curiosity index no.6 a pretext to talk about plants
Dear Friends,
It has been a few months since our February Index. It's easy to lose momentum when there is no official deadline and no accountability for self-driven projects. Your responses to the last Index relating your beautiful stories, as well as more recent emails wondering why you hadn't received an Index in your mailbox for so long finally pushed me back into action.
The day after the last lockdown was announced in France, Arthur and I took my mother Sona and headed down South. What we imagined as a short trip turned into a 30-day adventure from Paris to Corsica and back.
Every place we stopped, Sona had an endless curiosity for her environment. In the course of a month, she gathered an incredible amount of specimens of local flora. She cut plastic bottles and used them as protective containers for the cuttings. Whenever we settled somewhere, the plants were taken out and cared for, put in water, examined, and their names researched. By the time we returned to Paris, the car was bursting with plants in bottles squeezed in all 4 doors, plus a box under her feet and a few cuttings in her bags.
Back in Paris, she replanted her treasures in small makeshift pots, adding to the few that we had saved from her garden when we sold her house in February. Once we settled back home, discussions followed on the origins of different varieties, how to care for them, whether they would survive the Paris winter... It was her way of perpetuating the trip.
This intentional “transfer” of plants reminded me of the concept of “Le Jardin en Mouvement” developed by one of my favorite gardeners, Gilles Clement whose ideas grew from his initial refusal to mow his lawn. Michael Pollan in Second Nature also talks about his father who faced a revolution in their suburbia when he decided to let his grass grow. For both men, letting the grass grow was a formative act.
Clement's vision of creating a garden is more about paying attention and adapting to the plants and weeds that appear in the landscape. Far from a jardin “à l'anglaise" or “á la francaise”, Clement says gardens cannot be imagined on paper. The gardener does not begin with an empty parcel. Gardening is a constant conversation with the plants appearing, disappearing, and moving around the land. His vision of creating a garden is more about making paths around the plants and weeds that appear; choosing which to keep, leaving a sense of spontaneity for the gardener.
Clement’s ideas were first implemented at the Jardin en Movement in Parc André Citroën in Paris in the early 1990’s, that I hope you will get to visit one day.
You can see a bit of Gilles Clement’s vision in this documentary excerpt.
And read a collection of his writings ( unfortunately it's the only one I found in English)
I recently discovered the 19th century French political essayist and journalist Alphonse Karr, a friend of Victor Hugo who towards the end of his life settled in Nice on agricultural land and opened a flower, fruit and vegetable shop (what a dream..). In his book Around my Garden, he writes letters to a travelling friend, using them as an opportunity to exalt the adventures and marvels of an immobile voyage in his garden. Among many, this is an excerpt that I love:
“[...]At the extremity of my garden the vine extends in long
porticoes, through the arcades of which may be seen trees of all sorts, and foliage of all colors. Here is an azerolier (a small medlar) which is covered in autumn with little scarlet apples, producing the richest effect. I have given away several grafts of this: far from deriving pleasure from the privation of others, I do my utmost to spread and render common and vulgar all the trees and plants that I prefer ; it is as if I multiplied the pleasure and the chances of beholding them of all who, like me, really love flowers for their splendor, their grace, and their perfume. Those who, on the contrary, are jealous of their plants, and only esteem them in proportion with their conviction that nobody else possesses them, do not love flowers; and be assured that it is either chance or poverty which has made them collectors of flowers, instead of being collectors of pictures, cameos, medals, or any other thing that might serve as an excuse for indulging in all the joys of possession, seasoned with the idea that others do not possess.
I have even carried the vulgarization of beautiful flowers further than this. I ramble about the country near my dwelling, and seek the wildest and least frequented spots. In these, after clearing and preparing a few inches of ground, I scatter the seeds of my most favorite plants, which re-sow themselves, perpetuate themselves, and multiply themselves. At this moment, whilst the fields display nothing but the common red poppy, strollers find with surprise in certain wild nooks of our country, the most beautiful oriental double poppies with white, pink, red [...]”
In a way, Sona assembling the plants of her trip in a little corner of Paris reminds me of Alphonse's immobile voyage.
I learned a lot from her over the past months, even more away from the pollution of our city lives. Mostly, I learned that the secret of her life is curiosity. At 90, Sona does not see herself at the end of the road. Every complement to her knowledge, regardless of the subject, brings satisfaction and joy to her day.
While I go water the plants, I will leave you with a little basket of curiosity, more or less related to this Index, but all worth bending into:
THE GARDEN (2008), a MUST WATCH documentary film that tells the story of the now demolished South Central Farm; a community garden and urban farm located in South Central Los Angeles, California.
The Wild Garden by William Robinson: a revolutionary book at its publishing in 1870, William Robinson advocates that plants should be allowed to naturalise and colonise their environment. He issued a forceful challenge to the prevailing forman Victorian style of the day, which relied upon tender plants arranged in rigidly geometrical design.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, French botanist at the service of of King Louis XIV who was one of the first botanists to travel to the middle east all the way to Armenia in 1700. His herbarium consists of 40 boxes in which wide folders are piled. Each folder contains about 15 herbariums , with hundreds of pages organized in 22 classes (17 of herbs and 5 of trees) assembling about 8000 species in 673 types, as defined in this work, "Institutiones rei herbariæ" preserved today at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
Thank you once again for taking the time to read, please don’t hesitate to comment, share and open up your world to us.
Lots of Love,
Talin
PS: a little garden song for you-