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Daniel Lewis, 'Twelve Trees: And What They Tell Us About Our Past, Present and Future'
Full text linkPondering with Örö Pines: Talking with Trees as an Undisciplinary Method
Full text linkThis text presents talking with trees as a method of generating material for artistic and other research purposes based on conversations with pine trees recorded in May 2022 on Örö Island in southwestern Finland. Addressing one pine tree a day for six consecutive days as part of the project Pondering with Pines was an experiment that resulted in video works and podcast episodes. The perspective was human centred and subjective while also subjectifying the trees. In this context, the focus is on talking with trees as an undisciplinary method adaptable to other circumstances
Photographic Phytography: Towards a Photographic Re-Centring of the Oak Tree within Theory, Material and Practice
Full text linkThis paper explores my practice-based research project Arboreal Encounters, a collection of tannin toned cyanotypes made with six heritage oak trees that form an element of my part-time, practice-based Ph.D. at the University of Brighton, UK. It comprises a brief history and background of the project before exploring how photographic practice might interact with and integrate notions of vegetal intelligence within artistic practice. By thinking of the production of Arboreal Encounters as if an invitation to the trees to become part of the process of their own representation, I consider how such interactions might act symbolically as human-plant collaborations and how methods of thinking, as well as doing, may resist notions of the plant as commodity within artistic practice
Three Poems from 'Blazing Star'
Full text linkBlazing Star explores the healing modalities of plants and the liberatory possibilities of radical tenderness through a queer ecopoetics of care with and for the more-than-human world. The poems reimagine interspecies communication and nonhuman encounters through transcorporeal embodiments in thick time. Care blossoms into speculative permutations of the body and self through an exploration of trauma, healing, and the more-than-human relationships we are always already engaging in, visioning new possibilities for belonging, love and family
The Absence of the Ackee Tree: Jamaican Botanical Resistance and Kew’s Colonial Archive
Full text linkOn a monument to the people enslaved on the grounds of the University of the West Indies campus in Kingston, Jamaica, groves of ackee trees are acknowledged as ‘botanical markers’ of former slave villages. This use of the ackee as a long-term memorial of enslavement exemplifies the role of trees as sites of cultural memory and demonstrates how ackee became the principal botanical symbol of Jamaican identity. However, there is scarcely any material about ackee in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, particularly in the Miscellaneous Reports, a collection of archival material about economic botany in the British empire. This article argues that this absence is the result of ackee’s long association with resistance to colonial exploitation, as a tree bearing a potentially poisonous fruit, growing beyond the colonial spaces of the plantation and botanical garden
Un-cultivation in America: Discourses of Wild and Foraged Apples
Full text linkThis paper explores the existing popular culture discourse of foraging and wild fruit through examinations of orcharding history, longstanding American folk legend, contemporary mass media depictions and niche publications within the cider industry that were circulating within the social networks of cider makers during the time leading to our study. Taken together, these narratives indicate an active and evolving intellectual discourse of foraging within the cider community, a discourse which reveals a questioning and reframing of dominant cultural, social and economic paradigms, not only of contemporary agricultural and social economies, but also of the longer scope of American Romanticism as a foundational cultural imperative. Ideas of the landscape, its uses and its meanings, based in the opposition of wilderness and cultivated landscapes, are under revision in this foraging discourse
Between Grazing and Gathering: Plant Knowledges, Belonging and Becoming in the Swiss Alps
Full text linkAlpine summer pastures with high plant diversity emerged through millennia of farmers grazing their animals at higher elevations during the summer months. In the past decades, as plants have migrated uphill, changing the species composition in Alpine pastures, the economic viability of mountain agriculture has simultaneously declined, and who cares for which animals in summer pastures throughout the European Alps has shifted. In the Swiss Alps, seasonal workers from neighbouring countries make up a large portion of shepherds and cheesemakers involved in transhumance. Here, I aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of how the interactions between humans, animals and plants shape changes in alpine landscapes and their meanings. Drawing on autoethnographic methodologies, I reflect on my experiences as a shepherd in the Swiss Alps over several summers to explore how my growing knowledge of plants through herding and my own foraging anchored my relationship to the Alp and led me to think more deeply about approaches to conservation in regions characterised by alpine farming. While local farmers and members of the communities relate to plants mostly through animals, as a herder, I grew my plant knowledge based on species I could use for teas and as food for myself. As my knowledge about local plants grew, my relationship to place became more tightly attached, and accentuated a different relationship to plants from that which I observed among the local community. Based on my evolving relationships with the Alp, I suggest that plant knowledges provide an entry point to studying continuous becoming in places traditionally associated with high conservation value, providing an emergent perspective on the alpine pastures of the future
Amherstia nobilis: High priest of the Vegetable World
Full text linkThe thawka-gyi or Amherstia nobilis (‘Pride of Burma’) was first encountered by Europeans in 1826, after the First Anglo-Burmese War. This article is the first full-length attempt to recover the European cultural and colonial history of Amherstia nobilis. This splendid tree was known only in cultivated form, planted in the vicinity of Buddhist temples. From the earliest sighting, Western botanists called it the world’s most beautiful flowering tree. The tree’s European reputation was established through narrative accounts and illustrations based on Indian botanical paintings. Wealthy British horticulturalists, attracted by the tree’s beauty, rarity and sacred associations, competed to secure specimens and bring it to flower. Western women horticulturalists, writers and artists were particularly drawn to the plant. In tracing the cultural history of Amherstia nobilis, this article highlights the role of both Indian painters and British women in constructing scientific and horticultural knowledge
