Photostory

Antennae: The  Journal of Nature in Visual Culture no 68 (Autumn) 2025T

Abstract for my essay “Performing the Ragged Garden” p 20:

In 2020 a guerrilla gardening project began in the corner of a city carpark. The Ragged Garden is planted with ‘uncultivated’ shrubs and rushes that grew on the site before European colonisation, and flowers that may have grown in the forgotten garden of the Ragged School that stood there later. In the present steel and concrete environment, this tiny garden under the Gleditsia trees is a constantly transforming stage show where vegetal dramas take place daily.

Other contributors to this issue are:

Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg,  “Pollinator Pathmaker” p 94: In conversation with Giovanni Aloi, Ginsberg talks about her algorithmic, more-than-human artwork. Drawing on ethology and simulated pollinator vision, she devises an “empathetic algorithm” that optimizes plantings for pollinator diversity rather than human taste, so decentering the human as insects become audience.

Lorraine Shannon, “a multi-species garden” p 114: In Australia, bush fires, Covid-19 and climate change have given rise to a gnawing sense that a shift in how we care for country is required. This includes how we garden. Gardeners have the opportunity to reimagine obligations to the natural world and implement gardening as a crucial aspect of creative coevolution with all species.

Michael Pollan: “Second Nature” in conversation with Giovanni Aloi p 12: First published in 1991, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education anticipated many of the philosophical and ecological insights that would later shape the field of critical plant studies. In this conversation, Michael Pollan reflects on how the book’s central questions about human agency and vegetal autonomy have evolved.

Irina Botea Bucan

Don Fiednberg

Prudence Gibson

Mariana Menezes

and others . . .

All Issues are freely available online here