24.04.22

I stand on the sidelines. We all do, forming a ring around the kitchen garden. Alice reads O Noblissima Viriditas in Latin, a language none of us understands, and I am reminded of Hildegard’s own unknown language: Lingua Ignota. I forget the names of the plants in the bed, but I forgive myself since they’ve likely been renamed countless times and whichever names I’ve forgotten (Chickweed? Borage?) they are certainly not the names the plants use to call on each other.

 

I thought I’d start with names, nouns and verbs and the supposed origins of those words and definitions because in the act of defining something we begin to make it what we think it should be according to our own tastes, our inherited worlds. Colloquial names for plants have often pointed towards specific medical uses or how the plant looked: think feverwort or ragweed. Linneaus’ binomial nomenclature began to classify plants as belonging to families, and his system opened up a whole new realm of naming, naming plants after European men. Most of these men were completely unrelated to the plant itself, in fact many would never have seen, smelled or touched their namesakes. A good example is Reverend Adam Buddle (Buddle -> Buddleia) who studied mosses, which I think we can all agree are quite different to a butterfly bush, and died before the plant we call Buddleia (called Qulli in Quechuan and 密蒙花 / mì Méng huā in Chinese) was ever transported from Chile or China to Europe. As Jamaica Kincaid says in My Garden (1999):

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“they emptied worlds of their names; they emptied worlds of things animal, vegetable and mineral of their names and replaced these names with names pleasing to them; these names are pleasing to them because they are reasonable; reason is a pleasure to them.”

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The garden would not be a garden we would recognise now without boundaries (an inside and an outside), or a ward (a gardener to make it so). The chronology of the English words gardener -> garden (n.) -> garden (v.) confuses dominant narratives surrounding the role of anglophone humans and our plant directions. The way we learn seems to start with nouns, and so the logic of our learning has been to define first the place that is enclosed, then what is done in that enclosed space and finally who might do what is done. (garden (n.) -> garden (v.) -> gardener). We begin with property and end with relationships, whereas the etymology suggests a different order.

 

11.04.22

I am rolling my water tank back from the tap to my cabin and I notice Clive and Julie standing and staring at the flood break that curves behind the path separating the marshy ground from drier woodland. It is a porous basket of a wall made from an accumulation of branches that have fallen, or been dropped by ambitious rooks, and that have been piled haphazardly between the trees by human hands over time.

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I drop the tank where I am, and walk down the path to join them. Together we watch as a hedgehog shuffles its way around and between the twigs and dead leaves, following its own winding path over the dyke and into a perfect round hole none of us had noticed before. As it crosses the threshold, other circular entrances emerge from the chaos of sticks, that had not been there a moment before. The hedgehog had given us permission to attend to the wall as a home, as a kitchen, an accumulation of passages. Not separating one place from another, or defining one land from it’s neighbour, but a living space, inhabited.

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