From our Sketchbook

During the emergence, flowering and withering of the garden we keep parallel records and reproduce here some entries in our sketchbooks and the main book ‘Botanopoieicon – Plants of the Sun’.

Alchemilla was in her Yoko Ono mood yesterday:

A: ‘For the mystical gardening collective there is no publicly visible sign of belonging to a collective, banner or marker. The only thing we need are our clothes that are marked with short random texts about melancholy and utopia.’ Read here more about our working clothes.

Alchemilla lives out her exuberant garden fantasies in detailed wood engravings. Let’s hope that some of it can be carried over into the real world.
(She hands us her prompts for an image-generating programme).

At the very beginning, when we were thinking of possibly keeping a joint sketchbook/notebook, Alchemilla wrote:

“I’m really into the idea of a collective journal. I’ve been thinking about connecting with each other through the garden, and through the act of drawing and writing. I’m a big fan of the use of drawing to understand and document the natural world. I’m really interested in the way drawing can connect us to each other and to the plants, building on a long history of collaboration between artists and gardeners.
I’m thinking about the way in which we’re all involved in a struggle to survive and to care for each other and the earth, as well as ourselves. I’m interested in the way that the garden represents a kind of community, a microcosm where we can respond to the world around us, and to each other.”