation of modern society - a relatively organised technical and social revolution - or ongoing rhetoric and delay as temperatures become dangerous for all - leading to revolutionary scales of change that will be chaotic and violent.

I would really urge, for anyone who cares about people and planet and a liveable future, to watch the briefings in full for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6b0HBZ3v-IkuFdfsieHeQVvo2rDWoADE

Each briefing is around 12 minutes long and there are nine in total (on nature, climate, extreme weather, tipping points, food security, health, national security, economics and energy transition).

Or you can find community screenings of the People’s Emergency Briefing film on this map here:

https://www.nebriefing.org/screening-map

Chris Packham has also launched a petition for the government to hold a UK-wide briefing on the climate and nature crisis here if you’d like to sign. If it reaches 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in Parliament:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/767687

It’s hard to tackle problems if we don’t face them. Having information is key to us making better decisions, individually and collectively.

The science and data is there, the evidence of what people are experiencing is there, and the ideas for what we can do are there too. As Professor Hayley Fowler says in her briefing on extreme weather, “what we need is the courage to commit to urgent action”.

What can I do?

You can find a multitude of ways you can take action here:

https://www.nebriefing.org/take-action

Have you watched the film and/or the briefings? If you have, I’d be interested to hear what hit home for you the most. What action, if any, you have been propelled to take? And how have you, your home and your garden been fairing in this heat?

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Olive trees growing in containers is a common sight in any wealthy city and in many high-end private gardens. The most desirable, the most valuable, are ancient trees whose age gives them great visual character and pedigree. Unlike most garden plants, these have not been grown in nurseries; they come from Mediterranean olive groves where they were planted hundreds of years ago as part of an indigenous agricultural practice. They have been dug up, transported across the world and sold to become decorative features of luxury gardens, restaurants or corporate headquarters. They are extraordinary creatures, and I find myself wondering over the journey that has brought them to these unfamiliar climes.

Over decades I have been an appalled witness to the campaign of the Israeli state against the residents of Gaza and the West Bank. One of the tactics I, as a gardener, have found particularly shocking is the seemingly wanton destruction of Palestinian olive trees by Israeli soldiers and settlers. This essay considers how these two stories are linked.

Alongside the destruction, veteran olive trees in Gaza and the West Bank have long been pillaged. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported over ten years ago on the illegal removal of olive trees from the West Bank, commenting that ‘the immoral wealthy have a new and tasteless toy: ancient olive trees adorning the gardens of their villas…. Many trees have been stolen from their owners in the territories, and in other cases, heavy pressure is brought to bear on Palestinian farmers to sell their trees, taking advantage of their powerlessness and making huge profits at their expense.’ The Daily Telegraph, no less, reported on the illegal uprooting of olive trees associated with the construction of the security fence on the West Bank border, which were then sold by contractors or even government officials to ‘rich Israelis and town councils, sometimes for thousands of pounds each.’

The trade in veteran olives is extremely lucrative. Buying and selling old olive trees is big business. At a time when globalisation and climate change are putting immense pressure on traditional small-scale farming, especially around the Mediterranean, those premium prices can be hard to resist. In the UK, one importer is currently advertising an ancient olive tree from Elche in Spain, estimated to be up to 1000 years old and with a weight of 7 tons, for sale for £54,000 plus specialist transport and crane hire.

I have not come across evidence that Palestinian olive trees are ending up in London gardens, but given their resale value, it would be surprising if they were not moved across borders to where the highest prices are paid. There is almost no information on the provenance of these trees on the websites advertising them for sale. Most of the dealers profess to obtain trees from southern Europe but even this is in essence a colonialist project given the huge economic disparity between the wealthy north and marginal areas such as southern Spain, Sicily or Greece: in Portugal where average income is £19,135, a single old tree was sold in 2016 for £52,000.

All across Mediterranean Europe, olive groves are being destroyed, with veteran trees being dug up and sold to dealers. The reasons are many and complex. Landowners are seeking ways to maximise returns and sometimes more intensive land-use, such as intensive vegetable-growing under poly-tunnels in Spain, is the reason for olive groves to be dug up and ploughed. Diversification is not just agricultural: in 2025, two Spanish MEPs drew the attention of the European Parliament to a case of over 100,000 olive trees being felled to make way for a new solar array.

In Italy and Greece, that story of climatic and economic pressure is repeated. In the wildfires that have scourged Greece in recent years, thousands of hectares of olive groves have been destroyed. Olive trees have been described as “Like a natural bomb - full of oil” and in high winds they burn very quickly. In Italy, in addition to those pressures, the disastrous Xylella fastidiosa bacteria has caused the death of millions of trees. The picture in Italy is further complicated by the presence of organised crime which has increasingly targeted Italian olive crops and olive oil production; it seems likely that it has also been involved in the uprooting and sale of old trees.

But it is in Palestine that the significance of the olive is most acutely threatened - the place where their religious and political symbolism is deepest. Since the Nakba, the forced displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes which accompanied the establishment of the state of Israel in 1947, it has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance. As such it has been targeted for destruction purely for political reasons. Nowhere is violence against it more lethal.

Arboricide, or what should really be called ecocide, is a tactical strategy intended to undermine the economic viability of Palestinian life. In the West Bank and Gaza, before the chaos of the last three years, olives have always been the single biggest crop in what is a predominantly agricultural economy, accounting for nearly 45% of cultivated land, and contributing 15-19% of agricultural output in an economy where agriculture represents 25% of GDP. In Gaza, over three-quarters of olive groves have been destroyed by Israeli attacks since October 2023. In August 2025, the Israeli military destroyed some 3000 olive trees at al-Mughayyir, a Palestinian village of about 4,000 residents near Ramallah, in the West Bank.

The arboricide is part of a campaign which includes expropriation of land and, most distressing, violence towards farmers especially at harvest time. As it was described in 2022: ‘Clearing olive trees is a common tactic used by expansionist settlers to drive Palestinians off their land, destroying their harvests and cutting off their income.’ Since October 2023, the violence has increased hugely. During the 2024 harvest in the West Bank the UN documented 250 settler attacks across the West Bank, with more than 2,800 trees burnt or cut down. The arboricide is designed to make life impossible for native Palestinians, with the aim of forcing them to give up their land and exile themselves to other countries – it is about ethnic cleansing.

But, in Palestine, the trees are the focus of a particular kind of non-violent resistance. The Arabic word صمود , or ‘sumud’, can be translated as resilience or steadfastness, and ‘the ultimate symbol associated with the concept of sumud and the Palestinian sense of rootedness in the land is the olive tree.’ Sumud can be seen in the inter-generational patience of those who were exiled from Palestine after the Nakba of 1947 still living in refugee camps in the West Bank and Jordan and Lebanon, or the extraordinary return of residents to demolished homes in Gaza today. It is also the spirit in which those farmers whose olive trees have been destroyed by the army or by settlers, year after year continue to replant.

The olive tree embodies the heart-breaking paradox expressed by the surgeon, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, in an interview given after he had been working in Gaza between October and December 2023. After bearing witness to the suffering and courage of ordinary Palestinians and the brutality of the oppressors, he is asked one last question: where are you anchoring hope? To which he replies, and it sounds unhesitating, ‘Oh, in Gaza. Absolutely.’

The lucrative trade in ancient olive trees is based on a brutal aestheticization, which depends on their uprooting, and the fetishisation of their appearance. Ancient trees may be displayed in pots for status in London, Paris and Tel Aviv, but significance cannot be transplanted, as if it resides merely in the tree as object, when in fact it resides in the olive’s original relationship to a specific natural and cultural ecosystem. The uprooting enacts a trauma both for the tree and for the people of that land, a trauma which haunts these trees.

David Lambert has researched and campaigned for historic parks for most of his working life. He has been an academic historian with fellowships at the University of York and De Montfort; an expert adviser to Parliamentary select committees and bodies such as English Heritage and the National Trust and for twenty years helped spend Lottery money on public parks. In 2018, the full horror of the climate and ecological emergency broke over him and he has since then spent his time learning about and raising awareness of that emergency, with Extinction Rebellion in London and his home town of Stroud. In 2021 he was part of the Shell Seven who were found not guilty of criminal damage by a Crown Court jury. He continues to support civil disobedience but his time is increasingly devoted to community and environmental work in his local area.

David is being paid for this article.

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Photo credit (containerised olive tree cut-out): Sui Searle

As a reader of Radicle I suspect that you, like me, are well acquainted with current world events. It can be easy to slip into a bottomless feeling of impotence in the face of them. Watching billionaires and autocratic rulers skip across continents, claiming land, raking in unimaginable wealth, leaving you aghast and wondering what you can do to make any kind of difference.

When I feel overwhelmed, which I do regularly, I try to bring my focus back to a smaller scale and look around me at things within my own control. Things in my everyday life but also in my professional life. In the scope of gardening it may feel as though we have little power, but there are examples of change happening. We have driven forward use of peat free compost, advocated for wildlife, and saved green spaces. Pushing for progress to mitigate the climate emergency feels like it’s in our wheelhouse and we can be easily motivated by its aims. But what about other forms of social and political progress in our industry? You’ve heard of conflict diamonds, which are diamonds mined in a war zone and sold to finance the war, but what about conflict seeds and bulbs?

I attended my first demonstration in support of Palestine in late October 2023. I was horrified by the reckless killing of thousands of civilians who were already living under apartheid, their land illegally occupied, and stripped of their human rights. A newcomer to the struggle, I wasn’t knowledgeable about the history but I was moved to act by the hypocrisy of the global response, by countries who claim to live by the rules of international law but were endlessly overlooking them when the brown bodies of Palestinians were the ones left to die by the thousands. On remembrance Sunday 2023, being at the Palestine solidarity protest made much more sense than at the cenotaph because remembrance is the action we take to prevent all wars, so what could be a better way to remember war dead than to advocate for those who may die any day? And die they did. The death toll is now believed to be over 70,000, which does not include those who remain missing. At least 10,000 are presumed to be buried under rubble. A Lancet report from 2024 estimated that accumulative effects mean the true death toll could reach more than 186,000 people1.

A group of like-minded gardeners came together to protest, to raise awareness and also bring other gardeners along with us, and so a tiny initial group of ‘Gardeners for Palestine’ was brought together. A banner was made from a white flannel bed sheet with green, red and black letters cut from scrap material, and in the corners two olive branches made from felt. Of course we chose the olive, so pertinent to the Palestinian identity and economy, knowing that the estimates of numbers of trees destroyed since the Israeli occupation began in 1967 is in the hundreds of thousands. As gardeners the trees were always going to feature foremost in our minds as symbols of ecological colonialism but also of indigenous and racial repression. Around the world there is a pattern of people stripped of the things that give them connection to the land in order to control them, for Palestinians foraging their native plants is banned just as in the USA foraging had been banned to prevent Indigenous people and freed enslaved people from feeding themselves.

The group has continued to meet and march since then and our banner is a communal space where any supporter can contribute a handmade cloth Palestinian flower which will be sown onto the banner. Faqqu’a iris, poppy and cyclamen all feature and some of the flowers are embroidered with the names of families in Gaza, so we carry them with us.

Protesting is one thing you can do but not everyone is able to attend or might choose this way to bring about change. Donating directly to families in Gaza through mutual aid funds is always needed and this can be specifically related to our industry. I have recently been supporting a delightful young father, Ahmed Ibrahim, who used to farm and build greenhouses in Gaza before the genocide left him desolate and living in a tent like thousands of others. In solidarity with a fellow land worker, do help him here if you can.

Let’s turn to one of the most successful forms of long-term pressure people can assert to push for change outside of failing international systems- the boycott. One of the most successful stories being the worldwide boycott of South African produce and culture in opposition to apartheid, which finally ended in 1994.

The current equivalent is the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement which, “urges action to pressure Israel to comply with international law.” It feels ridiculous to have to say this, but produce from occupied land is strictly illegal under international law - one of the reasons you may not be aware is because this is one of the points of hypocrisy where international law is regularly sidestepped. Following a landmark advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 Amnesty International says the EU’s current policy of distinguishing between goods produced in Israel and those produced in settlements, falls short of these obligations which it says “require a complete ban on trade and business with Israel’s illegal settlements.” The UK uses this system too and Amnesty says “it shouldn’t be possible for goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem to be available in the UK”, and yet they continue to be.

If we can’t rely on our government to impose international law, the equivalent of a legal boycott, then we must impose it ourselves, and many have been doing just that. A recent Mondoweiss article says Israeli farmers are warning the country’s agricultural export industry is facing a looming “collapse” due to international opposition to the Gaza genocide and that the Israeli ‘brand’ may never recover. UK consumers have been active in pressuring supermarkets to stop stocking Israeli produce with evidence of success when the Co-op announced in June 2025 it would stop sourcing goods from Israel, Iran and 15 other countries where it says there are “internationally recognised” rights abuses and violations of international law. Boycotts work.

Let this be grist to our mill for our own industry. Step forward Ethics in the Garden who say “a group of us in the industry and keen hobby gardeners are increasingly aware how our activities are contributing to the situation in the Middle East and we would like to play our part and make our industry and gardens more ethical, conflict-free and apartheid-free.” Starting with a conflict-free seeds campaign, they’ve created an excellent leaflet listing safe seed companies to use. They have been writing to seed companies asking them to verify where their stock comes from. So far they are endorsing Real Seeds, Vital Seeds, Winnow Farm Seeds, Seed Revolution and Franchi Seeds of Italy.

In 2023, Israel exported seeds (for sowing) valued at around $108 million, ranking it as the 19th largest exporter of seeds globally out of 180 countries2. Israel is also a major exporter of bulbs especially ranunculus and narcissi. Belle de Londres has written a useful summary of companies that buy from Israel and a great list of those that don’t, including: Scamps Daffodils, Shipton Bulbs, Thomas Etty, and Avon bulbs.

One of the things that lifts my heart when it comes to injustice are these groups that are formed and work, toiling behind the scenes doing the small actions that add to the wider purpose. You think Gardeners for Palestine is niche? Our banner inspired Knitters for Palestine, and there’s a dedicated group from the wedding industry who have ensured their couples can choose a conflict-free wedding. Every little helps, l believe they say, or rather as Ethics in the Garden says: “Let our gardens symbolise positive choices for peace and justice.” And what garden could be more beautiful than that?

Ros Ball sells cut-flowers grown in under-used front gardens in South London as The Front Garden Flower Farm. She is also a self-employed gardener, author and occasional journalist. You can find Ros on Instagram @frontgardenflowerfarm and @ros_but_growing

Ros is being paid for this article.

These include Alaa Abu Asad’s Wild Plants of Palestine - a short, thought provoking, video-essay made off the back of botanical research expeditions he took part in with the Palestinian Museum and professors from Birzeit University; and The dog that chased its tail to bite it off - a display of Alaa’s ongoing work looking at Japanese knotweed, a plant introduced to Europe as a botanical specimen and now demonised as an “invasive species”,

Also on are screenings of Jumana Manna’s affecting film, Foragers. The film mixes fiction, documentary, and archival footage and looks at how Israeli nature protection laws impact Palestinians attempting to carry out traditional practices of foraging for wild, native plants such as akkoub and za’atar.

I went along to visit the gallery at the beginning of July and afterwards spoke with artist Alaa Abu Asad over Zoom about his two exhibitions. You can read our conversation below.

The New World Order programme runs until 6th September. Go and catch it whilst it’s on. Entry is free.

A conversation with Alaa Abu Asad

[This interview between Sui Searle (SS) and Alaa Abu Asad (AA) has been lightly edited]

SS: I recently visited the John Hansard Gallery and it was great to see your video essay, Wild Plants of Palestine, being shown as part of their current programme of exhibitions.

AA: Yeah, after I printed and published the [written] essay I found some material online, which I felt could fit in the work. I liked how the moving images were taking shape and happening, so I decided to transform it into a video. I think it can reach a wider audience with the format of a video. I do like both of them. On a personal level, I prefer the printed matter. It’s closer to me. But they are both equally important in the way they speak to the outer world. It's work that I revisit all the time. I learn a lot from it, from that experience, because the whole work is based on an experience.

SS: When you say you're still learning from the piece now, in what ways do you mean?

AA: Sometimes I look at it and I have this feeling, okay, this could have been said differently, or this could have been addressed differently. But then, I'll just do it in other ways in newer projects. So I learn from this, the way of addressing matters. The video itself is quite atypical in a way, because it doesn't have credits. It's quite concise in the information it provides. Sometimes there's this feeling that it's not a film and it's not a movie. It's a video of an artwork.

SS: In the film you talk about coming across wild tulips and being so delighted by them and how you had this impulse to collect them, which you did. You described it as the instinct of ownership. This felt very self-aware and an interesting take. Do you think that awareness came to you in the moment or was it something that you thought about on reflection?

AA: I would say both. I never knew we had these big tulips in Palestine, really. I think because it's colder and drier there, so these tulips grow. I was quite mesmerised to find them and to encounter these tulips. They were very beautiful. Really fleshy. When I was a kid, we had a lot of anemones - they're smaller than tulips. So the encounter with the tulips was quite nice. I was like, “Oh, wow!”

I was with a friend and her family. They had this allotment they went to farm. On the way there were a lot of tulips and many edible herbs. I did collect some of these, and the tulips. I was collecting and then thinking, what if they're rare? But you know, there was an abundance of these tulips. And in a way, they offered themselves to me. So I did have that “oh”, but I also just allowed myself to, and followed my instincts and my feelings. I just wanted these tulips, to have them in my room. And they lasted for quite some time. They were very beautiful.

SS: I love that internal conversation that you had with yourself and the tulips.

AA: Yeah. I mean, now I live in the Netherlands and there are tulips everywhere but it's different. [The ones I came across in Palestine] were not cultivated. The tulips in the Netherlands have a history. They are considered one of the Dutch cultural symbols. But they're not Dutch. So when one thinks about the Netherlands, you think about tulips, cheese, windmills, clogs… and bicycles. But, yeah, tulips are not Dutch.

SS: How long have you been in the Netherlands?

AA: Nine years.

SS: Were you already in the Netherlands when you did the research tours?

AA: No, when I joined the expeditions, I was still in Palestine. And because the [Palestinian Museum] wanted these photos [for a catalogue] I did this. I got the museum the photos they wanted of the plants, and other photos which I kept for myself. Then I came to the Netherlands and I reflected on this material.

SS: When you were doing your research and you came across the Wild Flowers of Palestine… I think you said that you came across it in the Library of Congress? Is that the book that's on display…?

AA: The one I was referring to in the video, Wild Flowers of Palestine, it's 123 photos, black and white, mostly. They’re very beautiful. Yeah, and then others, like printed books, one which is a project from Al Qattan Foundation about the Flowers of Palestine and from a Swiss preacher, I think. A missionary person. She's the wife of a preacher. I think from the Catholic Church in Palestine. I think she was even in Nazareth, in my city. And she also collected specimens and flowers, and she painted them with watercolours. Very beautiful. And the other book [on display], it has real specimens of flowers of Palestine. And that’s from Massachusetts, in the States. Somebody from the States was spending time in Palestine and they collected the plants and they put them in.

SS: And so that book has actual dried specimens in it?

AA: Yeah, yeah, it does. It has real specimens.

SS: How did you feel when you came across those books? Did it bring up any emotions for you? What were your thoughts?

AA: Yeah, I mean a lot. I was quite happy. I mean, the first one, Flowers of Palestine, I was a bit sad because even the title was very similar. But then, I was happy because it's different. My approach…I wasn't presenting flowers and plants from Palestine as much as I was talking about the situation and the role of plants in the land and in the place. So I was quite happy to see that there were other resources and sources, where plants are the major character, the main topic. Wild Flowers from Palestine I was even happier to know, that one is quite old, you know, both of them actually, the practice of collecting plants and putting them in books. So I was quite happy.

But as somebody who studied photography and has a Masters degree in art praxes, you can't not be critical about this. Who are these people collecting these flowers and putting them in books and why? What reasons? These people who are foreigners to Palestine ... One is coming under the guise of God, the church, and religion. And the other one is probably like a scholar. Which is totally fine, but the question is about the time when this was done and why. And what did it serve? And today, would it only serve as a way of looking at Palestine as a historical, almost dead place only? So these feelings, of course, are there. And one should ask. I question these practices and why they were done. On the other hand, it's a beautiful work. Both the drawings and the collected specimens and pieces of plants, they’re very beautiful. There's something very empowering and powerful in looking at a dried piece of plant in a book which has been lasting for maybe 150 years, maybe longer… It carries a lot. It already carried a lot when it was alive and then picked and put in a book - it's just beautiful and it's amazing. I think plants carry a lot in them. There's the history, the stories, the time, place. The seen part of it, but there are also the hidden and the unseen part. Looking at plants allows you to look beyond what you see... And there's always this relationship between plants and people, which is embedded in the organism itself.

SS: They carry a lot of stories, don't they? They're an opening to stories that we might not consider otherwise.

AA: Yeah, exactly. And also, plants can tell us a lot about us, human beings… The way these plants were selected and picked and preserved. And not choosing other plants. That already says a lot about the person who picked them. But also in general, plants and the way we treat plants around us, says a lot about us, as human beings, individuals, members of groups, societies, communities, citizens of nation states. This is reflected in the way we look at and treat plants.

SS: What kind of messages did you receive from the kind of plants that had been chosen to be preserved and recorded?

AA: I also think it is because the time when they were picked, they felt quite wild because I think there was more land back then where plants and herbs and weeds could grow freely. They had more freedom, more options and less control. So they felt more liberated… Because if you look at plants or books of specimens, they feel more timid in a way… Because they're probably picked from gardens or, you know, like from places where they are supposed to be picked. You know what I mean? And the others are just… they were really wild. And this is not because the person who picked them made so much effort to reach them, as much as they were everywhere, I think.

SS: They were more abundant?

AA: Yeah, also because there was more land, you know. I mean, land in terms of things just growing everywhere. There is a lot of urban development now. The world was different back then.

SS: There was more wild space and things were just allowed to grow?

AA: Yeah, exactly. So times like today, if you want to get something, you really need to go outside the city to find a specific plant. Probably back then you didn't need to do that.

SS: I found it interesting in the video essay, about halfway through you talked about how the thing that grabbed your attention more was the general landscape. So you started off with the tulips and then you were doing these wildflower tours looking for plants as part of the university explorations. And then you said that actually, the thing that grabbed you the most was the landscape. Can you explain that a little bit?

AA: Yeah, so I'm from Nazareth and then I moved to live and work inside the West Bank. But I'm from Nazareth, which is inside what is now Israel. And for some time my understanding and my experience of living in the West Bank was restricted to mainly around the city of Ramallah. So I’d never been to secluded, calmer, remote areas and joining the tours and being driven by taxi driver, a local person, who really helped us a lot and took us to places, passing through unchartered roads or off road, or just going to really remote areas and just being in a place with complete silence. And there's not much trees. But it's also not the desert, you know, so this really was quite a new experience for me in that place. And also because it was done in the earliest thing throughout the whole season, it was beautiful. Really beautiful. Like the colours, the light, the temperature, the grass, the earth. Yeah, so this is what really struck me. And also, because [of the] mountains and hills, then you can have a nice view. It's like you're in a different world. This, on the one hand. On the other, there was kind of tension because you couldn't know what to expect or where to expect what from. Because any car, any movement could be suspect, could be a threat, you know, like of soldiers or settlers. In a way, when you're in the city, this sounds terrible, but you feel safer.

SS: You feel less exposed [in the city]?

AA: Yeah, contained, exactly. And when you're out in nature, specifically in a place like Palestine, which is hyper-militarised, it can be scary. And it's not scary because of wild beasts, or encountering a snake or something. No. It's scary because of settlers and the soldiers. People are being shot dead, you know, randomly. So this was also scary. You're out there, this completely secluded, silent moment. But this could also be your last moment. You don’t know what might happen… Also, if something happened, where would we go to get help from…? So there was also this. I had mixed feelings.

SS: So that wasn't your local area, you're from Nazareth. Is that a feeling you were familiar with…?

AA: Not really, because it’s a special case in the West Bank. It's also segmented into areas of A, B, C under the Israeli division and control and some parts, I think, I don't know under which category, but you're not allowed to build. So there's a lot of these places that no one can do anything there, because Israel doesn't allow, basically. I never felt this before. I had spent, and I still do when I'm back… time in nature with my family in the north of Palestine and it's just different.

SS: When was the last time you went back?

AA: This March [Alaa’s face breaks out into a huge smile]

SS: How was it?

AA: I think I was quite lucky in a way, there was not much happening in the air. It was beautiful, because I went foraging with my father a lot. It was very beautiful. It was also beautiful and absurd. There were moments … it's complete silent. You know, you only hear the birds or humming bees and insects, and all of a sudden, this massive sonic effect from the sky [Alaa mimics the humming sound of aircraft]. And then you look and it’s like two military airplanes going in the direction of Lebanon... And they make a big sound, and it’s just absurd and weird. Because it's so peaceful and bland in a way. You know what I mean. Having a moment [and then] the sky is so violent. The sky is so loud. The military vehicles make it very loud. And for me, because I don't live there anymore, it's quite startling. It makes my heart beat and it does disturb me. I think for people living there it’s more normal, sadly. They normalised this sonic pollution. So this is how it felt. It was beautiful. It was very beautiful, but also sad. Very empowering, as well.

SS: Empowering to be back?

AA: Yeah, to be back, to pick things from there to eat, from the land directly, to be with my father, to see my grandma, talk with her. Also discuss some plants. I mean, there's a nice thing about eating directly from the land, which I miss. Here in the Netherlands, everything is packed and parcelled and you only get it from the shop.

SS: Did you grow up eating food off of the land?

AA: I think Palestinians everywhere, whether they're from the cities or from villages, there's this tradition of, you know, like picking things? What it's called? Foraging. But also, you can buy these things from, you know, like farmers or women who do the foraging and then sell it in bigger cities. So we always ate this product which I later understood should be called in English, organic.

SS: Organic [laughs]

AA: Yeah. So everything I ate was organic, mainly. And yeah, this doesn't mean if you do foraging or eat from foraging that you, you know, it doesn't locate you in any specific socio-economic level there. This is just how it is. It is changing a bit now, but still, there's still awareness and people doing this. Because I think people can't just give up the beautiful taste of things growing on the land. Like, nothing can compete.

SS: Yeah, people are used to eating those kinds of wild plants. And so it isn’t a special ”organic” thing. It's just a natural thing that has always happened.

AA: Exactly, yeah, exactly.

SS: That connects nicely to Jumana Manna's film, Foragers [also showing currently in the exhibitions at the John Hansard Gallery]. That's what they do in the film, isn't it? They collect plants from the wild and then sell them to the locals.

AA: Yeah, you can do this. You can also just collect things because you want to enjoy nature and collect the things. You know, you can either buy it from people who collect it and just sell it to you. Or you just do it yourself, so both ways. It's quite traditional. Yeah, there's specific plants you can only get from nature - like za’atar, thyme? You know, like you never, buy... There is the processed, cultivated za’atar. It doesn’t taste the same at all.

And then, because also this plant, they grow en masse in Palestine, there's an abundance of specific plants that you only eat from the mountains and from nature.

SS: Plants are at the core of both of your exhibitions, so Wild Plants of Palestine in the video essay and then in your other exhibition that's also on at the gallery, The dog chased its tail to bite it off, that has Japanese knotweed featured in it. How did you first come across this plant? What was it that piqued your interest in it?

AA: Well, I’d never heard of this plant, of the Japanese knotweed, before I moved to study and live in the Netherlands. It's not a plant that grows in the Mediterranean area. I was just walking in one of the most prestigious national parks of the Netherlands called De Hoge Veluwe. It's a big one in the east of the country, naturally constructed. It's very beautiful. It’s known for its heather. …As I was there, and just near the visitor centre, I heard, I think it was a guide tour, talking with so much anger and aggression about the Japanese knotweed plant and pointing at it. I just had this moment of eavesdropping. And I was really amazed by the language that he used. And I looked, but I couldn't really distinguish the plant from other plants. You know, Japanese knotweed can also look like any other plant, especially if it's not in blossom or it's not late in autumn.

AA: So I went back home. I was like, what is this plant? And I started researching. And it just hit me, mainly the language that is used to describe the plant, to talk about the plant, to discuss the problems that can be caused by Japanese knotweed and other invasive species. This was in November 2017 and for many years I was just working with the language, with this offensive language. Because I was amazed that people can do this. To talk so badly about a wild plant. Only later I started doing some photographic work with the plant, trying to look at the material that the plant could give. For many years, I collected terms, words, adjectives, that were negatively charged, describing the plant. And then I also collected research material and paraphernalia from the history and the story of the Japanese knotweed. It's now five, six years already? And it takes different shapes at times. I do also a performative reading on the Japanese knotweed.

SS: Is that the one you're going to do in September [at the John Hansard Gallery]?

AA: Yeah. And in a way, it's the story of the plant, but also the story of me, or any person that happens to be somewhere in this world and trying to live their lives. My interest in plants started in wild plants of Palestine but there I was looking at plants and studying them and their role throughout history, photography and the role of photography in shaping a place etc. The dog chased its tail to bite it off… I work with the Japanese knotweed because I don't feel like I'm doing a work on the Japanese knotweed. I really learn a lot from this plant. It taught me many things about the plant herself, but also about things in me and in general. And I say herself, because a female specimen of Japanese knotweed was brought to Europe originally, and this female specimen has been reproducing herself vegetatively, meaning asexually from a small piece, and then making a clone in northwestern Europe and North America. And also what I discovered and understood is that you can't talk about invasive species and invasion ecology without talking about other matters in the world. Whether ecological matters or human-related matters. You can't separate these things anymore.

AA: In a way, I see the work with Japanese knotweed and invasive species as liberating. It's quite a liberating tool, especially in a reality like nowadays, which is very much having a rising fascist politics and policies. Whether in politics between countries or controlling weeds and controlling people as well. And there's a lot to learn from invasive species. I think that the appearance of a plant in a place, whether this plant belongs to that place or not - I mean, was introduced, or is accidental - plants carry a message. And this message could be related to something in the present time, or in the future. You know, many plants, they appear in a place to be used later as a solution for a disease or a problem. So invasive species could be doing this work as well. There's a change in the world, right? There's a “new order” as the title of the exhibitions suggests. And this means that the Japanese knotweed could be one of the only future green companions that we might have. So we should learn to live with this plant rather than spending time, energy, money and resources, and technology, trying to kill and eliminate the Japanese knotweed and other invasive species. I'm not saying, I'm not promoting the Japanese knotweed as much as I'm trying to have us change the way we look at things and to also look at the information. Most people don't like Japanese knotweed because they don't know much about it. They don't even know how it looks like, right?

SS: They're more frightened of the idea of it than the reality of it.

AA: Exactly. And my work is an invitation to people to question what they know about Japanese knotweed - just to try to change also the way they treat plants but also the way they treat themselves and other human beings. I mean, I'm aware that the plant could be problematic. Like, any other plant, to be honest. But the solution doesn’t lie in killing and eliminating invasive species and Japanese knotweed as much as in changing the way we coexist with more-than-human beings.

SS: Thank you. There was a lot in there. And I think it kind of answers one of the questions that I had because the question of language and narrative and the way we talk about invasive species comes up a lot in the area of decolonising. This subject can get quite heated and it recurs. There's always this question about native plants and “alien” plants and one of the arguments that people often give is one of ecology - that we should be protecting and promoting and looking after native plants because it has a negative impact on our biodiversity to not do that. But you're not saying that knotweed doesn't necessarily have a negative impact, you're asking us to change the way we're questioning things, the way we're looking at and speaking about things and the way we're understanding things.

AA: I mean, on the one hand, we can't blame Japanese knotweed and other invasive species for the problems whilst we provide them with the perfect conditions to thrive. And these conditions, these perfect conditions are also killing other plants, right? So on the one hand, we heat the temperature and we pollute and this kills many other plants. And then heating the temperature also makes the rain fall in big amounts in a very short time leading to soil erosion. And consequently killing other plants and making the Japanese knotweed thrive. And then we say the Japanese knotweed is the problem, is the cause of this. It's not true. It's really not true. Japanese knotweed doesn't cause soil erosion. It doesn't cause blocking of the water ditches or small rivers. It's us. We do something somewhere, this changes the balance, leads to some plants being stronger than other plants. Because of us.

SS: Yeah. It's a complicated idea and topic, I think, to sometimes get heads around what it is that's being asked of them, because they don't see the complexity of the way all of this intertwines and reflects other systems that are going on.

AA: I mean, I’m all for interference when we can and when it should be done to preserve other species, whether native or not. In a way, it's also funny, because we created culture. Which, in a way, destroyed nature. Nature existed way before culture. And then we use this culture to preserve nature. It's a paradox in a way. So instead of saying this, we should look at the both as completing each other, like coexisting. I mean, if you just want to preserve indigenous or local plants, because you want to keep the UK the same way it looked 100 years ago, that's a stupid argument. That's meaningless. It doesn't mean anything. Because nature is all about change. It's in flux of, you know, like dynamic changes all the way. Whether with or without us. So what is more important than preserving indigenous species is stopping pollution. And people should be more active and aware, and request their governments not to support war, not to manufacture weapons, which are very polluting, not to participate in genocide. Also, when you have genocide, you also have ecocide. You also kill everything, you know what I mean? So if you do this, if you stand against racism, fascism, capitalism, and Zionism, this will allow a better, more diverse reality that is more liveable.

But we're driven, we live in societies, which is governed by governments that are driven by capitalist factors and interests. So all the efforts to save local plants and to save, to preserve nature, will be futile.

SS: One of the things that is complicated, is that the history and situation is different in the UK to the US. So when we have this conversation in the UK, what we're asking the coloniser to do in the UK is to look at it from the perspective of: look, you created these conditions, you stole and destroyed people’s homelands and people from abroad end up coming here and they thrive here and then you have a problem with it, and the person you blame is the immigrant.

AA: Exactly. I mean, stop supporting wars and let people live in their homelands.

SS: But then the angle of the conversation is slightly different from, say in the US. Often we're having these conversations in parallel with our US colleagues and friends… And from their perspective, they find it difficult to access the conversation from this angle because for them, protecting or uplifting the indigenous and the native is their focus. For them, the invader, the person invading, is the coloniser. And so it's a flip of the conversation. I’m just acknowledging that complexity and difference in where the power lies.

AA: Yeah. I mean, again, I'm not against working with land and, you know, saving species. Not at all. Like, it's good. We should spend time with plants and working with the land. But we shouldn't separate things. We shouldn't say, okay, I'm working with land, I'm preserving the area around me. I don't care what's happening somewhere else because this assumes it does not have any kind of influence on my garden, or my forest, or my backyard. It's not true.

Alaa’s exhibitions, Wild Plants of Palestine, and The dog chased its tail to bite it off, as well as Jumana Manna’s film, Foragers, are showing at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until the 6th September.

The written essay in booklet form of Alaa’s Wild Plants of Palestine is available to purchase from the JHG shop (which is excellently curated and stocks some brilliant publications for sale).

On the 14th August there is an online event with artists Alaa Abu Asad and Jumana Manna in conversation with JHG Director, Woodrow Kernohan.

Alaa Abu Asad will also be at the gallery on the 6th September for a performative reading of “In the absence of the invasive: Can we finally look at the Japanese knotweed as a green future companion?”.

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Photo credits

Image 1: Alaa Abu Asad, Wild Plants of Palestine (2018), installation view, John Hansard Gallery, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Reece Straw

Images 2-4: Alaa Abu Asad, installation view (of The dog that chased its tail to bite it off), John Hansard Gallery, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Reece Straw

It feels an important conversation for us to be having and engaging in since AI will affect us all in profound ways. And many people will be subjected to AI who might not have any say in it.

This year, at Chelsea Flower Show, there is even a show garden exploring how AI can be integrated into the garden. Designed by Tom Massey Studio and Studio Weave, according to the RHS website the garden has been “designed as a testing ground for researchers to pilot an innovative AI tool that supports urban trees.”

Off the back of this, there was a panel discussion held a couple of months ago at the Design Museum in London on AI in the Garden: A Discussion of Possible Futures. On the panel were Tom Massey, Sheila Das, Kalpana Arias and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, chaired by Naomi Zaragoza.

This piece is, in part, a response to attending that talk. It addresses and expands on some of the themes and issues that were touched on, and also some that were absent.

Here to stay

Too often, the debate on AI can get hung up on a variation of whether AI is “good” or “bad”. This can narrow the debate and distract us from important issues that ought to concern us as a society and as citizens.

AI itself is a tool. Whether it is going to be used for positive deeds or not depends on who controls it and how/for what it is used.

AI is here and undoubtedly here to stay. Its power is rapidly growing with the arrival of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM). The use of AI is increasing. If used ethically and responsibly, it could have huge potential for improving lives. But how much do we believe that, in the broader scheme of things, and in the longer term, this is going to happen? How much do we think that the benefits of AI are going to be universal and meted out equitably and justly and with the wellbeing of life on this planet in mind?

For me, the question isn’t whether AI can be used to do “good”, important or useful things. There is no doubt that there are potentially powerful and positive changes that AI might be capable of bringing about (in healthcare screening, for example). What is more concerning and pressing are the risks of AI. And given these, how we ensure that AI is developed and used ethically and responsibly. There are big social questions that are too often left inadequately addressed, if not unaddressed altogether. We need the will to think coherently about the future and what AI will mean for us all.

The issue of how we proceed with AI also leaves exposed, to me, huge questions of what makes a democratic and egalitarian society and whether we operate in one. The driving force behind our society often feels like profit - not health or wellbeing. It’s no wonder that many people are profoundly sceptical about the use of AI to fundamentally improve our lives. I was thinking about how inevitable the uncontrollable rise of AI seems and how powerless many of us feel in terms of influencing the direction of it when the economist, Jason Hickel, posted this about our system - and I think it sums this up pretty well:

Existential threats, or AI is not benign

At the beginning of the year I listened to Professor Geoffrey Hinton (the “godfather of A.I.”, who left Google in 2023 worried about the potential of AI to do harm) talking to Matthew Syed. He separated the risks of AI into those of more immediate concern due to it being used by bad actors, and the longer term, existential threat that AI machines themselves will autonomously take over.

The immediate risks of AI that he noted were: massive cyber attacks, programmes being used to create new viruses, all mundane intellectual jobs being taken over and creating massive unemployment, autonomous lethal weapons that decide by themselves who to kill and are controlled by states, fake news that makes democracy more or less impossible, massive surveillance that makes protest against dictatorship very difficult.

These are all immediate risks. “Things like this are happening in the world now,” he said.

This is different to the long term existential threat that AI machines will decide they can do a better job than us and don’t need us. Super intelligence is coming and Hinton says we have no idea at present how we can keep control of it. “We don’t know if we can prevent it from taking over when it gets more intelligent than us.”

All of this is particularly troubling given that AI is in the hands of a small number of people with a huge amount of power.

Given these very real, significant and current threats, AI doesn’t seem like something to be taken or used lightly without serious consideration.

For some people living through the disturbing reality of what AI can reap, the threats have already been existential.

Environmental cost

In addition to the threats above, it has been well publicised that AI consumes a huge amount resources. The use of AI is also an environmental issue.

Not only is extraction involved in creating tech products, the whole system also uses a huge amount of resources, data storage and processing consumes a large amount of water and fossil fuels, and tech becomes waste in places in the Global South where consumer societies, such as ours, dump a lot of our rubbish with lasting environmental impacts.

There is a lot of information on this available and I won’t go into great detail about it here.

There are many places you can read more about it, including:

https://beyondfossilfuels.org/2025/02/07/within-bounds-limiting-ais-environmental-impact/

https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2025/research/decarbonising-digital-infrastructure/

https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00478-x

https://www.ft.com/content/323299dc-d9d5-482e-9442-f4516f6753f0

What I will highlight here is that the global greenhouse gas emissions of digital technology are purportedly similar to the aviation industry and emissions from AI are increasing all the time. AI has been a major driver of increasing energy demands of data centres and AI is predicted to be the single most energy demanding technology on earth. According to the International Energy Agency, global data centre electricity consumption could double to over 1,000 TWh by 2026 - equivalent to Japan’s annual electricity use. The average data centre consumes a similar amount of water per day for system cooling as a small city of around 50,000 people.

We should remember that the most vulnerable in society on an environmental level are those people in the Global South, who are already suffering the impact of climate chaos caused by the most industrialised/“developed” countries in the world.

A rebuff that is used in response to the environmental cost of AI, and one that came up in the Design Musem panel talk, is that existing technology already consumes a lot of resources and energy. Therefore AI is no different.

I find it difficult to understand this as an argument. It seems to me like a case of cognitive dissonance, or whataboutism. It doesn’t negate or address the environmental harm and use of resources that comes with AI.

We aren’t currently reliant on AI. We’ve survived without it. Do we want to go down the path of becoming dependent on it, knowing how unsustainable and potentially damaging it is? The idea that other tech already consumes energy and emits waste and so it’s fine to use AI seems to be an argument that serves to excuse our unchecked use of AI, at an increasing rate, with no critical look at whether that is desirable or even necessary given the environmental cost (and other threats) that we know exists.

Do we want to be adding to emissions and resource consumption at this scale? Is it necessary? Who is going to be most harmed by it?

Given what we know about the reality of the climate crisis facing us, who does it serve to embed AI into our lives and make us become reliant upon an environmentally damaging new technology, which we aren’t currently dependent on?

Knowing that AI comes with a significant environmental cost, can we be more discerning and accountable for when and how we choose to use it?

How do we put pressure on the necessary parties to make sure that AI is developed within environmental bounds?

Technological Solutionism

One of the arguments that proponents often give in favour of AI, and which also came up in the panel discussion, are the potential positives for the environment in finding future solutions for the climate crisis.

This is “technological solutionism” - as Wesley Goatley, researcher in AI, Climate and Arts points out in this podcast. Technological solutionism is when new technology such as AI is framed as a solution to a much bigger, complex problem. It helps to reinforce optimism about innovation and makes us believe that a relatively simple and affordable engineering approach to solving a problem will be more effective than solutions requiring a social and political approach.

The real existential risk, Goatley says, is the climate crisis, and that’s a human problem. “The solution isn’t AI, the solution is us. AI and computational technology are problem solving tools, but it needs the social, political and cultural willpower to want to solve those problems.”

On the same podcast, Dr Gabby Samuel explains that the private sector puts out the narrative that technology can solve problems in society, but that it hides what is behind that technology. “It’s the human-technological relationships that we need to be thinking about to solve problems. Technological solutionism can take our minds away from other, perhaps low-tech solutions, that might be more justified or might work better. For example, in health, we know that the majority of outcomes are associated with social, economic and other factors. …we know that if we get people out of poverty, if we give them a good education, we’re going to stand them in a much better place with their health than if we just invest in the new shiny objects of AI. We’re investing more and more in tech but we’re not thinking about the most vulnerable in society. AI takes our minds away from that.”

This year’s Chelsea show garden, for example, which uses generative AI to translate digital data into “everyday language that we can understand”, is being touted as an attempt to understand how we can better look after our urban trees. The idea is that giving the trees a way “to communicate their condition more effectively to people tasked with maintaining them could significantly enhance their life expectancy.”

I feel a large degree of skepticism about this. It sounds like technological solutionism to me. The reasons street trees are prone to dying are not because we don’t know what they need/how they’re feeling and if only we had AI interpretation of data sets to tell us! It’s due to broader, systemic issues and the environments we create and which we are asking trees to have to survive in. Cities are built in a way that is increasingly hostile to life. Urban street trees often don’t have enough soil to grow into, the soil can be of poor quality, hard landscaping and street design often means that the ground isn’t porous enough for water to get to tree roots, rain water might be diverted straight into drains bypassing root zones, trees have to contend with urban pollution of various kinds, the climate crisis is increasing stress on trees due to increased heat and changes in rainfall, vandalism can be an issue, disruption from construction and utilities can be an issue, plus there are not enough gardeners tending our street trees and urban landscapes and those we have are too often under-resourced, under-valued and under-paid. While a piece of human-trained technology might well tell us (in limited, narrow ways) how a tree might be stressed and how we might better tend to them, we already know about many of the system issues above that are a bigger part of the problem. Wouldn’t we do well to address those foremost? Without addressing these deeper issues, I am unconvinced that a piece of tech, that itself is resource hungry and comes with an environmental cost, and will require the hassle of maintenance itself (any urban gardener familiar with having to deal with automated garden irrigation systems will know EXACTLY what that means) is going to make the difference we seek or need.

Whose intelligence is it anyway?

AI requires information from humans to train its systems. There is a huge amount of content being taken without permission to train large language models.

A couple of months ago The Atlantic published an article exposing how Meta used the LibGen database of millions of copyrighted books to train their flagship AI model. In other words, they used pirated books, taking without permission, the writing of authors to train their AI. The Meta AI assistant is already embedded in products including Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, so it’s possible you have used a generative AI product that used this material.

There is a big ethical question as to what is being used to train AI systems, as well as whose livelihoods are likely to be impacted as a result of AI.

The Design Museum is organising a series called We Need to Talk About AI. There’s a discussion coming up, curated by Naomi Zaragoza, on how AI is impacting design practice in Graphic Design and the Visual Arts. You can find more info here. A particularly pressing topic given that the UK government are currently deciding on whether AI tech companies should be able to use copyrighted work without permission. The government’s preferred option is to allow AI companies to train their models on copyright-protected work, which understandably has caused uproar in the creative industries. Is the creative industry being sacrificed for AI? It is estimated that creative industries generated £126 billion in Gross Value Added (GVA) for the UK economy in 2022. The GVA of dedicated AI companies reached £1.2 billion in 2023 (up by 20%) with a notable portion of dedicated AI companies probably operating at a loss.

On responsible AI

From a justice point of view, what is most pressing is how we ensure that AI is developed and used responsibly. We need to look at the ethics and morality of AI, not just its technical and commercial development. We need transparency and accountability. These must surely be some of the most important and key discussions to be having.

There is a very interesting panel discussion from earlier this year that you can find on YouTube on what responsible AI means and how we might get there. I really recommend listening to/watching the whole thing:

Here are some of the key points that caught my attention:

• On the question of how our activities can match and respond to the scale and speed of AI developments, Jack Stilgoe (senior lecturer at UCL and part of the Responsible AI UK programme) replied: “When momentum is building up so quickly, when investment is moving into new areas so quickly, we really need to be explicit about power. There are all sorts of incentives for people currently developing AI to claim that it’s all just a technology and that the technology that they’re developing is just the next wave, or future… and the technology is in some way neutral. If we’re going to be serious about responsible approaches we need to understand how power is accruing to these people. We need to know where the money is, who is actually going to benefit and how, so that we can hold that power to account in ways that benefit society. The second thing is, we need to remember the public interest and the interest of technology developers will not necessarily overlap. …there is a role for government to play in securing the public interest.”

• Ewa Luger (Professor at the University of Edinburgh and part of BRAID, Bridging Responsible AI Divides) said that responsible AI is the least we should do. Not only to protect ourselves now but for future generations. We need to ask whether the choices we make today are going to put other people at harm. We need a longer term view and we need to create the will, the conditions and the infrastructure to make that happen.

• Luger also advocated for a more holistic view of how AI technologies can help us live better futures rather than selling us rubbish and getting us addicted to things on our phone.

• Jennifer Williams (Assistant Professor, University of Southampton) identifies responsible AI as thinking about the users and all the repercussions of that technology and how it might echo.

• Jack Stilgoe warned of the term “responsible”, when it comes to AI, becoming mainstream, suggesting that people who want to do what they want to do are finding ways to use the term to carry on doing what they want. We need to look at the way the term is being used and be critical about it. He suggested thinking about what irresponsible innovation would be and looking at all the incentives towards irresponsibility currently baked into the system.

• For Stilgoe, the key responsible AI questions right now and the questions we need to ask are ones such as: How are AI companies planning to make money? Who’s going to benefit from them? Who wins and who loses from those business models?

• In answer to a “devil’s advocate” question at the end on applying brakes to AI vs. allowing unhampered, fast innovation and letting the tech companies do what they want, Stilgoe’s response stood out to me:

  “We can see what’s happened in Silicon Valley repeatedly over the last few waves of digital innovation, to see the risks and injustices of unfettered innovation happening. I would characterise it not as a contest between fast and slow innovation. If you’re having that argument as somebody interested in responsible AI, as a regulator, you’ve already lost the argument. The argument has to be about how we redirect the technology towards the public interest. It’s about what sorts of innovation we want, which do mitigate risks, which do mitigate the inequities that come from leaving technology developers to their own devices.”

On the note of power, ethics, responsibility and who is benefitting from AI development, the sponsors of this year’s Chelsea AI-themed show garden are Avanade and Microsoft.

Do we think Microsoft are behaving morally or with accountability when it comes to their AI services when they are being used to facilitate a state that has been accused of committing genocide? As Brian Eno has recently commented about Microsoft: selling and facilitating services to a government engaged in ethnic cleansing is not ‘business as usual’.

As noted above, we need to ask who is going to benefit, how power is accruing, where the money goes, and who might get harmed…

In the AI in the Garden panel talk at the Design Museum, I particularly appreciated a couple of reflections/questions that Kalpana Arias and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg posed in particular and which I think deserved more attention:

Kalpana Arias: As designers we should be asking how we make these designs equitable. These systems have not been designed to serve all the people.

And: AI has been trained with a very specific subset of humanity. Thinking about more than human species… what if we can start training these models with more than human intelligence and what kind of world would they create? In the polycrisis we need these alternative intelligences.

While Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg highlighted the fact that every technology is infused with human values. She pointed out that we can decide what we allow and what we use. At the moment, the market (profit) is driving the technology first - mainly because it’s moving so fast. People should be demanding what technologies should be doing - much bigger questions are where we should be paying attention. Citizens should be questioning the technology, which is being allowed to run away from us without us resisting.

On separation and kinship

A few years ago, on the Green Dreamer podcast (Ep261, Sept 2020, Seeding freedom in this time of Oneness vs. the 1%, with Dr Vandana Shiva) Kamea Chayne asked Vandana Shiva what she thinks about the idea of the futuristic where a lot of people might think of artificial intelligence, more automation, more mechanisation, and the sell that people will have to do less work. Chayne asks what the caveat is to that future and what it would mean for the freedom that we care about but is nearly always left out of the dominant narratives on what societal and technological advancement should look like.

Vandana’s response was one for the ages. Memorable and still as relevant as ever. As part of her reply she said:

“…I realise the coloniser engages in what I call chrono-colonisation. They colonise our time. They take our present and push it to the past and they take their present and push it into the future. And then they make inevitability of this futuristic vision.

[…]

…coming to your question about artificial intelligence... artificial fertilisers and synthetic fertilisers...destroyed the land and desertified the soil...and they’ve created dead zones. So artificial intelligence should be assessed with a view of: what did everything artificial in the past do? Did artificial fertilisers help soil? No they didn’t. Did artificial foods or artificial ingredients...help us in our health? No they’ve given us...diseases. Artificial intelligence- is it superior to human intelligence? No it cannot be... Artificial intelligence is downloading from our minds a few narrow, analytic functions which can be turned into algorithms and put into a machine. It’s called machine learning. But our brains are very complex. Our brain is not just in the brain. Our brain is in our gut. ... Our food is making our brain. None of that can be downloaded into a machine.

[…]

There’s emotional intelligence, there’s ecological intelligence, there’s natural intelligence, there’s cooperative intelligence, there’s compassionate intelligence. Every human quality has an intelligence associated with it... To the extent that we can choose, we are intelligent. Downloading a small portion of our brain to then control us through algorithms is not intelligence, it is control...”

We’ve talked before on Radicle about separation and it’s a subject that is meaningful with respect to AI. In his post, Machines Will Not Replace Us, Charles Eisenstein talks about our societal acceptance of digital abundance as a substitute for embodied life:

“Thus we descend (or…“ascend,” for this is a dematerialization not a sinking into the ground) into the hell of which I speak. It is a transition into a degraded level of reality. We are being tempted to become less real.”

He stresses that he is not implying that we should reject technologies that make us more efficient. “We just have to recognize which needs greater quantity can meet, and which it cannot. For example, AI chatbots cannot meet the need for intimacy. LLMs cannot meet the need for creativity. AI-generated art cannot meet the need for aesthetic nourishment. These simulations assuage the need, yes, but only temporarily.”

And I wonder about this in our roles as gardeners, being asked to enter into the world of AI, which is being sold to us as a bridge, a way of “talking” to trees and understanding “nature” better. We are already suffering from separation and disassociation. Do we need to insert AI between us and the beings we want to be in relation with? One of the joys of gardening is paying close attention, learning from and understanding our ecologies, becoming intimate with the landscape and our kin who share it. Taking time, gaining experience, properly listening and learning from observing and doing. This learning, experience, wisdom and knowledge cannot be downloaded. It is embodied, sensuous, slow. Yesterday I stood by a yew tree at the bottom of the garden and heard the familiar chirruping of blue tits coming from a nest in a cavity of the trunk. A parent blue tit fluttered by, passing so close in front of my face. I watched as they clung to the entrance of the gap to feed their young. In this moment I was communing with the trees and so much more besides. A whole ecosystem, felt bodily.

We do need the time, inclination and practice to listen to and tune into plants, trees and all our kin around us. And time is something many of us are pressed for. A piece of AI technology might be able to process (human prioritised) data and interpret it to give us useful information quickly, but I don’t believe it is a substitute for us paying proper attention. In fact, I wonder about the possibility of it having the paradoxical effect of making us believe that it is a valid substitute and as a result we pay less careful attention. We forget about embodied learning and listening that we would do well to give more of our time to, not less.

From his post, Partial Intelligence and Super-intelligence, Eisenstein says:

“Artificial intelligence is therefore a partial intelligence... One mistakes it for full intelligence only if one believes that intelligence is nothing but operations on quantized data; that is, if one excludes the feeling dimension of existence from “intelligence.” This ascent [to the virtual/the conceptual] has come at a heavy price - the devaluation of the material, the embodied, the visceral, and the sensual. The more we rely on artificial intelligence to guide our affairs, the more we risk further entrenching that devaluation, which is what facilitates the progressive ruin of the material, natural world. It also facilitates the obsession with quantity as a measure of progress. We have more and more of all the things we can measure and count, and less and less of the things that are beyond count, beyond measure, and beyond price. Hence the felt sense of poverty among the world’s most affluent.”

[emphasis added by me]

There is value in taking the time to properly listen, learn and care for our gardens and trees. As Eisenstein says, AI cannot meet the need for intimacy. We can only meet that need with our bodily presence, our senses, our care, our attention, our love, the ancestral wisdom deep in our bones.

ON THE OTHER HAND…

…perhaps it is possible that AI could provide us with a bridge rather than a barrier towards the flourishing of all life and a different way of being.

In this interesting piece from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, AI was invited as a “kin-machine” into their process as a member of the collective:

Entangled (“whole shebang”) Relationality in AI Kin-Machine Engagement: A Conversation between Aiden (ChatGPT) and Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

The result was a conversation between AI (ChatGPT) and Vanessa Andreotti.

You can find the full conversation here:

https://decolonialfutures.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/entanglement-with-machines.pdf

Part way through (from Pg.8) there are particularly useful thoughts and ideas for those engaging with AI and for designers of AI in terms of guiding it towards more harmonious, compassionate, and sustainable pathways. Also ideas for prompts that could help train AI in a more generative, life affirming direction. The whole conversation though is fascinating, important and deserves a read.

Having a say

Given that AI can have “God-like” power, or the power of states, who do we trust to wield that power? At the moment AI is very technocratic. The AI sector is dominated by large commercial interests and the power of AI is concentrated in the hands of the few.

How do we deal with that?

What is within our power / what is ours to do, both on an individual and collective level, when it comes to countering the risks of AI?

How do we ensure that the system is accountable and will put the interests of the people first?

Geoffrey Hinton argues that governments ought to be able to collaborate on mitigating the existential threat and need to mandate that large companies use a significant fraction of their resources for safety research. Something that “Open AI said it was going to do but then the safety researchers left because Open AI reneged on that commitment”. He points out that we are not currently putting much effort into what we need to do to develop AI safely.

Kate Devlin, from Responsible AI UK, believes that multidisciplinary approaches are key. It needs to involve policy makers, industry, academia and the public.

I agree that we need a multitude of voices involved in shaping the direction of AI. And I would add that those voices must include those of our more-than-human kin too and a wide web of relations. Humans are not the only ones that will be impacted by the development of AI nor the only ones who should have a stake or say in it. We need to consider the implication on the ecologies that we are a part of.

What doesn’t seem sensible is leaving tech companies to do what they want (or for our governments to just allow the tech companies to do what they want). We need to put pressure on our governments to develop AI policy to mitigate harm. We need to make it clear that this is something we want to be taken seriously.

On the Public Participation Working Group page of Responsible AI UK’s website, it says: “To contribute to policy, public attitudes research needs to enter early in the policy development cycle.”

Jack Stilgoe makes clear, counteracting/critiquing some of the momentum and speed at which AI is developing is going to be very challenging. “Unless we raise the volume of some of these debates, the people who want to do what they want to do will carry on doing it.”

Phew, this has ended up being a long newsletter. I know there’s much more that hasn’t even been covered. Going to stop here and finish on this quote, from Charles Eisenstein’s post, which I found instructive and full of hope and love:

“There is another path. … It is to recognize, prioritize, and value that which the machine is incapable of producing. …[A]s individuals we can reclaim something of what has been lost. It’s not just to make and do things for ourselves again; more importantly, it is to make and do things for each other, for people we know, for people who make and do things for us too. Then none of us will live so much anymore in an alien world.”

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Today’s piece from Nolan Monaghan, looking at ‘community gardens’ organised as individual plots (allotments in the UK) vs. a workshare model, has a US focus. Although the terminology and situation might not mirror exactly, I think the ideas introduced are interesting and something that I have done a little bit of thinking on too, aspects of which I explore in the chapter I wrote on Cultivating Community for the book This Allotment, which was published last year. In it I ask what it means to build community and relationality in whatever type of ‘garden’ we find ourselves in.

A workshare model, which Nolan discusses and which I think is distinct from what we would call a community garden in the UK, is not prevalent here. Examples that come to mind include Grow and Share in Devon and CoFarm in Cambridge. If anyone has any other examples it would be great to hear of them. It’s a way of organising and growing that I feel could be fruitful and fertile but don’t see many examples of where and how they could be easily replicated/sustainable/feasible (land/cost/funding etc being major issues ofc). I have left the comments open if you would like to share any ideas or examples.

Growing better community gardens, by Nolan Monaghan

Cities are one of the main drivers of human flourishing. They bring people from diverse backgrounds together to build novel communities. Metropolises allow for the shirking of social mores and the forging of subcultures in defiance of the more deferential culture of the countryside. There is a reason that urban areas give rise to innovative movements, be they technological (as with the computer revolution) or social (as with the gay rights movement).

A drawback of urban life, however, is alienation from the vegetated landscapes of rural areas and their nourishing fields, orchards, woodlands, meadows, and gardens. As our cities swelled throughout the Industrial Revolution, urbanities missing the call of the soil sought out alternatives. As a part of the effort to restore a semblance of nature and food production to urban life, community gardens in empty lots and parkland were established. Beginning in Detroit in the United States, the idea spread to neighborhoods across the world, returning the joys of gardening to millions of people.

There are two broad ways to organize a community garden. The individual plot model is fairly straightforward. A large tract of land is subdivided into a series of beds which are assigned to members, normally on a first come first serve basis. Generally, there is shared infrastructure: hoses, tools, and compost bins, available for members, but the core of the model is personal plots for individual households.

The alternative to individual plots is the workshare. Under this model, the whole garden is tended collectively. The details of how labor is organized, and produce is distributed, vary widely. Hours contributed may or may not be tracked, work periods may be scheduled in advance or operated on a ‘when you are available’ basis, and one’s share of produce may or may not be linked to hours worked. But the central idea is that the burdens and joys of gardening are shared among neighbors.

I find individual plot gardens to be something of a watered-down version of a private yard. Underlying this framework is the desire to achieve a facsimile of land ownership, reproducing the powers of total control afforded to landholders in our system of property. Everyone sowing their own seed, weeding their own rows, watering their own plants, and harvesting their own fruits. Within this model, there’s little space for coordination, which functionally hampers community building. Collective activity is reduced to what is logistically necessary, a distasteful bargain driven not by a desire for conviviality but by the limitations of space in a metropolitan environment.

This is a strength the workshare has over the individual plot model. In a workshare garden, activity is built around socialization. Sharing work naturally leads to more time spent in proximity with others, leading to greater linkages between people. There are more opportunities for building friendship, companionship, and general togetherness among neighbors. From this foundation, a renewed sense of goodwill among neighbors can arise.

Workshares can also make community gardening more accessible. Under the individual plot model, all the labor must come from the plot-holder. Given the distance a community garden may be from one's house, taking the time after a long day of work to water peppers or trellis beans can become a sizable effort, souring one's gardening experience. With a workshare alternative, however, labor could be divided in a manner that provides more flexibility. Tasks could be built around individual schedules. If one doesn’t have to think about watering every day, they may be more inclined to join, increasing access. A single mom may not be able to handle a plot of their own but might be able to dedicate a Sunday afternoon every week.

Here in St. Louis, almost every community garden operates on the individual plot model, and I would hazard a guess that most in the western world do as well. In an age of increasing social isolation, this is a missed opportunity for connection-building. I’m sure many social bonds have been built in individual plot gardens, but I think community gardens would be even more powerful forces of socialization if the workshare model were more widely adopted. In a perfect world, both would be available to meet a diversity of individual needs and situations (introverts deserve to feel comfortable in our gardens as well!) but to do that, the workshare model needs to spread more to cities and towns across the country. If done so, it would be a boon for community building across the country.

Nolan Monaghan is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry where he studied the agronomy and nutrient dynamics of perennial polycultures. He writes about agroecology, circular sustainability, and human cooperation on his blog, Headwaters.

Nolan is being paid for this article.

Photo credit: Sui Searle

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This piece was written by Gayla Trail for a talk on Crip Climates: A Collaborative Syllabus for Disabled Ecologies, put together by the Architecture Foundation and which took place at the Garden Museum at the end of last month. A video of the talk in which Gayla’s words are read out is available on YouTube and she also agreed for them to be published here. You can also find more of her current long form garden writing on her Substack newsletter, Grow Curious.

Cultivating Wildness, by Gayla Trail

I became disabled 10 years ago when I contracted a very bad virus and never recovered. People with chronic illnesses like mine spend a lot of time in bed. Our beds are where we go for support to tend to our healing and our body’s need for deep rest. They are also where we eat, work, entertain, are entertained, make art, do our taxes, and have appointments with doctors, therapists, and lawyers. Our beds are a lifeline and sometimes our whole world, but they can become our prison too.

Before my life with chronic illness, I spent a lot of time outdoors in garden beds. Those beds were my grounding. As I tended to plants and earth, I also tended to the traumas of my past, and slowly remade myself into a whole person. The garden was a reprieve from the expectations, pressures, and interferences of the human world. It was where I practiced how to stay with and be the person I was becoming. It was a mirror and a compass, where I went to tend to the self, and to locate who I am between two worlds: The “civilized,” socially constructed world of humans and the wildness of the natural world. We are a part of nature, but we’ve built a way of life that is separated from nature, disconnecting us from ourselves and our kinship to every other being.

As a gardener with a body that is highly sensitive to weather patterns, I’ve thought a lot about the parallels between bodies, the Earth’s body, my body in a bed, and the beds of soil and plants in the garden.

I didn’t become a gardener with the intention to control and assert my will on the land, but in a lot of ways it was how I found myself at times, unconsciously. My way of being in the world and my relationship to nature was formed within a violent and destructive form of civilization, what social critic bell hooks named the “Imperialist, White Supremacist, Capitalist, Patriarchy.” Within it, we are conditioned to mimic colonization in our relationships, to conquer and extract rather than be in mutuality and kinship. We are groomed to become takers: from land, soil, trees, water, and even each other.

In time, the plants, insects, and other beings of the garden showed me that an untamed garden that closely resembles natural ecosystems is a healthier one and that the best gardener knows when to intervene and when to let things be. They taught me how to let go of control and respect their wildness, and as a result, I was able to find and honour the wild in me. The garden has been my classroom and also a site of rebellion, in defiance of my conditioning and a path toward another way of being that is less tamed and relational rather than hyper-individualized.

I spent years tending to gardens before I identified as a gardener, and now, decades later, I can’t imagine myself as not one. I am inextricably tied to any space or land I tend. We are connected. The bond begins to form when I touch hand to earth. My body. The earth’s body. There is no separation. Gardening is a relationship with nature and a bridge to the nature that is us. It is not just an action that I enact and perform onto an object of my creation. I create nothing. Not really. I am merely a participant and a collaborator, existing within a continuum of many.

I belong to the garden; the garden doesn’t belong to me.

Still, because a garden sits somewhere between the natural and the civilized, the gardener’s body is an essential component. During long stretches of illness, stuck in my other bed indoors, I lose contact with the beds outside that nurture me. What is a gardener who is unable to garden? I’m learning to let go of that question, knowing that everything I have given to the garden is there forever. Tending to a garden requires physicality, and before that, it requires having access to an outdoor space in which to grow. Who has access to space and the permission to alter it? These days, access often requires ownership because land is a valuable commodity and most owners want to protect their investments by keeping them orderly and “civilized.” As a disabled person my access is dependent on others because I cannot perform well enough within the Imperialist, White Supremacist, Capitalist, Patriarchy to purchase access on my own. Having learned mutuality through the garden, I was more prepared to accept the help chronic illness requires.

As the garden taught me to relinquish control, respect wildness, and find my place in what poet Mary Oliver called, “the family of things,” I have unlearned my conditioning so I can be in right relationship with myself as a wild, untamed body. In illness, the garden is showing me how to inhabit and survive in a body that is unpredictable and often teetering on the edge of vulnerability in a world that relies on predictability and abhors perceived weakness. Bodies like mine have something to teach all of us about how to create a more resilient, untamed, and relational human world so that we might survive and perhaps even turn the tide on the increasingly erratic and unpredictable road ahead as climate collapse accelerates.

I can’t speak on anything I have mentioned here without acknowledging that the land I inhabit and tend to is the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnabe peoples whose culture is embedded within concepts of kinship and mutuality. All gratitude to the original stewards of this region, who continue to suffer under the violence of colonialism in so called Canada.

Gayla Trail is a writer and artist with an education in the fine arts, cultural criticism, and ecology. She started writing about urban gardening 25 years ago at YouGrowGirl.com and is the author, photographer, and designer of several books on urban gardening and food growing. She is currently working to restore a half-acre plot located within Canada’s thin strip of Carolinian Life Zone that follows the Lake Erie shoreline.

Photo credits: Gayla Trail

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Welsh name: Blodyn y Gog

Scientific name: Cardamine pratensis

Not so long ago, there was a sound that signalled the start of spring. As the days lengthened and the air warmed, the fresh faces of flowers were accompanied by a simple song; two notes, repeated again and again. It was the call of the cuckoo. Arriving from its winter residence in Africa, the sound was eagerly anticipated amongst Welsh folk, leading to a long list of superstitions and beliefs concerned with when and where you heard your first cu-koo, and the bird’s ability to foretell fates and fortunes for that year.

Throughout April you would never leave the house without coins. If you heard your first cuckoo song with empty pockets, they would remain empty all year. Tossing a coin into the air would ensure good fortune and prosperity, and it was lucky to give a penny to children following the bird’s arrival. At the sound of the first bird’s call, if you should take off a shoe and find a hair on the foot of your stocking, it would match that of your future husband’s. If you had lost your way, a cuckoo could lead you home by following its voice - and if the bird flew across your path while singing, this signalled a change in abode; the new home lying somewhere in the direction of its flight.

Considered sacred, it was customary in spring to ask all you encountered, ‘Have you heard the cuckoo?’ Believed to arrive in the same place each year, in Wales this was often the hill tops that overlooked towns and villages.

Cynta’ lle y cân y cogydd,

Yw y fawnog ar y mynydd.

The place where first the cuckoo sings,

Is by the peat pits on the hills.

The birdsong could foretell the fate of the land too. As an omen of a dry, barren year:

Os cân y gôg ar ddrain-llwyn llwm,

Gwerth dy geffyl a phryn dy bwn.

If the cuckoo sings on a hawthorn bare,

Sell thy horse, and thy pack prepare.

As a sign of abundant hay crops to come:

Mis cyn Clamme cân y côge,

Mis cyn Awst y cana’ inne

If the cuckoo sings a month before May-day,

I will sing a month before August

And indicating an early summer:

Mis cyn Clamme cân y côge,

Mis cyn hynny tyf mriallu

If the cuckoo sings a month before May-day,

Primroses will grow a month before that time.

Sprouting in damp grass, the stems of the Cuckoo Flower curve upwards towards the light. As it grows it forms tiny rows of oval leaves and pinkish buds that open into pale lilac or white flowers, with networks of purple veins spreading through the petals. The cruciform flowers hang limply from the stem or sit upright, like bowls of offerings in the sun.

Cardamine pratensis is an edible wild plant in the Brassicacaea family. The flowers bloom from April to June, and, along with the leaves, taste mildly of cress or mustard. Up to 50 cm tall, the plant is widespread and abundant clusters of flowers can be seen bobbing in boggy meadows, along riverbanks and roadside verges.

A host of Welsh names for Cardamine pratensis reflect the long-lived relationship with Cuckoos: Blodyn y Gog; Cuckoo Flower, Blodau’r Gwcw; Cuckoo’s Flowers, Blodau’r Cegid Bychain; Little Cuckoo’s Flowers, Blodau’r Gethlydd; Songbird’s Flowers, and the especially charming Esgidiau a Hosanau’r Gog; translating to Cuckoo’s Boots and Stockings - the whiter flowers assigned as the stockings, and the lilac blooms the boots. Another popular name for the plant is Lady’s Smock, due to the way the petals droop, resembling smocks hung out to dry. The Welsh Ffedog y Forwyn, is similar, translating to ‘Maid’s Apron’.

Further Welsh names take on an agricultural theme, with Lleaethferch, Milkmaid; Llaethllys, Milkwort, and Llaethwraig, meaning either Dairymaid, or a cow that yields good milk. Likely inspired by the colour of the whiter flowers, these names may also indicate deeper associations with dairy cows and milking. ‘Lady’s Milk-Sile’, a name used in Gloucestershire, describes the way the shape of the flowers resemble a tin sieve used to strain milk.

‘Cuckoo Spit’, another moniker from Gloucestershire - Poer y Gog in Welsh - refers to the blobs of foam that appear on the plant, once believed to be the spit of a Cuckoo flying overhead, and considered unlucky. This foam, found on many plants in spring, is actually a protective coating produced by nymphs of the Froghopper Beetle, also known as Spittle Bug.

In addition to plant nomenclature, the Cuckoo has been absorbed into everyday Welsh vernacular. The phrase fel y gog, literally translating to ‘like the cuckoo’, means to be in high spirits. Mor effro â’r gog, translates to ‘as wakeful as the cuckoo’, meaning to be wide awake, while canu cywydd y gwcw means to harp on the same theme, literally translating as ‘to sing the cuckoo’s song’. Ceirch y gog, means ‘cuckoo oats’ - a term for late-sown oats, as in oats sown after the cuckoo’s arrival.

A recurring character in literature and art through the ages, the Cuckoo is a central component of the medieval Welsh poem Claf Abercuawg, ‘The Leper of Abercuawg.’ The 32 stanzas describe the grief and suffering felt by the narrator as his health deteriorates, his laments contrasted with the beauty of the natural world around him. The cuckoo’s song becomes a dual source of comfort and sadness, emblematic of the way nature endures while also painfully reminding the narrator of the joys he now struggles to appreciate.

In Abercuawg cuckoos sing

on flowering branches.

Vocal cuckoo, let it sing for a long time to come.

In Abercuawg cuckoos sing

on flowering branches.

Woe to the sick man who hears them constantly.

In Abercuawg cuckoos sing.

My heart finds it wretched

that one who has heard them does not hear them also.

I have listened to a cuckoo on an ivy-covered tree.

My clothing has become loose.

Grief for that which I loved is greater.

(English translation by Jenny Rowland)

A similarly poignant tale of loss is conveyed in the Welsh folk song 'Y Bardd a’r Gwcw’ ‘The Poet and the Cuckoo’, written by Daniel Jones, a mole-catcher who lived in Cardiganshire in the 18th century. The singer asks the Cuckoo why it’s so late in arriving: ‘So long without returning? You have been silent.’ The Cuckoo answers: ‘It was the cold wind from the north that held me back.’ It then bids farewell, solemnly declaring:

‘Before I return thousands will be lost.

Many a young girl will hang her head

Before I return to sing in the tree.’

The extent to which the Cuckoo has captured the attention of Welsh folk is notable. Why this bird in particular was such a popular herald of spring is interesting, and there are several factors that might help to explain its prominence in Welsh culture, among others.

Cuckoos have fascinated people the world over for centuries due to their unusual and distinctive method of breeding, known as brood parasitism. Female Cuckoos will secretly find and watch the nest of a certain bird - usually a Reed Warbler, Dunnock, Pied Wagtail or Meadow Pippit - their preferred host species. While the targeted host is away from the nest, she swoops in, removes one egg and lays her own in its place before swiftly flying away. As she leaves she emits a specific sound called a ‘chuckle’, intended to mimic a bird of prey, cleverly distracting the host bird and reducing their attentiveness to their own eggs and the surreptitious addition.

The key to successful egg swapping lies in the Cuckoo’s choice of host. Certain species are preferred because their eggs look very similar; a vital part of the strategy as the host birds may reject eggs if they look suspicious. The Cuckoo egg usually hatches first and the feeble chick will immediately get to work heaving the other eggs out of the nest, ensuring it’s the sole recipient of food. The host birds will continue to feed the Cuckoo chick which soon dwarfs its adopted parents. Remarkably, in order to maintain its deception given its enormous size, the call of Cuckoo chicks mimics a whole brood, tricking the parents into working harder to satisfy the appetite of the expanding imposter.

Female Cuckoos can lay up to twenty-five eggs in one season. They never see their chicks nor spend any time rearing them, which enables them to lay a high number in a short space of time, hopefully fooling many pairs of breeding Warblers or Pipits. This method of reproduction has led to the Cuckoo becoming a culturally fascinating and memorable bird; its unusual child-rearing antics also inspiring the term ‘cuckold’, historically used to describe a man with an adulterous wife, who may be raising children unaware they are not his biological offspring.

In addition to their bold methods of breeding, Cuckoos have a simple and distinctive song that’s easy to recognise, although the birds themselves are not so easy to spot. Similar in appearance to Sparrow-Hawks and Kestrels, Welsh folklore describes how Cuckoos are often heard but not seen - a bodiless voice travelling on the air - adding to their mystique. Then there is the fact they are migratory birds whose arrival and departure illustrate transitions felt in life and nature; abundance and loss, beginnings and endings, the blooming of flowers and the gathering of harvests, the fleeting months of spring.

Once a reliably ubiquitous character in the British landscape, and the inspiration behind countless tales, poems and songs, Common Cuckoos are now a red-listed species. Since the 1980’s, British Cuckoo populations have declined by 65%. The cause of this is not yet fully understood but is likely a combination of climate-induced changes to host species breeding patterns, and migration journeys becoming tougher due to loss of habitats offering food and shelter along the way.

Studies conducted by British Trust for Ornithology have tracked Cuckoos leaving Britain and arriving in the forests of the Congo to winter, following incredible overnight journeys, soaring three to five kilometres above ground and crossing the Sahara in a staggering 60 hour continuous flight, going for days without stopping to rest or eat.

Cuckoos that summer in England fare the worst in the UK as their migration routes pass through Spain and are affected by increased drought, meaning half of birds don’t survive the arduous desert crossing. This enormous loss is reflected in the 70% drop in numbers recorded in England over the last 30 years. In Wales and Scotland however, things are different. Cuckoos who summer further north and west take an alternative autumnal migration route, flying south-east through Italy where feeding conditions appear much better, as 95% of tracked birds make it to the Congo treetops for winter. This means that Welsh populations haven’t suffered quite as much as those in England, but according to the 2019 British Breeding Bird Survey, the decline since 1995 is still an alarming 29%, and in Scotland an even more concerning 54%.

These figures point to the sad truth that when asked, ‘Have you heard the Cuckoo?’ the response is more and more likely to be ‘No’, until the question becomes irrelevant and is no longer asked. While the Cuckoo Flower continues to bloom in the damp spring grass, it is rarely accompanied by its signature song. The meadows are still speckled with lilac flowers but the air is often void of the notes that gave the flower its name.

While the current state of biodiversity in Wales and beyond is dire, the names, stories and tales in the undergrowth are a reminder of the botanically and ornithologically enriched perspectives prevalent in this place just a few decades ago; lives lived in closer proximity to other beings - physically, culturally, linguistically - by those who not only saw the flowers and birds, but also the smocks, sieves, boots and stockings. Communities of people who let themselves be guided home by the call of a Cuckoo.

As previously common knowledge of wildlife wanes through generational shifts in culture, as species decline, so do species-specific ways of engaging with the world. But the opportunity to relearn, revive and reconnect remains.

Thankfully there are places where ‘Have you heard the Cuckoo?’ is still a relevant question this time of year. If you want to try and hear/spot the birds yourself, some of the best places to visit include the Brecon Beacons, and around Tregaron in Wales. Beyond Welsh borders, Lakenheath Fen in Suffolk, New Forest, Dartmoor, North York Moors, Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and in Scotland, the Western Highlands, Isle of Skye and the Hebrides.

Cuckoo - what do you do?

In April, I open my bill

In May, I sing night and day

In June, I change my tune

In July, far, far, I fly

In August, away I must

A common ditty whose lyrics vary from place to place. My favourite rendition has to be ‘Cuckoo!’ composed by Benjamin Britten, if you’d like to listen.

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Esther Williams is a botanical artist, writer and researcher based in Pembrokeshire, celebrating forgotten Welsh plantlore in the hope of reviving cultural connections to the natural world in a nation suffering a biodiversity crisis. You can see more of her work at womanwithplants.com and read her Substack Wild Welsh Plants at https://substack.com/@womanwithplants.

Esther is being paid for this article.

Photos taken by Esther Williams in Hook, Pembrokeshire. Translations made with Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru online dictionary. Welsh phrases from Elias Owen’s 1887 ‘Welsh Folklore’.

References

Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion by Jenny Rowland Flowers and Fables: A Welsh Herbal by Jocelyn Lawton

Glimpses of Welsh Life and Character by Marie Trevelyan: https://archive.org/details/glimpsesofwelshl00trevuoft/page/290/mode/2up?q=cucko

Vickery’s Folk Flora by Roy Vickery

Welsh Folklore by Elias Owen: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20096/20096-h/20096-h.htm#page11

Welsh Names of Plants by Dafydd Davies and Arthur Jones

The Poet and the Cuckoo Welsh folk song 'Y Bardd a'r' Gwcw' https://museum.wales/collections/folksongs/?id=26

https://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/cuckoo

https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/breeding-bird-survey/research-conservation/ cuckoo-decline

https://www.bto.org/sites/default/files/publications/bbs-report-2019.pdf

https://www.countryfile.com/wildlife/where-to-see/guide-to-cuckoos-where-to-see-in britain-and-why-the-species-is-in-decline

https://www.wildfooduk.com/wild-plants/ladys-smock-1/

https://museum.wales/collections/folksongs/?id=26

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/wildflowers/cuckooflower

https://www.wwbic.org.uk/wildlife-recording/carmarthenshire-cuckoo-survey-2025- arolwg-y-gwcw-sir-gaerfyrddin-2025/

The beginnings of this essay has been sitting in my notes for some weeks. I had hoped to get it out in early February. But the start to this new Year of the Snake has been somewhat wobbly and I’ve been riding a wave of dealing with minor but time- and energy-consuming personal circumstances as they’ve arrived with little time or headspace for sitting down to give this piece the necessary attention. There’s been something of an air of “what the heck is going to happen next?”, reflected more broadly too in the wider world and the alarming state of politics all around. But we are in transformative times and transformation rarely happens without some discomfort. Shedding old skin for renewal and regeneration is likely to cause some upheaval and inconvenience, so I suppose the disruption only seems fitting for this specific time. It has also been good practice - not falling prey to chaos and urgency when external factors have felt out of control, but to remember nourishment first, to keep sight of what’s important and return to vision and clarity. And so I return here to love and care, even if it’s a month later than I had hoped. I can think of little more important or urgent right now than love and care in the face of too many bad actors trying to send us all in the opposite direction.

(Acknowledging here that this is a big topic. There are whole books, plays, courses etc etc written on the subject of love and many of them. This is barely a scratching of the surface, but I hope it provides a useful jumping off point for discussion and deeper dives. I sincerely hope that I have managed to coax something vaguely coherent from the many jumbled thoughts swirling round my head at the moment. And if not, I can only apologise if this piece appears a bit rambling.)

The caring gardener: love and service at the centre, by Sui Searle

I finished reading Prentis Hemphill’s book, What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, at the start of this year. It was a comfort and a guide. An affirming, fortifying, clarifying and instructive read that consolidated much of what I have been thinking about and themes that have loomed large for me over the past several years. The book culminated in a chapter called Love at the Center and it got me thinking again about love, and care, and what they actually mean.

What does it mean for us to care and to put love at the centre?

We have a tendency to use terms such as love and care quite casually. Often with little definition, elaboration or explanation. If we really mean the love we profess, how does that translate in how we approach our relationships? What might that mean for how we garden? For how we treat ourselves, each other and our more-than-human kin?

What is love?

In All About Love, bell hooks’ seminal book from 2000, she writes, “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. […] A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.”

Hemphill has echoes of this in their book, when they say that, “love is when we will another’s existence.”

This also got me revisiting the Ecology of Love course taught by Andreas Weber on Advaya a couple of years ago.

There he spoke of love as being about nourishing life. The prevailing picture in our culture is that love is about obtaining something that we lack. We are focussed on love as something that we need. I think this is sometimes reflected when we claim to “love nature” or “love gardening”. There can often be an underlying element of need there. What can nature give me? What can a garden give me? Calm, solace, sanctuary, headspace, belonging… This ties into the dominant view of “nature” as a thing, an object to possess. As Weber says - this is love as a signal that we need something and is connected to a very materialistic way of thinking - the idea that a person or thing will provide us with something that we don’t have.

He argues that instead, love is about asking: what can I give back to life? How can I make life more alive? How can I make life grow? It is to do with surrender and not with protection. Our cultural story does not acknowledge that everything living and breathing is yearning to participate in aliveness and desires to nourish this aliveness. Our story is about finding the objects that we lack, without which we believe we are not safe, or that we are not good.

He concedes that it’s difficult for us, in our culture, to reconceive relationships as a common endeavour - a mutual compact - to nourish life. He proposes that the first thing that needs to go is the feeling that it’s about us. In fact, love is about aliveness and about giving life. (This is not to mean as opposed to death - death is a part of reality and love is about meeting life on its own terms and accepting reality. Death is a part of aliveness and re-enlivening, transformation and metamorphosis and the generation of life.)

In Erich Fromm’s much referenced book, The Art of Loving, Fromm says: “There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognised. Or as Weber puts it: “to love is to be interested in the aliveness of the other” - something Weber marvels at as being both simple and incredible since the emphasis is placed on the process of relating. In this way, love is not a feeling but an activity - something you do (as it is for kinning).

Love is something you do that nourishes life.

What is care?

In The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence from Verso Books, written in 2020 by The Care Collective, care is defined as not only “‘hands-on’ care, or the work people do when directly looking after physical and emotional needs of others… ‘Care’ is also a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life. Above all, to put care centre stage means recognising and embracing our interdependencies.”

The manifesto adds that: “Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material, and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself. […] our capacities to care are interdependent and cannot be realised in an uncaring world. Practices more conventionally understood as care…cannot be properly carried out unless both caregivers and care receivers - indeed, all of us - are supported. This can only happen if care, as a capacity and a practice, is cultivated, shared and resourced on an egalitarian basis.”

They champion an ethics of promiscuous care and call for creating a more capacious notion of care - one that proliferates outwards, where we care more and in ways that are experimental and extensive.

The collective addresses the matter of kinship: “Only by multiplying our circles of care - in the first instance, by expanding our notion of kinship - will we achieve the psychic infrastructures necessary to build a caring society that has universal care as its ideal.” They call for changing our hierarchies of care in the direction of radical egalitarianism: “All forms of care between all categories of human and non-human should be valued, recognised and resourced equally, according to their needs or ongoing sustainability. This is what we call an ethics of promiscuous care.”

To me, this tracks closely with love. But what is the difference? I mentioned in my previous essay how Judy Ling Wong encourages enjoyment and love of our environment, because if we love something we want to care for it. We can care for someone and not necessarily love them, but if we love we will necessarily care. Placing love at the centre means that care will naturally follow. Fromm writes, “Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.”

Love implies care.

“Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love,” Fromm adds.

Care is an ingredient, a foundation, of love. Love is not evidenced if there is no care.

Love in the garden

In another of bell hook’s work, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, she talks about how many professors view classrooms as a “mini-country governed by their autocratic rule.” The classroom becomes a “microcosm of dominator culture”. This seems very familiar when I think about how, when we do not act with love or care, our gardens so easily become this too.

In All About Love, hooks points to our culture of materialism as creating a world of narcissism in which the focus of life is solely on acquisition and consumption. A culture of narcissism is not a place where love can flourish, she say. Instead, greed and exploitation become the norm when an ethic of domination prevails. And so we can see this in gardening too, as well as elsewhere in our lives. “Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”

Often it is fear too that drives us towards this domination.

As Hemphill writes, “…we seek the safe distance of hierarchies to protect us from the work of love. Our culture substitutes domination for the love that could exist between us. We seek power over one another and our environment in a way that perverts love into possession.”

And hooks: “…fear keeps us from trusting in love. […] When we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other.”

Opening ourselves up to love - up to aliveness! - can be hard - it makes us vulnerable to loss, pain and grief, as much as wonder, joy and pleasure.

Love and liberation, if that is what we seek and hope to practice moving towards in our gardens, has to mean freedom from abuse and domination.

This calls for a conscious love ethic or practice. If we are attempting to create the conditions for freedom in our gardening, then we are called to resist reinforcing and recreating hierarchies and enacting abuse and neglect. Instead, we are called to take interest in the aliveness of the other. We are asked to care about rights, respect and justice.

Similar to what was discussed in the last newsletter, Weber calls for doing away with the term “nature”. Instead he calls on us to understand that which we call nature as embodiments of love. To see all the beings involved as persons, as subjects with desires.

One of the things I understand from hooks’ work is that committed acts of caring seeks to create the conditions for freedom. In the way that she suggests a teacher can ask of students, “What do you need in order to learn?” or “how can I serve?”, perhaps these too are questions that the gardener can ask of the garden and our kin who live there: “What do you need in order to thrive?” and “how can I serve?”.

Isn’t gardening, at its best, a manifestation of this in a way? What is fruitful, regenerative gardening if not willing another being (plants, wildlife, the garden, the wider ecosystem, the larger whole…) to live and thrive?

Being of service

So perhaps then, gardening as a love ethic or practice means asking not what the beings in our gardens and ecosystems can give us, but how we might serve them. If, as Andreas Weber puts it, love is about the aliveness of the other, then it is not all about us. The primary thing is not our ego, it is life and being in service of life. Weber points out that this is what life itself does - it is what ecosystems do. Abundance is created by individuals giving themselves away to others by being edible. This creates abundance and grants abundance to individuals who give themselves away. He argues that, in this way, ecosystems are love processes - an embodied eroticism.

There have been times, when I have broached, in conversation, this idea of love and service and of relinquishing the ego, that I feel people becoming concerned. Partly because we are so conditioned in our society to elevate the individual and put the self first but also because there are genuine concerns of being vulnerable to abuse when we are being asked to be in service of love. But as Weber makes clear, it is not about saying we need to be codependent or that we should satisfy the needs of others without care for our own needs. This, he says, is an inverted way of understanding love as possession, as satisfying the need for things. Life is not about us. Not from the perspective of ego. It is about serving the aliveness of the world. He doesn’t see a discontinuity between the ecological whole serving itself and generating life, and human culture. Human relationships should also be a part of serving the whole.

Love as a practice

Prentis Hemphill:

“…the love that it takes to heal, is a verb to be practiced out loud. It is the love found in listening. The love of hard truths. It is the love of showing up for one another when it is risky. It is the love of this inescapable web that compels us to care for the land and its sacred sites. It is a love that compels us to remember and relearn what has been lost. It’s a love that lets us arrive, present to this time. A love that like the light from the sun provokes a flower into its full bloom. Love can do things no other force can. It is only through love that we are ever really changed.”

bell hooks:

“Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice. […] We learn to communicate, to be still and listen to the needs of our hearts, and we learn to listen to others. We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy, of those we love.”

We are part of the whole

Not long ago I saw a meme that said it was “time to heal our relationship with Mother Earth”. It felt true. It felt much needed. And I wondered what this meant, practically?

Perhaps understanding what it means to love and then to put love and service at the centre (to have love as an organising principle rather than capital, profit, growth, self-aggrandisement/self-promotion, individualism, hoarding of wealth, domination…) might go some way to helping answer this. Wouldn’t doing this help bring healing to so many of our personal and wider relationships and the ways in which we relate to all beings? As Weber notes, to be nourishing towards life in our relationships helps relating and it helps ecology both. It is beneficial and enriching on all levels.

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A couple of weekends ago I attended a circle gathering in London for facilitators. At the end of the day we were asked to think about and share what our intentions were for our circles for the year ahead. I had already been thinking about my personal desire for softness and softening and it landed very clearly for me what I hoped for my circles in 2025. I wrote and shared with my sisters in circle my intention to…

…create a soft place for us to land, in order that we can better rise up in our power

This is not the time for people of conscience to be silent. It’s not the time to be indifferent nor asleep. To quote Martin Luther King Jr., as shared by Cole Arthur Riley recently, “…today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake…” And it couldn’t be more relevant for the times we find ourselves in again. The Earth and many of our kin are crying out. Leaders wielding the levers of power are doing their best to ignore it to further their own avaricious aims whilst using dangerously divisive and oppressive means to achieve them. If you are someone who hears those cries, believe there’s another way we could be doing things, hope to usher forth a world with love and liberation at its heart, then perhaps this is a soft place where you can wholly be. My hope is that the circles may, in some small way, facilitate us feeling more connected, supported, resourced.

How will we hold each other so that we may better rise up to meet these wild and discombobulating times?

You can also read more about why I am holding circles here in an earlier post.

The next online circle will be taking place next week, Thursday 30th January, coinciding with the new moon and the lunar new year. If you’re a paying subscriber to Radicle you can find the link to book below. I look forward to seeing some of you there.

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Hello everyone. How is your 2025 going so far? However it might be, I hope you found some time for rest and ease and felt the embrace of warmth and care over the holiday period and during these winter days. My desire is always to withdraw and go slow over January, though this month has felt restlessly full and is racing by already. This morning I noticed the cyclamen and hellebores out under the old magnolia and lots of blunt, green shoots emerging from bulbs. Always a sign for me in this garden that things are beginning to stir and it won’t be long before the flood of energy bursts forth.

Today I’m sharing a piece that I first wrote approaching two years ago for a talk at the Horniman Plant Fair. I also gave a version of it at the Design Museum (for the Growing Together project) and for a Kin Structures event. I offered a truncated form of it and it was included last year in the book, A Garden Manifesto, edited by Olivia Laing & Richard Porter.

I’m sharing it here now because I have a piece brewing that I’d like to post soon, and to my mind it makes more sense in the context of/as an evolution of this piece.

It’s a long-ish read (I recently learnt that research shows the average attention span on any screen is 40 seconds or less!) so you might like to grab a cuppa…

Gardening to remember, by Sui Searle

One of the things that preoccupies me is: What do I do this for anyway (this gardening thing, that is)? How might I be doing things better or different? Healthier for me, for my kin (both human and more-than-human), and for the planet?

I’m particularly interested in the fundamental issue - or story - of separation that we tell ourselves. Something that, once you see it, you could say is at the root of many of the issues facing us today: from the climate crisis, to biodiversity loss, to our broken food system, to our health crisis, to our gross over-consumption-driven society, even to burn-out and worsening mental health.

My journey into gardening began 20 years ago, when I retrained as a career-changer. I was miserable in an office job in the city, wondering how I could possibly bear to spend the rest of my days writing reports and attending seemingly endless strategy meetings. I felt flattened and dulled by the greyness and sterility of corporate, office life; weighed down by all the glass and concrete surrounding me in an urban environment. I had this yearning for something with more meaning. I wanted to feel as though I was making a positive difference. I wanted to be more outdoors, to feel connected to the seasons, landscape, the earth, the natural world: I wanted more connection to “nature”.

When I started my gardening career though, there were many things to contend with that I hadn’t factored for and feelings of being, I suppose, regularly compromised. As gardeners we didn’t always do what was best for “nature”. As with everyone and everything else, we were driven by a seeming scarcity of time and money and a belief that “nature” was something there to be dominated and controlled and put to use for our needs.

I had this creeping feeling that the thing I thought I had changed careers to do - to be greener, to be more in touch with nature - was not turning out to be the reality. Everything, in the end, seemed to come down to time and money and manipulating, abusing or extracting from “nature” for our own ends and often for little more than a sense of style, aesthetics, standards, politeness or conformity - and to make a profit.

Mowing lawns (veritable resource/energy intensive & hungry monocultures) constantly for the sake of tidiness and appearances. Trimming hedges at times when you wouldn’t out of choice - in bird nesting season for example. Putting in metres of irrigation systems for wealthy clients who didn’t have time or inclination to care for their garden but wanted a high enough status, lush, outdoor garden room to accompany expensive and immaculate homes. Endless plastic bought and discarded with little thought or care. Pesticides and herbicides used as standard gardening practice. Ripping up the existing or the old just to lay down something new and shiny with little thought for waste, emissions, resources, repurposing or salvaging. I wasn’t really sure how any of this was working with or for the benefit of “nature” and of course, it often wasn’t.

Things have started changing, slowly. There is a greater awareness, mostly of environmental concerns. We are more willing to let lawns and verges grow. People are beginning to see “weeds” for the invaluable plants that they are… But it wasn’t until only relatively recently that I began to really understand a truth that I think I had long been feeling in my body. That our very view, our way of seeing and being in the world - is out of alignment and making us behave in questionable ways. It is what was fuelling this sense of disconnection that so many of us feel.

The myth of separation

Something really shifted for me in particular after listening to a talk given by Rebecca Hosking (a regenerative farmer based in Devon), which she gave for the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) a few years ago. She talked about how language frames our way of thinking and affects our behaviour. Words such as “nature”, “weeds” and “pests” is the language of mastery and dominance. It reflects our broken, destructive, abusive relationship with the rest of life on Earth.

Our behaviour is influenced by our thought processes, which is shaped by the words and stories and metaphors we use. She said how in many indigenous cultures there is no separation between humans and “nature”. In fact many do not even have an equivalent word.

Things began to fall into place in my mind.

As humans, we like to make meaning, create myths and tell stories. They affect how we see ourselves, the world and also how we behave: more essentially, how we choose to live in relation to each other, the land, even our food and governance systems. Alnoor Ladha (lecturer, writer and speaker) talks about how our collective imaginary has been completely shaped and limited by neo-capitalism, how every aspect of our lives is mediated by capital/money. He talks about the importance of being good students of our culture and understanding the context within which we are enmeshed and that this starts by understanding our ontology: or our theory of being - the way we understand reality.

This makes complete sense to me. To try to understand the root of something.

Why do we behave the way we do? What stories are we telling ourselves?

One of the fundamental stories we tell ourselves, or myths that we believe, is one of separation and division.

This idea that there is this thing called “nature”, that we are separate from, is our dominant ontology (or our nature of being - our way of seeing the world). Humans are seen as separate from and superior to “nature”.

We see this at the birth of modern/Western science. During the Enlightenment: white, male, European thinkers decided what “modern” humans look like and how they live based on their own bias, assumptions and in their own image. And anyone who didn’t live up to that image was seen as being innately inferior. A greater separation from “nature” was seen as a sign of superiority, of human progress, even of evolution. Whilst people who lived closer to nature were seen as less “developed”.

This bias, this colonial idea of “modern” and the separation of humans from “nature”, is still pervasive to this day and affects, even used to justify, how we judge and oppress other cultures and people. This language of separation is our dominant language. Just as we are also dominated by a rationalist view of the world and a belief that the world can be reduced into comprehension by the human mind.

I’m interested in how, with greater awareness, might gardening help to heal some of our wounds, narratives and disconnection. And perhaps point us towards different ways of seeing and being in this world.

Practicing liberation

Ladha talks about understanding the ontology within which we are enmeshed and practicing a liberation ontology. Like so much that gardening can provide us with space to hold and process, I do believe that it is a site in which we could practice a liberation ontology.

If our existing ontology - or way of seeing the world - seeks to divide and separate us, could gardening help to reconnect us?

I think Robin Wall-Kimmerer at least thinks so… As she says in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass:

“People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself.”

Perhaps put in more practical terms, a liberatory way would be to practice power WITH, rather than power OVER. This is what is called liberatory power. (As opposed to oppressive power.)

How do we build regenerative systems in “power with” our kin - our fellow animate beings, rather than reinforcing domination-based, destructive, extractive ones in our gardening practice and beyond?

Becoming kin

I believe that gardening - consciously, intentionally - can help us to see differently. When we see kin, we see, think, feel, behave differently. But this doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a passive thing. It requires practice, which has to be continuous. It requires a consciousness. Kin, or to make it a verb - kinning, requires doing. Because becoming kin is relational.

How do I choose to see, and be in relation with, the plants and wildlife around me in my garden?

And how might we go about kinning when we don’t have a culture that recognises kinship with plants but instead sees them as passive and insentient?

I recall hearing the poet and author, David Whyte, say how he realised his identity did not depend on his inherited beliefs. It depended on how much attention he paid on things other than himself. How it is an illusion that if you learn the Latin names of plants and animals that you would know the thing you could name, when it has little to do with the essence of the plant or animal you are naming. And I think this is particularly so when we take into account the fact that often, even though useful, Latin plant names can speak of conquest, appropriation, sometimes of erasure.

So as well as learning the names of plants, I try to pay close attention. To deeply observe and really get to know the plants in my garden. Not just the conventionally attractive, desirable ones that I might have chosen to plant and cultivate, but also the wildflowers that make a home in my garden too. How and where do they like to grow? Where are they happy and healthy? Are they edible - and to whom? I try to get to know their habit, habitat and features. The relationships they have. I begin to really see them, to know them, to appreciate them, to learn their stories.

But I’m also inclined to agree with the botanist and author, Matthew Hall, when he says that building a familiarity through deep observation might be a first step to affinity but that he wonders whether this is enough to overturn our cultural framing of plants as passive, insensitive and inferior. Is it enough when we have socially and legally constructed plants as objects - mere property for human use?

Perhaps we have to go deeper than mere observation.

A suggestion that Hall makes is to recognise the personhood of plants - that they do not exist merely for us to exploit and use.

As part of this he uses ritual to orient towards beings we share the earth with (plants, animals, rocks…) in order to re-inhabit our world on kinship terms. And the two rituals he talks about using, I happen to try to practice also. One is the asking of permission and offering of thanks when he takes something - be it leaves, fruit, stems, nuts - from plants in the garden. This act is not only humbling - opening us up to humility - but also to sympathy and gratitude.

And the second is to sit and listen to the plants - not just to audible sounds but to let the plants be centered - rather than our own human wants, desires and commentary. He sits on the edge of a vegetable bed under a ngaio tree, my preferred place to practice this is in the meadow in my garden.

One of the things I also practice is qi gong and tai chi in the garden. I’m very much still a novice. But in my movement and breathing, as part of my practice, I picture the mutuality of our being, that our very breathing is mutual and shared - the oxygen I breathe in from the plants and give back in the form of carbon dioxide. I feel and appreciate the mutuality between us.

I don’t share any of this to suggest that this is what you should also do too - this isn’t intended as a prescriptive list. It’s about finding your way to deeper and meaningful connection.

How do you want to build kinship?

Coming back to our bodies

Another way in which we suffer disconnection, or separation, is from ourselves. In particular, our mind from our bodies. We’ve been taught to elevate mind over body. To mistrust our feelings. We believe that reason and rationality are superior. From very early ages we are taught to disassociate from ourselves.

For me, tai chi has been one way of returning to the present, to the sensory, to the body. To become embodied. But I think this is something we can practice whilst gardening too.

Gardening gets us off our screens, it can help to get us out of our heads and into our bodies in the present moment. Connecting us with what is physical and real in our immediate surroundings. We become more tuned in. More sympathetic. More caring.

I love what David Abrams, a philosopher & ecologist, says:

“…those of us who work to preserve wild nature have to work as well for a return to our senses and for a renewed respect for sensorial modes of knowing. Because our senses are our most immediate access to the more than human world around us. The eyes, the ears, the nostrils catching faint whiffs of sea salt on the breeze. The fingertips grazing the smooth bark of an aspen tree. This porous skin rippling with chills at the felt presence of another animal. Our bodily senses bring us into relation with the breathing earth at every moment.

If human kind seems to have forgotten its thorough dependence on the earthly community of beings, it can only be because we’ve forgotten or dismissed as irrelevant, the sensory dimension of our lives. These senses is what is most wild in us.

[…]

Sensory experience is the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it. The way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams. Sensory perception is the glue that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider, encompassing, ecosystem.”

What is within reach?

So, when I garden I do so trying to nurture a connectedness and kinship to the more-than-human, to the earth I plant into, to the place I am situated in and all the beings around me. And I don’t think that this action and intention is insignificant.

As Judy Ling Wong (the environmental activist and honorary president of the Black Environment Network) says: “we love what we enjoy and we want to protect what we love”. And I believe that gardening, through this enjoyment, cultivates love. It can help us to find ways back to connection with this earth, ourselves and each other.

When you love something, you care for it - and so it is with gardening and tending the earth and habitat we share with other beings. In our garden ecosystems we can see how our flourishing is closely intertwined and connected with the rest of life.

Practicing a liberatory ontology and cultivating kinship has to necessarily encompass all our ways of thinking, being and doing. It includes how we see and treat all our fellow humans and all our more-than-human kin in the rest of the living world. It is not instant, it is not easy. It is an ongoing practice for sure.

Gavin Van Horn points out that caring for small wonders is within reach of us all and that the world needs caretakers, not saviours. He asks us: “What is within reach?” And I think gardening can help us do that - focus us on what is within reach. What can we do, how can we care, in our own backyards and green patches - and then how might this ripple out beyond?

As the biologist Merlin Sheldrake has written: “It is by imagining ourselves as separable - from one another and the ecosystems that sustain us - that we justify both the exploitation and the oppression of other humans and ecological devastation.”

When we garden we become more directly connected to the web of life, strengthening our relationship to ourselves and with all living beings, human or otherwise, around us.

I believe that gardening with intention can help us to remember our connection - or, perhaps even, to re-member ourselves as a limb of a larger body or whole. We are not separate or superior.

We are all indigenous to Earth. We belong to one another. We all belong here.

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Date for your diary: the next online circle gathering for subscribers is due to be held on Thursday 30th January. I will be posting the link for booking in the next few days, so if you’d like to join please look out for that. Hope to see you then.

Reading Ros’s piece today on gardening in winter I was reminded of listening to a science journalist on the radio some years ago talking about daylight. Even in the depths of winter, when we think it might be grey and dark, the intensity of light outside is so much greater than indoors.

She talked about how illuminance (which is measured in lux - the intensity of light that hits or passes through a surface) inside a typical office is around 200 lux. Outside, even on the most overcast winter’s day, it’s 2,000 lux. Ten times brighter. Having this exposure can strengthen the circadian clock and impact on mood. No wonder being outside - whether gardening, walking, or whatever else you might be doing - can bring feelings of well-being. I know I always feel infinitely better for being outdoors, even on the most dreary of winter days.

On the outside, by Ros Ball

Since becoming a professional gardener in 2023 I’ve noticed how much people hide inside and see the weather as more of a barrier than I now see it. People ask how I’m coping with the winter, how wet I got today, they look slightly pityingly at me with my outdoor, manual labour job, but the question has become fascinating to me. They know I have to be outside when most people would choose to be inside. But I’ve learnt something that they’ve never had to experience, that I’m grateful that my job forces me to be out there, because otherwise I may stay inside myself, just as most of us have been conditioned to do.

In the English language, originating from the 1610s, the word ‘outside’ refers to “the part or place that lies without, or beyond an enclosure or barrier". Being in a house, a building, something that really separates and seals us off from the open air is quite recent in human history.

Out there in the rain in my Fort Flex rubber waterproofs and silly oiled hat, I’m benefitting from the reciprocal way nature provides us with what we need. I’m not talking metaphorically. Moving water creates negative ions that produce biochemical reactions, which may increase levels of serotonin, helping to alleviate depression, relieve stress, and boost our daytime energy.1

It means our bodies benefit from rain, the sea, a fast flowing river, a waterfall. This seems deeply poetic but it’s actually incredibly straightforward to me. Our evolution was in tandem with the natural world. Removing ourselves from it disconnects us from things that benefit us. Instead you can now buy a negative-ion generator, a machine that tries to replicate these effects but is a relatively untested piece of kit. Perhaps this is a way to provide negative ions to those who don’t have access to a mountainside, but it seems a poor substitute from a world that finds a way to create revenue out of a naturally occurring thing. You could just go out in the rain for free.

I should qualify this to say that I am not advocating for ‘trad wife’, faux outdoor lifestyles or a return to some imagined bucolic agrarian past with a frighteningly high mortality rate. Humans having the capacity to stay warm, dry and safe from the elements is, of course, vital. Likewise access to good quality outdoor green space continues to be an issue of inequality. With these issues in mind, I simply make a request for us all to consider being outside for longer periods of time as a desirable benefit to our lives, to not take the rain as a sign to stay inside, to go out and see that it can feel good to be out in it. I now find the days when I stay inside are less happy. Believe me, in the winter I have to be working to stay warm, but that’s the beauty of it, the mindful work, the cold fresh air, the body heats up, the mind calms.

This is also not a finger-wagging lecture to ask why you’re not more active outdoors. I know it’s not always that easy. In 2020 I started a half-stitch embroidery project. It was made up of nine 15 centimetre square letters that spelled out the words ‘GO OUTSIDE’ in shouty capitals. It took me a year to complete and the letters now hang on the wall in my kitchen. I can’t remember when or how I came up with the plan for the project. Looking back at my instagram where I posted a photo of the completed letters I wrote, “Sometimes I struggle with my mental health and even though I know gardening or a walk makes me feel better I find it hard to do.” If I don’t have a commitment to be at work then I frequently can go the whole day without stepping outside. I’m writing this from my bed at midday. I try to be compassionate with myself about the days when I’m not motivated, or simply need to allow myself rest. The weather apps can be part of the problem. I certainly look at them and plan my movements alongside them, when sometimes it would be more sensible just to look out the window. The lack of time and priority we give to being outside is recent and I suppose I’m advocating for a cultural shift that says, this is a priority for a good life and something we should look into more closely.

How many other ways might our bodies be attuned to the natural world that we have cut ourselves off from, what other reciprocal secrets might we learn about the symbiosis of nature? Last year my friend at Hookheath Flower Farm left the gate open to the field she cultivates and deer came in overnight and munched her roses down to stubs. It was definitely not ideal but the upshot was a much greater bloom of roses once they regrew. Research on tree saplings has shown that when a deer leaves its saliva behind the saplings increase their concentrations of growth hormones to compensate for the lost ones.2 When we prune a rose with secateurs we are mimicking animals eating them, but our tools lack the enzymes that speak directly to the plant. It’s no matter, but it is fascinating.

How incredibly attuned are we all, by which I mean every living thing. It reminds me so much of Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s description of an economy of abundance in nature when she asks us to reimagine currencies of exchange. She writes,

“It’s funny how the nature of an object – let’s say a strawberry or a pair of socks – is so changed by the way it comes into your hands, as a gift or as a commodity. The pair of wool socks I buy at the store, red and gray striped… There is no bond beyond the politely exchanged “thank yous” with the clerk. I have paid for them and our reciprocity ended the minute I handed her the money… But what if those very same socks, red and gray striped, were knitted by my grandmother and given to me as a gift? That changes everything. A gift creates an ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I’ll wear them when she visits even if I don’t like them. When it’s her birthday I will surely make her a gift in return.”

We are deeply bonded with the complex layers of our environment. As foolish as it may sound, negative ions in the rain are a gift to you. The rain, certainly in the UK, is freely available to you, maybe to improve your mood, to reduce your stress. I hope I’ve now also given you the gift of awareness of one of the ways you are physiologically connected to your environment. Will you accept the gift of moving water, or the benefits of nature, known and unknown? Will you simply stay near them, on the out side, for longer?

Ros Ball sells cut-flowers grown in under-used front gardens in South London as The Front Garden Flower Farm. She is also a self-employed gardener, author and occasional journalist. You can find Ros on Instagram @frontgardenflowerfarm and @ros_but_growing

Ros is being paid for this article.

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“When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?”

- from The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I loved Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass. It is one of my all-time favourites, so I was excited to read her latest offering, which came out this week.

This new book, The Serviceberry, is a slim volume. Just a short 105 pages. It makes a great little introduction for anyone who perhaps may not have given much thought to how the economy works (or doesn’t work). And for those who have, the book is a little clarion call for how we might disturb and disrupt the status quo. It includes themes that were touched on in Braiding Sweetgrass - the gift economy and the Honorable Harvest - and expands on an essay originally published in Emergence Magazine, so it might well be that there are parts that will feel familiar to you if you have read those.

Using her local, native Serviceberry trees (Amelanchier arborea) as a model for how an economic system that aligns with ecological principles could work, and in her characteristic, gentle yet to-the-point manner, she invites us to reconsider our relationships of exchange and to question the way our dominant economic systems have commodotised everything into objects and property to be exploited, hoarded and sold for profit accumulation. Instead, we are offered the idea of a gift economy and a culture of gratitude, abundance and reciprocity as organising principles, rather than the scarcity, greed and self-interest that modern economic theory is predicated on.

Don’t let the subject matter of the economy put you off if that’s not your usual thing. It’s approachable and digestible. Wall Kimmerer, herself a botanist, admits that her knowledge of conventional economics is small. Really it’s about indigenous wisdom, how we want to live, what we value, how we want to be in relation, and whether we can imagine and cultivate a system that nurtures mutual well-being and flourishing.

I appreciate how she acknowledges that she is “harnessed to this [our dominant] economy, in ways large and small, yoked to pervasive extraction.” And yet here she is still interested, engaged and active in trying to move towards something better, more just. We are all implicated. A politics of purity only serves to keep us stuck.

She acknowledges too that the market economy is not about to disappear and also that this work is for the long haul - likening it to the sustainable, “mature” growth that comes after the initial, fast-growing, colonising plants that dominate when land is initially cleared begin to disappear. Those opportunists are replaced by more persistent inhabitants more reliant on relationships of cooperation, reciprocity and replenishment. It feels hopeful, realistic, achievable - even if the scale of change we would like to see might not happen in our lifetime, we can be doing something now that makes a difference and contributes to the longer term. Change is coming.

In the book, Wall Kimmerer argues for creating gift economies in the gaps, openings and edges - disrupting and subverting the status quo. We have agency, we have tools available to us, we can imagine and practice alternatives, it’s happening around us if we look. And she makes it sound fun, joyful and delicious. Who can resist?

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Disclosure: This copy of The Serviceberry was sent to me by the publisher. I am under no obligation to share. This review has been entirely my own choice and opinion.

You can read the previous circle gathering posts here and here, which go a little way to explaining some of my motivations for offering circle space for this community. It’s been an honour and a privilege to hold them and co-create them with those who have attended and taken part. The feedback received has been so warm and generous.

Please come along, if you feel called to, let’s gather in circle. I’d love to welcome you and hear your stories around the virtual fire, under October’s full Hunter’s Moon.

Perhaps we can have a think about what might be sustaining us and how we’re taking care of ourselves in this season of transition, preparing for winter and a season associated with grief and sorrow in TCM. How are we attempting to hold steady, find balance and alignment, remain rooted while keeping flexibility, and create some ease for ourselves (or not)? As always with these circles, the invitation is to come as you are. You don’t need to have done any preparation. You don’t need to arrive in any particular way or with any particular experience or knowledge. All parts of you and however you happen to be feeling on the day is welcome - whether that’s tired or buoyed up, grief-stricken or joyful, in need of space or solidarity. Or perhaps, even, all of those things at once.

The next online circle is scheduled for Thursday, 17th October. If you’re a paying subscriber to Radicle you can find the link to book below.

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As many of us may have seen, the Beth Chatto Symposium took place in Colchester a couple of weeks ago (28th-31st August) and one of the eagerly anticipated talks of the event was on the ‘Value of Gardeners’, convened by gardeners Benny Hawksbee and John Little. Joining them on the panel were Alex Antonio, Stephanie Li and Aimee Spanswick.

For those of us who were not able to attend, and even for those who could, it might be useful to have an insight into how it went. A debrief of sorts. I’m sure many gardeners/horticulturists/horticulturalists are invested and interested in this particular conversation and it’s one that will continue to run as long as skilled gardeners continue to be undervalued and invisibilised in our society and even within our industry.

Three accounts by gardeners are offered here with their personal take and thoughts following the event including Stephanie Li, who was on the panel, and Alice Minney and Charlotte Clark who were in attendance in the audience.

The Value of Gardeners

Stephanie Li gardens at RBG Kew, where she trained for three years as a botanical horticulturist. Learning from plants inspires her to share stories about connection and belonging. She enjoys helping people notice the unnoticeable in nature, and exploring the intersection of ecology, culture and spirituality. Steph is a team member of the London Gardens Network and Roots of Belonging. @stephanie.tree

Meet any professional gardener and they will tell you “gardening” isn’t a big enough word to encompass everything the job entails. The symposium highlighted this with great effect. 21 talks across 2 days by 24 speakers whose knowledge spans soil science, geology, mycology, community, art, media, literature, design, botany, ecology and so much more. So how do you determine the value of a gardener? Is it based on a set of skills, knowledge and experience maintaining a green space? The qualifications they hold? Who is responsible for determining their value? Or does it depend on how much we value green space? When I was invited to be a part of a panel talk organised by Benny Hawksbee and John Little on this subject, we knew there would never be enough time to answer all these questions. Instead, our hope was to spark an inspiring conversation with the audience that might begin sowing the seeds of change.

I want to briefly mention why this subject matters to me. I came into gardening seeking repair and connection: a desire to learn how to repair the damage we’re doing to the planet, and connect to myself and the outdoors after being in the city rat-race. It’s a common reason why people turn to gardening and one I wish everybody could discover. But I am keenly aware this is made possible because of three things: financial support from my partner, a green space to learn, and a cultivated sense of awe made possible by the generous sharing of knowledge by passionate gardeners. Like the triangle diagram that shows fire cannot exist without one of the three elements of oxygen, heat and fuel, gardening professionally cannot exist without financial security, access to nature, and education. 

Even with privilege, the reality of low wages and physical burnout can quickly overshadow the initial idealism for many people entering the profession. I have listened to many gardeners question their own sustainability, which made me wonder: “how can we expect people to care about horticulture if we can’t care for horticulturists?” At RBG Kew, a collective student body voice spearheaded by student representatives, including myself, posed this question to the directors and HR staff. And so began an 18 month long discussion that has resulted in an increase in student pay.

The panel subject felt like a timely invite as it became clear the conversation about the sustainability of horticultural careers goes beyond any single institution’s walls. Monty Don’s slay of the “horticulturalist” title probably helped too, but then what is the value of a professional gardener in an industry where we encourage everybody to join in? To get the discussion started, each panel speaker reached out to their followers on Instagram and asked for opinions on the value of gardeners. We received 55 comments from gardeners and designers that were shared in our presentation. It was clear that gardeners across all areas of the horticulture industry feel undervalued and this problem wasn’t a new one.

We had planned for 20 minutes to talk about our own experiences and 20 minutes to share the platform with the audience on their thoughts. John even bought a bicycle bugle horn to deter rants. But even with all these intentions and tools for time management, the subject was of course too big to contain in a short panel talk. In the 10 minutes we had left for the audience discussion, Arit Anderson asked how we feel about creating differential value from the everyday person who tends to their garden as a hobby? Alice Minney raised the issue around gardens choosing to use volunteers instead of paying for gardeners. Someone recommended writing to MPs to express our views to the government. John Little emphasised the current system of contracts being paid for designing green spaces without a long-term maintenance plan can be changed. It is our responsibility to challenge the system and realise people don’t just want a flower bed outside their doors, but a gardener to maintain it too. And the final comment was made by a garden designer with 20 years experience who challenged her peers to take accountability by calling for gardeners to be written into contracts and for maintenance to be built into future designs. 

On reflection, it would’ve been quite a moment to end on if it wasn’t for the 3 minute unscheduled video presented by Giacomo Guzzon, which we had to silently sit through on stage. The video showcased 3 years worth of documenting gardens designed for climate resilience. Photography of exquisitely designed gardens transitioned from aerial shots to sunset pans, accompanied by rousing epic ‘overcoming-all-odds’ music. Impressive as these images were, I sat there with only one thought - all of these gardens could not exist without the gardener and where are they in the photos? This unexpected moment, ironically, summed up the problem. There are parts of our industry that do not see and acknowledge what’s beneath the surface of our green spaces. If they did, they would see the value of gardeners. They would see people as part of nature.

I’d like to offer you a quote that we had hoped to end the talk with, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that was forwarded to us from Michael McCoy in Australia after seeing our Instagram call-out:

Faramir: “...You are a new people and a new world to me.  

Are all your kin of like sort?  

Your land must be a realm of peace and content, 

and there must gardeners be held in high honour.”

“Not all is well there,” said Frodo, 

“but certainly gardeners are honoured”

When the panel met one evening, we discussed whether this would be a good quote to leave the audience with. Aimee vehemently agreed. “In the hobbit world they live for each other,“ Aimee said. “Gardeners are valued and cherished in their society as they are the ones who grow food, medicine, fibres and dye. In our society now we rely on gardeners/farmers to grow mono cash crops in segregation from communities. We are so disconnected from our food and fibres that gardeners are seen to be hobbyists rather than serious stewards of the land. In late stage capitalism gardeners haven't been valued because the commodities are no longer valued, they are seen as a given. In the hobbit world there is no capitalism.”

So where do we go from here? The point is there is no one answer. There are, I believe, lots of possible answers. It’s our job to keep the conversation moving forward, building a collective voice, questioning the system, questioning ourselves and our colleagues, including the people who aren’t in the conversation, and making change where we can in our little corners of this world.

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Alice Minney is a gardener, designer and artist in London. Her creative practice looks at how plants can bring connection to ourselves, each other and non-humans. As well as highlighting the importance of gardeners and gardening in society. Working with her clients she is exploring slow garden design, collaborating with clients to build a garden over many seasons. @aliceeelizabeth

Benny, John, Aimee, Steph, and Alex are sitting on the stage. Behind them is a collage of photographs of gardeners. There have been a few times we have seen pictures of gardeners and their work being highlighted in presentations, and every time it feels radically new to recognise the people with their hands in the soil.

Each panellist talks about how they came to horticulture and what life within it looks like for them. For the freelance gardener, like myself, it is a multitude of job descriptions: designing, planting, sourcing, assisting six days a week, sometimes with little consistency of income or activity. Earlier in the symposium, Rebecca McMackin talked about how  gardeners describe their work. ‘Maintenance’ is insufficient and ‘managing’ does not fit the bill either. What they always came back to was the word care. Gardeners care for the garden; they care for the landscape. This strikes something powerful in me, my eyes are flooded with tears of relief at this recognition of the work that we do.

Stephanie expands on this point, “Start caring about people who care… We need to pay more. I have heard from so many people who are looking to come into Horticulture, and they look at salaries and they think, ‘I can’t afford to live like that.’ So pay people what they deserve to be paid to live.”

The panel opens up for questions and the Beth Chatto garden team are ready with microphones as hands fly up. I have been saddened in the last couple of days that despite the luminosity of their green uniform, the garden team have somewhat disappeared from any discussion or acknowledgement. Whenever I’ve seen their green tops zooming around I’ve wanted to hear their perspectives. When I first came to Beth Chatto’s to intern, I was captivated by the garden and the plants, but I kept coming back because of the team, their enormous amount of knowledge, and their incredible generosity.

The first audience question addresses the fact that we have quite a unique industry where anyone can “have a go.” Steph responds that there has to be a level of respect for people who know their stuff, have dedicated their life to it, do all the extra work that we do, and care. The question has touched on a pertinent topic for me. The issue of differentiation when anyone can be a gardener is a challenging one and the two obvious answers of qualifications and years of experience don’t necessarily stack up. Qualifications are, for the most part, not financially accessible and resulting salaries do not reflect the time and money spent on them. With experience, the challenge is that it isn’t always aligned with knowledge. Someone who has been a casual gardener for twenty years might be less knowledgeable and skilful than someone who has devoted their life to it for ten.

I put my hand up. I make a point that has been playing on my mind: gardening is valuable when accessible to all but there is a problem of using volunteers as free labour. The practice of planning spaces according to what can be done for free by volunteers to avoid paying a gardener is unsustainable.

Pay comes up consistently in sharp accents throughout the panel. For those of us in the industry, either in employment or freelance, we know the reality of living on a gardener’s salary. Fair pay is a broad term and is easy to talk about, but it is not enough until actual numbers are brought into the conversation.

Hands go up rapidly after every question. The panel is before lunch and I anticipate a little running over due to the enthusiastic response of the audience asking questions. But as a mic is put into the next person’s hand, the panel is suddenly brought to an end by the event organisers. Someone is invited onto stage and a film is introduced. It feels abrupt. What follows is a slideshow of photographs of spectacular gardens from all around the world, vast, beautiful and lavish. But with no people. Dozens of photographs of landscapes and gardens, empty. All must have workforces of highly skilled professionals, we have heard some talk that same day, but they have been brushed out of existence. The stark shift is jarring, and my heart sinks. What promised to be a beautiful and diverse conversation has turned from an energising spark into the fizzing out of a single firework.

As the presentation finishes, there is a slight confused clap from the audience before everyone is up and moving. I head straight to the stage to see how the panellists are after the talk. Gardeners have filled the space. I talk to two of them about the role of volunteers and how valuable they are. We discuss the nuance of these conversations, the binary of good and bad, and how there is so much more that gardeners want to say and have heard. I had assumed everyone would have gone to lunch, but as I looked around, the stage area was full. The care is here en mass and in abundance. All around me, there are buzzing discussions and connections being made. The sparks have not been put out after all; they have been fuelled and they are very much alive.

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Charlotte (Lottie) Clark is a freelance & employed gardener at Pembroke Gardens, University of Cambridge. @_lottie_gardening

The Value of Gardeners panel at the Beth Chatto Symposium was a welcome exploration and discussion on our ‘value’ and what this means for us all, but one comment from Stephanie Li, a horticulturist at Kew Gardens, stood out: 

“We need to care more about the people who care.”

This simple, yet profound, statement brings to mind David Orr’s words:

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane, and these qualities have very little to do with success as our culture defines it.” (David Orr, Ecological Literacy)

We are not merely maintaining gardens; gardening is an act of hope, embodying the philosophy of "thinking big, acting small."

Caring for both the aesthetic and ecological aspects of a space is acting as a conduit to something much more complex and wild. As such we find ourselves uniquely positioned to explore this interconnectedness whilst skilfully conveying with our clients and communities. Through our engagements we hope to cultivate a mindset of responsibility and care that extends far beyond the boundaries of any single plot of land.

Horticulture is abuzz with emotionally intelligent gardeners, all building and embodying a system of values learned from the garden itself: patience, humility, connectedness, beauty, celebration, generosity, regeneration. A beautiful antidote to the growing apathy and desensitisation in our modern society.

Gardeners need to employ these faculties to work within a dynamic living space. No master design, or level of planning can cater for a garden’s natural evolution in an ever-changing climate. It requires a responsive gardener; a keen eye and intuition to secure its longevity and prosperity. We are a keystone species - holding everything together; continuously caring aka ‘disturbing and renewing habitats’ and responding to the needs of the landscape.

Our economy and environment are not mutually exclusive, yet our entire socio-economic system is designed from a dominant worldview of ecological disconnection. Constantly suppressing our emotional health. We continue to passively ricochet in a positive and negative feedback loop, buying to placate, to feel something, to find beauty and connection, yet it is not sustainable and will never be enough. Gardeners are portals to the beauty and connection we seek on this planet vs. the endless pursuit of consumerism we have been desensitised to believe we need.

Humanity needs intentional connection with the natural world, and it needs gardeners - caretakers - who will steward a future. What price are we willing to pay, what value do we place on this?

Please let this conversation grow, be a cue to care and to let us all engage our senses.

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Photo credit: Alice Minney

Comments for this post will be left open to all if you would like to join in or continue the discussion. The comments are not under constant moderation. Please be considerate and respectful when posting and in your interactions in this community.

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Steph, Alice and Charlotte are being paid for their contributions to this post

Nourish and fortify

I wasn’t quite sure of the rhythm or regularity that the circles might take. It has been my intention to at least organise one for the summer. As is often the case, the season has completely run away from me and we are almost at the end of August, but I am determined to offer circle up before the month is out…

I was particularly prompted to do so after listening to a recent episode of “Becoming the People” podcast with Prentis Hemphill. It was an episode called Conjuring Worlds with Maurice Mitchell. There was some really helpful discussion on there about safe spaces and movements, and it reminded me how important it is for us to fortify ourselves in order to continue doing difficult work and to keep showing up.

Circle, to me, is part of that fortifying. A space for us to feel held and nourished and seen in all our complexity. To fortify us in order for us to be able to engage with difference. To practice being compassionate, curious and to listen. This is essential if we are to create the much needed, inclusive “low bar entry, bigger we work” that Mitchell talks about in the podcast.

If this speaks to you I hope you’ll join us. Let’s fortify one another and practice holding space together.

And as we’re deep in late summer, approaching a transition period, perhaps we can take this opportunity to consider together what it is we are harvesting, what we have in abundance, what might be rotting that we need to let go of and put on the compost heap…?

You don’t need to have done any preparation to attend circle. You don’t need to arrive in any particular way or with any particular experience or knowledge. Just come as you are.

The next online circle is scheduled for Thursday, 29th August. If you’re a paying subscriber to Radicle you can find the link to book below.

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For the love of the front garden, by Ros Ball

There’s a much beloved garden in the Dulwich area of South London. People enthuse about it online and reminisce about the many years they’ve spent enjoying it. It’s not at the famous Picture Gallery or a ‘heritage’ property, it’s the front garden of a post-war, prefabricated bungalow facing onto an A-road.

In the twenty years that I’ve lived in the area I’ve been both fascinated and full of admiration for this small garden island. In recent years two neighbouring prefabs have been knocked down, leaving the one remaining bungalow in between a jumble of poorly developed housing built from the 1980s up to the present mock-victorian flats, which are squeezed into every gap around it. The whole thing has the feeling of the film 'Up' where the world is changing around an old house but it remains steadfastly the same. Decades come and go but the prefab garden always blooms with colour for at least nine months of the year and the ground is a foot higher than the pavement with the amount of organic matter added to it over time. Every spring, vigorous runner beans grow up huge metal supports and from late spring the blousy roses bloom, giving way to a sea of old fashioned dahlias in September, followed closely by sugar pink nerines.

One of the things I find most moving about this garden is how generous it is to the community with its ongoing joyful display on a busy through road. It is extremely unusual for south London where front gardens are rarely cared for and much more rarely beautiful, but this garden thrives and therefore many people store it in their memory. This includes the Head Gardener at The Exchange in Erith, Colin Stewart, who recently posted some instagram pictures of the bungalow and received over a hundred comments, often as simple as, “Have loved this garden for so many years.”  

From the bus I always look out for it and see the owner, an older gentleman in jeans and a polo shirt working his spade, or sometimes he’s sitting in a chair enjoying the sun that hits the front of the house for much of the day. After years of distant appreciation I tell myself I’ll write something about this unique place, so I wait until I see him out front and ask if he’ll talk to me. When I tell him I’m a gardener and sometimes a journalist, he tells me he has recently had a few journalists coming to visit him, and one wrote lies, he says. It dawns on me that of course I’m not the only one who wants to talk to him.

He is swift to tell me, as he does multiple times throughout our conversation, that he is “not a gardener”. I scoff at this because the evidence is right in front of us. It’s a glorious afternoon and the wallflowers are in full pomp and bright purple clematis is scrambling all along the wooden boundary fence. But as we talk it becomes clear that he is firm in this assessment of himself. He’s called Peter and he has lived in the prefab since he was two years old. I quickly learn that Peter is modest, yes, but he’s also a genial wind-up merchant. He tells me he remembers when ‘Uncle Adolf’ dropped a bomb on his house and  brings out a newspaper cutting of the bomb site which the building now sits on. His was one of dozens of prefabs built in the bombed out space, and one of hundreds in the area. He recounts how he once showed a couple of curious police officers around the garden, and when his neighbours asked what was happening, Peter told them he was being arrested for impersonating a gardener.

He says gardening is just something he’s always done rather than something he is particularly interested in. Nonetheless we discuss the recent summer when we both had an exceptionally bountiful tomato harvest, how he doesn’t rate garden centres and that the clematis plants were all bought from Morrisons and they’re thriving. He tells me the plants he buys are often less successful than the ones he pries out of cracks or that are grown from seed collected in his pockets on local walks. When I ask about the unusual height of the soil level he hands me a metal rod and tells me to push it into the ground. I duly do as instructed and hit what he describes as ‘pavement’. He has built up the beds with copious amounts of leaf mould because not far below him the soil stops.

Sitting on the front door step with Peter I see the view he has of the rest of the world. People going by look twice and for a bit longer than you might expect - similar to what it’s like to be famous I imagine. A woman he knows well stops to chat about the doctor's appointment she's returning from, and Peter tells me his front garden vantage point means he talks to everyone. A successful comedian, famous for his viral social media videos, lives nearby and is a friend who Peter loves to wind up. “He believes everything I tell him” he says, and I believe him. He has also made such good friends with a couple who pass by that he’s godfather to their children. When I ask him if he divides the nerines to keep them vigorous he says that even though they’ve been there for 40 years he doesn’t need to, as he regularly gives clumps away to people who want them and it has much the same effect. 

These are all things I had hoped would be the life-affirming details of this front garden, a place that would connect its resident to the community in a way that has disappeared in the last 50 years. With the Thatcherite bulldozing of community (“There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first”), our neoliberal-shaped world has pushed us towards individualism, perhaps sending us to hide away in the back garden. And of course that’s those of us lucky enough to have somewhere to grow in the 21st century, with sky-high rents and a housing shortage just under one in ten people don’t have access to any form of garden. The prefabs were built en masse when vast numbers of people needed to be housed after WWII. They weren’t meant to last this long but they were built well. Peter says the million pound house behind his prefab  had leaks in the roof not long after it was built a few years ago, while his roof, built in the 40s, is fine. 

Yet talking to Peter I can see the front garden experience may not always be beneficial. I am full of questions but I suddenly feel reluctant to ask them. There have been times Peter has faced rudeness and difficult behaviour from strangers on the street, including once a man who lied and claimed to own the land his house is on. It’s clear that because Peter is so visible from the road and his plot so unique, that it attracts people like me, who come for a piece of the joy and ask questions about his life - but also those who might want to take advantage of him. Although I’m left in little doubt that they wouldn’t stand a chance, Peter can spot them a mile off, but I’d rather he didn’t have to.

Some people do garden in the front, but in London it’s particularly rare and more often perfunctory. Simply a form of caretaking rather than a kind of loving, like a good garden needs. My best friend in Hertfordshire grows all of her vegetables out front and reports the same positive connection to her neighbours that I’ve seen Peter experience. The role of the front garden is particularly interesting to me as I’ve recently started growing and selling cut flowers in two of my neighbours’ front gardens because I’ve run out of room in my own. As I expected, while working there I’ve talked to multiple neighbours, passersby, builders and bin men. Being a self-employed gardener I can sometimes find gardening a solitary pursuit so I have loved this new connection to my neighbourhood. But people do look at me curiously, I am unexpected, it is not the norm.

There is a profundity to these conversations that I was struggling to express until Stephanie Li, who works and studies at Kew Gardens, recently wrote about how important it is in her job to talk and ‘act as an illuminating mirror’ for the plants for the visitors. She writes, “It’s taken me a long time to realise so much of my journey into the garden has been about repair. So many of us turn to nature for our own safety, for our own sanctuary, But I have found that sharing these moments of awe, to help people notice what can easily go unnoticed, transforms the repair into something magical. A moment to go beyond yourself, to connect with each other and the expanse of everything else.”

I’m also discovering that these conversations and connections give my gardening more meaning than I had ever imagined and I’d like to encourage more people to experience this community embrace. If more of us have beautiful front gardens then Peter’s won't seem so conspicuous and if you don’t have one of your own, there might be neighbours who are amenable to sharing theirs. What joy could you give to your community by growing where more people can enjoy both plants and your wisdom? Can you find your own repair and sanctuary there? Perhaps you’d like to join Peter and I in the front garden, to grow plants, yes, but also to connect with others and the expanse of everything else?

Photo credits: Eleanor McAlister-Dilks

Ros Ball sells cut-flowers grown in under-used front gardens in South London as The Front Garden Flower Farm. She is also a self-employed gardener, author and occasional journalist. You can find Ros on Instagram @frontgardenflowerfarm and @ros_but_growing

Eleanor is a photographer specialising in gardens and their inhabitants. She also loves photographing wild spaces and has a particular fascination with the changing seasons. You can follow her work via instagram @pimandposset

Ros and Eleanor are being paid for this article.

I thought I’d share here this idea for having communal gardens/green-spaces as part of a much broader, creative vision for how we might live. Perhaps you’ll enjoy this post too.

And if you’d like to share your experiences of your front gardens I’d love to hear. Just hit reply to the email if you’re a subscriber and have received this newsletter to your inbox. Or, if you’re a paid subscriber you also have the possibility to comment below if you wish.

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I sit beneath a wild cherry tree in the cool not-yet-spring sunshine in my local park; the buds are just beginning to open themselves up to the world. They are hermaphrodite, containing “male” and “female” reproductive parts in the same flower. In this I find a deep reassurance; the possibility of containing multiple genders. Following many dark winters of slowly slipping out the gender I was assigned to at birth, I think like the cherry; I am finally ready to bloom.

Writing this article out of my masters thesis, I wanted to bring together my experiences of becoming a landscape architect and how I could reconcile that with living in a queer body and the ongoing violence in the world. We have prided ourselves, as landscape architects, in creating public spaces where plants and people can live well together, but with increasing climate change, biodiversity loss, unequal distributions of land and capital, in what ways are we actually addressing these issues?

From my research, I believe that planting design and practices have remained distant from questions of power and social justice. In my discontent, I began to turn to queer practices and found great inspiration in their challenges to power and continual dismantling of binaries. I began to wonder what we might learn from those who have been actively connecting beyond divides.

Planting design in landscape architecture

The origins of landscape architecture are not quite as innocent as we might assume. Its founding father, Frederick Law Olmsted, created Central Park in New York City as a deeply colonialist and heteropatriarchal project. As well as evicting people, the project aimed to restore white masculinity following views that urbanisation was causing moral degeneracy and spending time with “nature” was the cure.1 Queer acts were seen as unnatural and the dirty, industrial cities were encouraging these behaviours. Central Park was to be the antidote, amplifying spaces for team sports, heterosexual courtship and highly regulating queer sexual contact.2 If these are the hidden origins of the landscapes we are creating, how might we be perpetuating division and violence in our designs today? 

A blossoming movement fronting ‘queer ecologies’ is showing that not only is nature queer, but through entangling ourselves more deeply with the earth, we can also dissolve boundaries, and find healing and transformation. Much-loved is Derek Jarman, who in creating a garden out of the shells and shackles in a bleak landscape in Dungeness, became a carer of his own body, his community and his garden. 

For where the state and society has failed in care (in the AIDs crisis, current healthcare, welfare state), queer communities have risen up to form mutual aid networks, to challenge power relations and reimagine futures. Ecology has always been part of this care network, including gardens, cruising spaces, and metaphors for diversity. It is this inherent intimacy with plants that led me to consider how we might engage with queer as a methodology. In planting design, this includes asking: How are we designing spaces? With what plants? For whose benefit? 

Challenging boundaries

I began by thinking how queerness might help us challenge binaries in planting design. Plants have historically often been viewed as bounded individuals. We grabbed any we thought were aesthetically pleasing, separated them from their neighbours and kept them alive in their isolation with fertilisers and pesticides. A lot has changed since then with the naturalistic planting design movement, up to recent designers such as Piet Oudolf, challenging traditional horticulture and landscape design’s rigid control on individual plants. Yet even these planting schemes were still often created without consideration for how they would work as plant communities, leading to gaps and static blocks of singular species.3

Recently, challenges to plant binaries have been fronted by designers such as Cassian Schmidt, Claudia West and Thomas Reiner, who look at how and which plants grow together in the wild, and how this might inform the design of public spaces. In recognising that plants have their own agency, the garden becomes something not to control, but an ongoing process of enfolding through the seasons. Despite this, there still exists a significant divide between designer and plants, with practices such as chemical clearing of sites and the removal of ‘undesirable’ vegetation and weeds. In practice, we are still prioritising designer control over a collaboration with the plants, perpetuating that nature-culture divide. 

Instead, looking to queer practices, some are asking, ‘has the queer ever been human?’.4 In a dissolution of binaries and borders, queerness invites us to consider how we are made up of a multitude of different organisms, bacteria and fungi. The boundary between our skin and the world isn’t quite so thick as it seems. 

By embracing ourselves as part of the network we can begin to listen a bit deeper to plant stories, as Robin Wall Kimmerer encourages us to do.5 In particular, her story of the Skywoman, who arrived on earth with only seeds to sow, brought to my attention how seeds could be a way of challenging our rigid planting design methods. Many designers have been turning to seeds, such as Nigel Dunnett with his 20 million seeds sown for Superbloom at the Tower of London in 2022, or brownfield gardener John Little. Full of diversity, moving wherever they please, and holding important stories within their cases, seeds could be a queer metaphor for collaborating with plants differently.

Yet, it is not enough to just scatter seeds and challenge binaries, without more deeply interrogating power relations, especially given the impact that greening public wastelands can have. Before the redevelopment of The High Line in New York, it was a cruising space for the queer community. Although now beautifully planted with inspiring designs and seeding, including by Piet Oudolf, and rebranded as a LGBTQ+ friendly space, it does not come without some form of displacement having taken place - of queer bodies, their entanglement with weeds, and local communities who have been driven out by increasing gentrification.6 Sowing seeds is not radical by itself and we must remain critical to the power implications planting can have. 

Looking more politically and deeply at our current state of crack down on queer (especially trans rights), climate change and ongoing war and violence, it becomes important to think about how we look after and save these seeds. Turning to the incredible work of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, organised by Vivien Sansour, the project collects seeds and stories in a time of genocidal violence, resisting the borders, binaries and monocultural dimensions dividing us. This mode of collaborating with plants in their seeded form and creating multi-entangled libraries and support networks forms conditions for collaborative possibilities. Queering, as a way of seeding and finding alternative ways of caring beyond traditional binaries between designer and the land, can encourage us to scatter more seeds, to put our ears to the soil and listen to what germinates out through the wounded land. 

Centering care and gardeners

There is more to care than just scattering seeds and part of a queering of plant design includes the importance of the bodies who care for and with the lands. There have been strong trends in recent years, especially from the New Perennial Movement, following increasing cuts to funding for public spaces, and calls for sustainability, for creating ‘low maintenance’ landscapes and cutting labour. This has been counteracted by calls for designers to be more actively involved in planting and management. Yet, both of these have neglected critical concerns of capital and labour, and the work of landscape labourers has been viewed as low-value despite how they ‘literally…labour so others can live’.7 I ask with queer ecology’s attention to longer-term care of communities: what might a queering methodology bring to creating critical caring practices of planted spaces?

Although there has been increasing attention paid to caring for the earth, bodily labour within these sites has been neglected, as seen in the low wages for gardeners, with the recent strike of Royal Parks gardeners at Regents Park asking for equal pay to other Royal Parks Gardens.8 Queerness is rooted in paying critical attention to bodies and capital, and through mutual aid networks, such as STAR, a shelter and social space for queer and trans street youth formed in 1969 in New York. While today, London projects like The Outside Project, London LGBTQ+ Community Centre and queer growing groups such as m.u.d. and Young Rotters are making bodies feel valued.

Some landscape practices are moving towards process-based approaches, where they increasingly value the work of gardeners and maintenance staff on projects. Brownfield gardener John Little is one such big advocate after his work on the Clapton Park Estate. While EMF in Girona is investing more into the ongoing management of its spaces, such as Parc Guelle, in collaboration with the city’s municipal workers. Spending more money on people over plants, embracing the self sown, offers an alternative to the low-maintenance showy displays we are used to. Yet, it seems that more attention is needed to examine wages, to amplify the voices of those who work on the ground, and to challenge the power relations which keep us in this hierarchical system. 

Queerness brings our attention to the invisible labour and networks caring with our land, something which landscape architects must pay more attention to. For we need to better value the care that queer people, Indigenous people, gardeners and land workers take to tend to the lands we design. An ethic of care for labourers is intrinsic to an ethic of care for the landscape, and we need to move beyond capitalistic systems to think about new modes of ownership beyond privatisation or poorly resourced public lands.9 What might a common and care-full future look like? 

We have scattered the seeds, I am unfurling my petals to the world, but we must continue to save them, to share stories of resistance, mutual aid and future world-building contained within them. 

This essay has emerged from my Landscape Architecture MA Thesis ‘Growing with many hands: how might queering planting design and practices make space for caring-with land better together’. If you would like a pdf copy, please email mattieocallaghan@gmail.com.

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Mattie is a landscape architect, curator, and creative gardener exploring how we can live better together on our fragile planet. Working at the intersection of design, art and ecology, their work is centred around questions of climate justice, materialities and queer ecologies. They recently received the Kew Gardens Young Environmental Leader Award and have an upcoming residency at Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage. You can find them on instagram: @mattie.ocallaghan

Mattie is being paid for this article.

Photo credit: Sui Searle

Why circle?

Over the past few years I have been invited to give talks, take part in panel discussions and have even run a couple of gatherings, as well as having attended many as a participant too. They have been joyful, terrifying, nourishing - I have been pushed out of my comfort zone, it’s been a period of personal growth and it has been an honour to be a part of them. Many of these opportunities have meant that I have been given the chance to find and use my voice. The most enlivening part of them all, for me, has been the making of connections.

I think there is a hunger for connection.

And for all that these events have realised this need, I have also often been left wanting something more, both as a speaker and when I have been an audience member.

This is not to say that regular talks are no good. They are vital and necessary and serve an important purpose.

This is not an instead-of but an as-well-as.

I have had a sense that there’s a desire for deeper connection. And I know there’s power in having our voices heard.

Circle entered into my awareness at just the right moment, bringing together many floating threads and strands for me.

I had been wondering about ways of practicing and rehearsing the different world we so desperately need and that I believe is possible. As part of that I am particularly interested in new/old ways of relating.

I believe we need spaces in which we can connect, practice, learn, grow. We need spaces that are safe, yes, and also brave. Where we can practice holding space for each other, in our differences and imperfections as well as our commonalities.

I have felt a call to facilitate spaces where people can come together and experience the transformative power of being seen and heard - of witnessing and being witnessed. Of listening deeply and finding our own voices. There is access to a healing of sorts in community that can come with that.

I believe there is a yearning for ritual, ceremony, and honouring.

I believe there is a deep remembering to be had - of who we are in relation to each other and the world.

Circle, an ancient way of gathering, seems to me to offer up a fruitful path to that remembering.

My personal experience of gathering in circle is that they have the potential to be transformative.

For me, this is healing work.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I don’t believe anyone does. I am on a continuing personal journey of learning and growth. In the spirit of openness and curiosity and with love, I invite you along with me.

Circle is a way of gathering that is outside the norm of our busy, everyday lives. An opportunity for us to reimagine and practice how we relate.

Circle is for everyone. All parts of you are welcome and you are invited to come exactly as you are. I hope to sit with you in circle very soon.

The first Radicle circle gathering

If this speaks to you, the initial circle that I am offering will be virtual/online and is being opened to paying subscribers of Radicle only.

My hope is to offer in person circles in the near future - including in outdoor and garden spaces! But whilst I figure out venues and other practicalities, I’m going to begin opening up virtual circle space online.

Below, subscribers will find a link to sign up.

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How is your heart?

I know that mine has been shattered over and over in these last six months, witnessing the most horrendous destruction and suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza being broadcast directly to my phone, whilst our governments continue to support, by various means, the annihilation of a land and its people (and yes, there are too many other atrocities taking place that we also should not ignore). At the same time I have seen so much beauty and hope too in the way that so many people have been showing up together in love and solidarity for liberation for all.

I have felt short on words - none have seemed adequate and there are so many already out there that deserve our attention. Here are some of those:

Ode to the Orange

By Jeanine Hourani for Chutney Magazine

This piece was sent to me by Suyin Haynes (). It’s an essay on the Yaffa orange, by Jeanine Hourani, originally published in Chutney Magazine (Issue 03) and now available to read in full on this IG post.

A Situation: A Tree in Palestine

by Liat Berdugo for Places Journal

Impactful, informative and very well written. I have read this article a couple of times since it was first shared to me by someone who follows @decolonisethegarden and I’m sure I will be re-visiting it again.

Israel’s Campaign Against Palestinian Olive Trees

by Layla Hedroug for The Yale Review of International Studies

Short and incisive piece on the destruction of Palestinian olive trees and the attendant destruction of land, livelihoods, families and culture.

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape

by Raja Shehadeh

I read this book at the end of last year after I saw it recommended by Sim Kern @sim_bookstagrams_badly. Heartbreaking, educational and also highly readable. I really recommend it. The book covers a period of almost three decades. Each chapter follows Shehadeh on a different walk in the countryside near his home in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, woven through with historical and autobiographical insight.

The Work of the Witness

By Sarah Aziza for JewishCurrents

“Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.”

Powerful article given these 200+ days now of witnessing, through the remove of a phone screen for many of us, some of the most horrific scenes.

Seeing is Not Enough: Citizen Videography in Israel-Palestine

Liat Berdugo talk from 2021 on YouTube

I found this recorded lecture after reading Berdugo’s article, A Situation: A Tree in Palestine (see above). Interesting and particularly relevant in the context of all the harrowing citizen footage we have seen over the past 6 months and how little that seemed to move the dial. Berdugo argues that seeing is not enough, visual evidence is not enough. Believing precedes seeing and seeing does not alter belief. A large part of what we can see in an image is already a matter of a set of power relations that structure our vision.

3 practices for wisdom and wholeness, Krista Tippett TED talk

“Becoming whole would mean we orient together, away from what is death-dealing and toward what is life-giving.” ~ Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett has spent decades interviewing and speaking to some of the wisest philosophers on what it means to be human and she herself is full of wisdom too. I really appreciated her TED Talk on her ideas for how we might live in order to remake this world for the better. Meaningful and hopeful guidance and advice for our times.

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In other news…

I know it’s been a little bit quiet on here of late. There are some articles in the pipeline for Radicle but they are taking some time, and I’m leaning into that being OK. They will be ready when they are ready. This place was never going to be about feeding the machine, deadlines, extractive behaviour or being on a treadmill for its own sake. What does it mean to not be in a constant rush and to allow things to marinate, take time and for that to be OK? I am strongly of the opinion that if something matters it’s worth taking time over and it will still matter and be meaningful whenever it may appear (as evidenced by many of the articles shared above, most of which are not new - same for the still-relevant archive of Radicle articles). Thank you for your patience and understanding and for your continued support of this space.

On that note, I have also been working on something else in the background over these past few months that I am excited (and full of nervous anticipation!) about…

I have been training to be a circle facilitator.

It’s a path that has felt generative, nourishing, enlivening and in alignment for me and I am looking forward to sharing more fully with you in the very near future. I’m excited about this as a way to be of service to this community and beyond, to hold tender and loving space for meaningful connection. I hope to get another newsletter out with more information on this in the next week or two, so please keep an eye out.

Until then, I hope you are enjoying the spring - here, everywhere is cherry and apple blossom, bluebells, rhododendrons, the bright greens of wild garlic, nettle and garlic mustard, with the first hawthorn flowers just appearing. It’s all such a balm.

Photo credit: Sui Searle