A Love Letter to Weeds
Weeds are maligned as useless, or even harmful, plants. But Tabitha Faber has always had an affection for them, and thinks they can teach us something about how communities of all kinds can practice better relationships.
Tagged: Plants and Gardens
BBC’s The Green Planet Puts Plants in the Spotlight
James Weldon reviews BBC’s docuseries The Green Planet, and considers whether new film technology can help humans better understand plants.
A Black Herbalist’s Guide to Breathing and Grieving with Yellow Dock
Herbalist Asia Dorsey reflects on a pandemic year when life and death cycles were especially present and describes Yellow Dock’s role as the grief worker of the plant world.
The Quarantine Garden
Gardening is on the rise as the world quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anna Muenchrath considers the implications and opportunities of the quarantine garden in her review of The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times.
Composting’s Colonial Roots and Microbial Offshoots
Current methods of composting came out of colonial plantation agriculture, but have become a key way of practicing polyculture and imagining multispecies communities.
ClearCut – The Wages of Dominion
In ClearCut – The Wages of Dominion, photographer John Riggs presents a guided meditation about the cultural mindset behind clearcutting.
Fugitive Seeds
Christian Brooks Keeve traces how fugitive seeds and seed stories are deeply entangled with the stories and legacies of the Black diaspora.
Plant Monsters Turn Normal Upside Down
Julia Dauer argues that the plant monsters from the Netflix series Stranger Things share roots with 18th-century colonial terror of botanical powers. Unruly vegetation from the Upside Down calls for a wholesale reevaluation of normal in the contemporary US.
Uprooting a Renter’s Garden
Gardening while in graduate school and on the academic job market means preparing to uproot, leaving a renter’s garden and broken promises behind.
