Making Sense
Let's make a community garden together.
17 October 2024 Festive opening of the new season for multi-species-gardeners.
We already started this season on 26 September, quietly in the leeway of the start of the academic year, while everyone was busy and an energised chaos filled the building; we gardeners took our moment to connect with the outside life of the Academy.
There are already many interested gardeners, and we meet weekly on Thursday between 17 - 19h in the old Academy garden at Mutsaardstraat. Bring garden gloves if you have, the rest is provided for. We serve tea and welcome you for a chat and some easy gardening.
This Thursday 17 October we're adding homemade cake to the tea, and we're opening the gardening season festively to engage in a community of more-than-human gardeners. Welcome!
20 June 2024
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| Poster announcement for the weekly gardening sessions, presented ont he Art & Research message boards. |
In September 2023 we started 'Making Sense' a two-year artistic research project taking place in the old garden of the Royal Academy Antwerp. It follows the previous project 'A Sympoiesis Garden' and continues to restore the local ecology by the multispecies collective practice. From an ecofeminist perspective we learn to rethink traditional gardening in response to climate change and global inequalities. We organise weekly open sessions and invite all the students who would like to join for a cup of tea and gardening together.
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| The fragrant black tea from Taiwan is a gift by Cian Ti Wang. Weekly tea tables were arranged with the help of Bernadette Zdrazil. |
With this project we enter the field of ecology with curiosity, we have no antennae, no whiskers, no sharp eyes like some birds have, but we have human hands and through our fingers we turn stones, hold branches, dig (a little bit) through the surface of the sand and at the end of the day when we look up from the world under our feet we see light entering the garden slantly between the tree branches. Thousands of insects fly together in the evening light. The birds are singing. A snail sits nearby. A seedling grows between the grasses. It is a wonderful feeling to be a part of this multispecies collective. The Sympoiesis Garden concluded with 'It is the garden who makes us gardeners'.
Now we take a step into the wild. What does it mean to garden in this collective?
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| For decades the maintenance of the garden aimed to keep the style intact. The intend was to make it look 'clean'. September 2023 |
What can we do when we see our fellow critters disappearing? How can we react to climate change, habitat loss and the decline in biodiversity? Not to be immobilised by the solastalgia or eco-anxiety, we want to act, react, respond, connect, touch, feel, hold, support, repair, sow, grow and make a difference by learning to garden together. The old set of garden rules will not help us now, they were written down for different purposes. We’ll have to learn to garden together before it starts to make sense. We’ll have to use our senses before we understand the meaning of this project. This research project is an experimental practice of being there. To be present.
During the year there were different modes of being present, for gardening, for an ecology course, for an exhibition, for a picnic, a visiting artist, inspecting a bird nest, making a new artwork, cleaning up, meeting for a cup of tea...
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| During Antwerp Art Weekend Sophia Kuri created a work with wool, she wrapped the pedestal in a long thread. The work was executed with the help of other students from the In Situ department |
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| Recycling materials: we washed the old shells we found in the spoil heap from a building site nearby. |
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| The garden sessions often combined planting small potted plants, a direct way to get to know other species. |
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| When Brandon Ballengée visited we organised a picnic with the students from the In Situ department. |
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| For ARTICULATE week we invited Débora Gomes de Oliveira, linguist and performance artist. |
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| Her introduction to ecolinguistics opened new perspectives on artistic practices as well as gardening. |
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| Artistic researcher Saskia Van der Gucht gives a lecture on the finite material sand, presenting here her practice of material investigations and artistic colaborations. |
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| The master students of several disciplines had the opportunity to get involved during ARTICULATE week, with a program of daily gardening sessions and ecofeminist theory. |
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| For Aria, the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, we invited Aurélie Disasi as companion to give a garden tour. Unfortunately, since we were both giving the tour, we don't have a good photo. |
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| During 'Open House' the students of In Situ gave a garden tour. |
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| The publication 'The Sympoiesis Garden' was made about last year's project. |
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| With flower we marked patches in the lawn where wild plants are seeded for increased biodiversity. |
Gardening in European traditions comes with an old handbook written in the Enlightenment years, structured along botanical taxonomy and filled with instructions on how to use the tools in the shed. If anything, we have seen that this approach will not make sense out of gardening in global and local perspective. How are we supposed to use the old dichotomies 'nature / culture', 'vulgar / cultivated', 'native / introduced', 'individual / community', and many more when they don't add up? What is it that makes people happy when the grass is mown, when the hedges are square, when the ivy is torn down and the roses pruned? None of this is nice towards nature. If a garden means 'contained, kept, clean, controlled, and neat' then it what does it say about humans? What is it that makes people reach for the pruning shears? Where does this mentality of forcing-nature-into-a-box come from? It's not a heritage from the Celts who thought trees were holy, it doesn't come from the prehistoric villages where forests were looked after by the locals, it's not part of a tradition of schlepping stones across the landscape because they mean so much to us. When did we lose our respect? It looks like our attitude towards gardens and nature changed along with our culture, shaping similarly our attitude towards art and artistic practices. The white walls of an exhibition space are equally 'neutral' as the monoculture-grass-field also known as a lawn; the pedestal is as square as a hedge. Both claim freedom of expression and both are captured in a story about freedom-as-opposed-to-what? Class? Slavery? Plantations? Mining? War? Dictatorship? Agricultural multinationals?
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| The Academy garden is layered with history, the architecture and archaeology are very much present and gardening means to take account and respond carefully. |
The scale matters, the complexity matters, the care for nature matters, even in an action as small as a bit of gardening. Only when we allow this gardening to transform us along with the changes we envision will this make sense. This is practice-based research, a methodology of being present, an open-ended experiment in a multispecies collective.
To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting."
-- Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
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| Only a few of the trees in the garden will provide food for the larvae of butterflies, in the 1840's the choice for which trees to plant was based on aesthetics rather than supporting the local community of wildlife. |
Lonely trees
The style of the Academy garden is defined by the tall trees creating a closed canopy within the boundaries, it is an island of green in a brick city. These trees are not very old, estimated between 50 and 200 years, they were planted when the garden design followed the building of the Museum of Fine Arts around 1841 as an extension to the Academy. Some redesigning was done in 1905, many of the trees are from this time.
They are:
Taxus baccata
Acer Pseudoplatanus
Aeschulus hippocastanum
Fagus sylvatica
Carpinus betulus
Platanus x Acerifolia
Ailanthus altissima
Robinia pseudoacacia
Prunus laurocerasus
Aucuba japonica
Quercus ilex
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| The trees are stressed because of the compacting of the soil and the decreased oxygen levels. In winter many of the trees don't have leaves and they need to breathe through their roots. When the soil has been compacted by lots of people walking here the roots start to die. Without these trees the garden wouldn't look the same. |
Plants that grow here are plants from here.
The conversation about which plants to save is tricky. So often these talks are reduced to a mirror of how people are treated when they arrive in Belgium, or who grows up as a second generation citizen, or third or even longer. I know because I am also one of those people who often gets asked ‘Where are you from?’ and I was born here. In my experience plants and human animals are very different and also not all that different. We can relate to plants. These feelings towards other living beings are something good, a precious quality in life. And yet we are nothing like most plants, people have been traveling around the globe for thousands of years, not-sitting-still is a typical trait to our species. From a gardener's perspective, humans have a tendency to move about. Walking through long grasses for generations, we left Africa a long time ago and kept walking, swimming, running; discovering continents until we became a global species. Settling down is such a recent invention we’re still not very good at it and one look at the world tells us living close to each other can use some improvement.
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| Jackson Shallcross - Platt gave a workshop on rammed earth, with these cubes we installed a temporary sculpture garden around a precarious tree bed. |
Plants are not like us, except sometimes they are. The colonial plant hunters took plants out of their home – from oikos, ecology means ‘home’ – and planted them in solitude in a location where nobody spoke their language. Most of the times these plants adapt quite well, and all goes fine. Sometimes a species mutates, unhindered by local ecology and not being pestered by the usual caterpillars or other munching animals, these plants start to take over soil, grow by the thousands and overgrow all the others. It’s the ghost of the colonial times haunting us today in species loss, because of our own careless greed. The past has not left us, our histories are ongoing. Should we talk about ‘native species’ when we ourselves have arrived here only so recently? Compared to mosses and buttercups we could say we are not native. In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity and habitat. And we are a part of that diversity, the ‘natureculture’ works both ways, our little farms and curated forests gave lots of plants the opportunity to adapt to these new cultured settings and we can still do this today.
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| The Cherry laurel is growing in fron of a Hornbeam, the green shrub in the front is about ten years old, the tree in the back is at least a hundred years old. |
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| There are several Cherry laurels in the garden and they self-seed in several areas. We decided to take this one out to save the Hornbeam, every week we took out some branches. |
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| To further support the Hornbeam we added a bit of compost and lots of community-building plants in its patch. |
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| The cherry laurel had taken root in the disturbed soil where there used to be an oil tank, the archaeology had already been disturbed when the tank was removed from the garden. |
Secret cutting technique
The cherry laurel growing in front of the hornbeam took a lot of light and nutrition away, putting the old tree under increasing pressure. Photos of the exhibitions in the garden show that the cherry laurel has self-seeded and is no older than 2015, in the process it grows extremely fast and has the ability to spread allelopathic substances in the soil, causing other plants to die. By 2023, the Hornbeam’s crown had withered before June even though it was not an exceptionally dry spring. Some of the branches died at the top of the crown. The Hornbeam belongs to the original planting design of the garden, circa 1905. It was probably not considered important as a species, but it is very important in ecology. Many insects and birds live from this tree. The risk of losing them seemed real and so we looked after the tree bed (removed Atlantic ivy, planted native species) and removed the cherry laurel. All this was done in consultation with the heritage department and with Krinkels nv. The archaeology in this location was already disturbed by an old mazout tank, so we did no further damage. The bird bush we planted in place of the cherry laurel is to support birds with the berries, and these shrubs are food plants for butterfly caterpillars. Every week we cut a few branches of the cherry laurel, almost no one commented on the changes.
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| From Natuurpunt we ordered several bare-root shrubs. |
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| We planted and seeded a patch for birds and butterflies. |
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| The shrubs are community supporting plants to increase habitat and biodiversity. |
Ecology means community.
Only the Taxus, Hornbeam and Beech in the Academy garden are considered native, this means these species were here at least since the last ice age. The other trees were introduced about a hundred years ago. When someone took the Aillanthus altissima out of their ecological home in China he didn't bring the rest of the ecology with him. This tree now grows in the Academy garden as a lonely tree. There is no connection between this tree and the caterpillars, ants, fungi, composting leaves, birds, … all living in the same place. Feeling alone in the garden this tree brings lots of seedlings, roots sprout up between slabs of stone and the allelopathic chemical qualities of the roots inhibit the growth of other plants. Instead of blaming the Aillanthus, we should look at the ongoing history. When talking about these trees we can give them a voice and share their feelings. This more-than-human perspective isn't simply imagination. These trees were planted as curiosities without consideration for their feelings, and in this legacy we can at least try to give them a nice life in this garden. Ecology makes more sense when we understand our connections as a community. We know how a community works, and how it is not a recipe for complete safety nor a locked system of immobility, certainly a community is a very local shared habitat and it requires diversity.
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| For the annual Art Sale at the Academy we set up a garden table. |
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| Overspill seeds and plants were sold at minimum prices to support students who make non-commercial works. |
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| When no students were present an honesty tin took on the job. |
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| The table also connected to the Academy library. |
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| Being present we made a lot of gardener friends. |
Open patches
Our recipe is quite simple: restoring ecology by increasing habitat and biodiversity. Guided by the natural occurrence of wild nature in this region we introduce plants that would normally grow here in abundance. We're not making a design for the garden; in our multispecies view it would be too anthropocentric to create a design on paper and then lay it out in the soil. Instead we follow the natural lay out of the garden, responding to the plants already growing in certain parts, sensing the conditions of the soil, looking for shade and sunshine. The maintenance of the garden consisted for many years of mowing the grass, cutting the hedges, cleaning the paths. The result is a soil with low nutrition values, ideal for wild plants that are getting rare in the rural landscape because of over-fertilisation from agriculture. The Academy garden can be a refuge for wild plants, they can move in and out of the garden. Plants have a habit of moving around over generations, growing a bit on this side for a couple of years to cross the path and grow on the other side for the next couple of generations. This slow movement is an active component of the garden. When we give agency back to the inhabitants we get a lively garden in return, full of surprises. The root systems of plants who chose their own location are less disturbed and better suited for extreme weather conditions, in general they thrive a lot better compared to our introduced plants who we tried to give as good as-we-can locations.
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| Seeding the wild plants. |
The wildflower meadow.
Grasses are incredibly strong, in comparison to their size they win in strength to almost anyone else living in this garden. And yet, there are bare patches in the lawn. This is good news for us, when the grasses don't grow in a closed structure it means there is room for diversity. Lawns have very little to bring in an ecological garden, they are water consuming, evaporating, intensely maintained and practically a monoculture. When even the strongest of plants doesn't want to grow, it means the conditions are better suited for other kinds. We added seed mixtures in the bare sand in the lawn. This is not how one makes a flower meadow. But a flower meadow is not our goal, although we call it a flower meadow on our information boards because there is hardly an alternative that describes what we do. The academy garden has a style, and we want to respect this. The garden breathes a calm, gentle, subtle, and comforting nature. Flowers are few and colour is almost lacking - except for green, purple and white. The trees create a cool shade, much appreciated by students and other passerby who like to stay for a moment.
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| The lawns already had a lot of open soil in them, we increased these and marked areas where seeds from wild plants have been added. |
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| A different approach is to add a few plants and let them grow, die back and spread their seeds naturally. |
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| This kind of gardening lets the plants decide where they want to grow, it takes a minimum of three years to find out if this works some of the plants. |
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| With bulbs we plant local species in the patches we assume to be best for them, to let these patches rewild will take several years. |
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| We like to offer a helping hand in dispersing the seedlings. |
A flower meadow would look very different from the original style of the Academy garden, the connotations with these grassland flowers are traditional farms, road sides, abundance and full colours. In some patches we planted several kinds of ferns, some even arrived on their own. In the sunny patch of tall grass we have sown seeds that would occur at the edge of the forest, in the ecotone between shade and sun, between moist and dry and on the edge of a tree-line. Flemish Heritage consulted us to opt for low plants. Keeping the original design of the garden in mind, we ordered seeds from Ecoflora Halle, Cruydt-Hoeck, and Stichting Levend Archief. These are wild plant nurseries. The plants they grow are the plants we are missing more and more in our 'wild' nature. These are the plants that disappear through loss of habitat and the use of herbicides and too much fertilisation. They are missing in our landscape, and because we grow up without them, they are missing from our memory. Generations of humans grow up without knowing the lost plants, bees and butterflies. Our grandparents knew some of the names of the spiders, beetles and butterflies that are now extinct in this area (the Red List* has 205 critters/mushrooms/mosses marked as extinct in Flanders in 2024), we don't know them, and we will not need the use of their names.
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| Seeds from wild plants would sooner or later arrive, we're helping them to get across the border. |
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| Wild ferns are planted in the fern patch, from here their spores can find suitable places to grow. |
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| The fern patch when it was planted, in the shade of the Cherry laurel and under a sad looking Hornbeam. |
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| The seeds from October look mostly like small green plants now, they are still a bit invisible. |
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| To raise awareness for visitors we planted some adult wild flowers to give an idea of who is growing in the meadow. |
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| Not all the flowering plants were added by us, the All-heal or Prunella was already growing here and took full opportunity to flower in No-Mow-May. |
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| To remember where we didn't seed any wild plants we made a little path lined with shells. |
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| The path is too narrow to walk comfortably, it's more of minimum stepping area for careful gardeners who still feel the need to enter this patch. |
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| Some of the newcomers look like they have been here for ages, and they probably have, like this common comfrey. |
Who are you?
Let's get to know the plants that we don't see any more. The word 'colocation' means as much as two or more things located together. We're one of those two, the plants in the garden are the other, and bumblebees might be a third, a blackbird a fourth and so on. I'm hoping to create a memory in the mind of the visitor, an awareness that might be unaware as well, a bodily thinking, a sensory recognising of a plant and a moment in the life of this person.
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| Ornithogalum umbellatum is a wild plant growing in the lawn of the Academy, possibly it was introduced by gardeners from the nature around Antwerp. |
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| Another name for this plant is 'star-of-Bethlehem', it is unclear why it is called like this. |
The Ornithogalum umbellatum will blossom with white stars in spring, when it's still a bit cold. It's the time of tasks, when most students need to come up with artistic solutions for assignments. Later the pink frilly petals of the cuckoo flower appear. The year is coming to an end, and a buzz is filling the corridors of the Academy. Flopping down in the grass after an exam students look at the purple beehive flowers of Prunella or Heal-all, some feeling relief and others feeling a bit stressed but still enjoying the sunlight. Hopefully these moments are stored in the back of their mind, in a stack of unnamed memories associated with location and time-related emotions. Years later, when they see these plants again, they might feel a kind of recognition where person meets plant and plant meets person in a colocation. This awareness of other living beings stored in our memories is a valuable clue to understand a multispecies collective. Just like now I know from memory the long nettles go with dusty knees running after butterflies, and mosses come with laying under a shrub on a hot summer day. This is us thinking together, with our body and our memory. We're thinking-together.
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| Roel Arkesteijn is the chair of the research group Art & Ecology, he has generously shared dead wood from his garden and three young Crataegus also known as Hawthorn and Maythorn shrubs. |
Plant species
During the courses of Nature studies, ARTICULATE, and String Figure Patch we gardened with lots of students. We made seed mixtures in response to the soil conditions, for shaded and sunny patches, for dry and moist soil, for plants who like calcium because the old monks in the cemetery are also taking part in this garden project.
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| There are a few nurseries who work with wild plants, and for the garden we selected carefully which organisations have a heart for nature and offer the wild plants instead of garden varieties. This photo was taken at the annual plant fair for Natuurpunt, a nature preserve organisation. |
We can make three lists of valuable plant species in the garden: who is already there before we started to join in gardening, who can we introduce, who naturalises? Plants who can’t survive without (a lot) of our help and who don’t naturalise and will eventually disappear. But some plants will find a natural habitat and eventually we’ll find a balanced diversity in a natural ecosystem.
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| This map was printed with the help of Track Report and added to the research magazine Forum + |
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| About a 1000 extra posters were printed and are distributed via the Library of the Royal Academy as a free edition. |
What we found when started gardening in 2022:
Important species for biodiversity we found in the garden before we started to plant in the Sympoiesis Garden patch.
Trees
- Taxus baccata
- Fagus sylvatica
- Carpinus betulus
Shrubs, perennials and biennials
- Ligustrum vulgare
- Prunella vulgaris
- Plagiomnium undulatum, gerimpeld boogsterrenmos
- Plantago lanceolata, smalle weegbree
- Geranium robertianum, robertskruid
- Jacobea vulgaris of Jacobskruiskruid
- Asplenium ruta-muraria, muurvaren
- Bellis perennis, madeliefje
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| Not mowing the grass resulted in a wonderful spring lawn full of daisies. |
2022 – 2023 The plants we introduced in the Sympoiesis Garden patch (these plants were mostly potted plants, only a few have been seeded):
Achillea millefolium, Duizendblad
Alchemilla mollis ( a garden variety, not a wild plant)
Alliaria petiolata, Look-zonder-look
Aspidistra elatior
Aquilegia vulgaris, Akelei
Bunium bulbocastanum, Aardkastanje
Campanula persicifolia, Perzikbladklokje
Chelidonium majus, Stinkende gouwe
Crataegus monogyna, Eenstijlige meidoorn
Chrysosplenium alternifolium, Verspreidbladig goudveil
Colchicum autumnale, Herfsttijlloos
Digitalis lutea, Geel vingerhoedskruid
Digitalis purpurea, Vingerhoedskruid
Fritillaria imperialis, Keizerskroon
Galanthus nivalis, Sneeuwklokje
Galium odoratum, Lievevrouwebedstro
Glechoma hederacea, Hondsdraf
Hesperis matronalis, Damastbloem
Hypericum perforatum, Sint Janskruid
Iris pseudacorus, Gele lis
Leucojum vernum, Lenteklokje
Lunaria annua, Tuinjudaspenning
Myosotis (sylvatica?), Vergeet-mij-nietje (tuinvariant)
Oenothera biennis, Middelste teunisbloem
Polygonatum multiflorum, Gewone salomonszegel
Primula elatior, Slanke sleutelbloem
Primula veris, Gulden sleutelbloem
Pulmonaria officinalis, Gevlekt longkruid
Ranunculus acris, Scherpe boterbloem
Ruscus aculeatus, Stekelige muizendoorn
Salvia sclarea, Klarei
Sambucus nigra, Vlier
Scrophularia auriculata, Geoord helmkruid
Tanacetum parthenium, Moederkruid
Tanacetum vulgare, Boerenwormkruid
Urtica dioica, Grote brandnetel
Verbascum densliflorum, Stalkaars
Vinca minor, Kleine maagdenpalm
Viola odorata, Maarts viooltje
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| Screenshot from the online map |
You can download this map as pdf via the website of The Royal Academy:
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| The shells we use to decorate the garden are fossils, they are more or less 4.000.000 years old and come from the seabed deep in the soil of Antwerp. From top left to bottom right: Glycymeris (2), Pygocardia (2), Ostrea edulis (2), Mimachlamys angelonii (1). Many thanks to Stijn Goolaerts for the identification and explanation. |
2023 – 2024 The plants introduced in the Making Sense project:
We used preselected seed mixes from Cruydt-Hoeck and added extra seeds from plants we expect to normally find in similar local settings. Seeded in the patches:
G1 Bloemrijk grasland mengsel voor lichte grond
Achillea millefolium, Duizendblad
Barbarea vulgaris, Gewoon barbarakruid
Centaurea jacea, Knoopkruid
Crepis biennis, Groot streepzaad
Crepis capillaris, Klein streepzaad
Daucus carota, Peen
Echium vulgare, Slangenkruid
Erodium cicutarium, Gewone reigersbek
Galium mollugo subsp. Erectum, Glad walstro
Hieracium sectie Hieracioides, Schermhavikskruid
Hypericum perforatum, Sint janskruid
Hypochaeris radicata, Gewoon biggenkruid
Jasione montana, Zandblauwtje
Leucanthemum vulgare, Gewone margriet
Lotus corniculatus var. Corniculatus, Gewone rolklaver
Luzula campestris, Gewone veldbies
Malva moschata, Muskuskaasjeskruid
Oenothera biennis, Middelste teunisbloem
Plantago lanceolata, Smalle weegbree
Prunella vulgaris, Gewone brunel
Ranunculus acris Scherpe boterbloem
Rhinanthus minor, Kleine ratelaar
Scorzoneroides autumnalis, Vertakte leeuwentand
Silene dioica, Dagkoekoeksbloem
Tragopogon pratensis subsp. pratensis, Gele morgenster
Trifolium arvense, Hazenpootje
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| Screenshot from instagram stories after a field walk. |
G4 Bloemrijk grasland mengsel voor matig voedselrijke kalkhoudend grond
Agrimonia eupatoria, Gewone agrimonie
Agrimonia procera, Welriekende agrimonie
Anchusa officinalis, Gewone ossentong
Anthyllis vulneraria, Wondklaver
Barbarea vulgaris, Gewoon barbarakruid
Betonica officinalis, Betonie
Briza media, Bevertjes
Campanula persicifolia, Prachtklokje
Campanula rapunculoides, Akkerklokje
Campanula rapunculus, Rapunzelklokje
Campanula rotundifolia, Grasklokje
Campanula trachelium, Ruig klokje
Centaurea scabiosa, Grote centaurie
Cichorium intybus, Wilde cichorei
Crepis biennis, Groot streepzaad
Dianthus deltoides, Steenanjer
Galium verum, Geel walstro
Geranium pratense, Beemdooievaarsbek
Isatis tinctoria, Wede
Knautia arvensis, Beemdkroon
Leontodon hispidus, Ruige leeuwentand
Origanum vulgare, Wilde marjolein
Plantago media, Ruige weegbree
Poterium sanguisorba, Kleine pimpernel
Reseda lutea, Wilde reseda
Reseda luteola, Wouw
Rhinanthus minor, Kleine ratelaar
Salvia pratensis, Veldsalie
Saxifraga granulata, Knolsteenbreek
Scabiosa columbaria, Duifkruid
Silene vulgaris, Blaassilene
Tragopogon porrifolius, Paarse morgenster
Tragopogon pratensis subsp. pratensis, Gele morgenster
Verbascum nigrum, Zwarte toorts
Verbena officinalis, IJzerhard
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| In nature reserve Blokkersdijk the plants create wonderful miniature landscapes. |
M4 laag Bloemrijk grasland mengsel voor schrale kalkrijke grond
Achillea millefolium, Duizendblad
Briza media, Bevertjes
Campanula rotundifolia, Grasklokje
Dianthus deltoides, Steenanjer
Erodium cicutarium, Gewone reigersbek
Galium verum, Geel walstro
Hypochaeris radicata, Gewoon biggenkruid
Jasione montana, Zandblauwtje
Leontodon hispidus, Ruige leeuwentand
Leontodon saxitilis, Kleine leeuwentand
Leucanthemum vulgare, Gewone margriet
Lotus corniculatus var. Corniculatus, Gewone rolklaver
Luzula campestris, Gewone veldbies
Medicago lupulina, Hopklaver
Origanum vulgare, Wilde marjolein
Pilosella officinarum, Muizenoor
Plantago lanceolata, Smalle weegbree
Plantago media Ruige weegbree
Poterium sanguisorba Kleine pimpernel
Primula veris, Gulden sleutelbloem
Prunella vulgaris, Gewone brunel
Ranunculus acris, Scherpe boterbloem
Rhinanthus minor, Kleine ratelaar
Silene vulgaris, Blaassilene
Thymus pulegioides, Grote tijm
Thymus serpyllum, Kleine tijm
Trifolium arvense, Hazenpootje
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| A visit to Blokkersdijk gave us lots of inspiration to extend local nature into the garden. |
O3 Onderbegroeiing bosplantsoen
Achillea millefolium, Duizendblad
Centaurea cyanus, Korenbloem
Hypochaeris radicata, Gewoon biggenkruid
Leucanthemum vulgare, Gewone margriet
Lotus corniculatus var. corniculatus, Gewone rolklaver
Matricaria chamomilla, Echte kamille
Medicago lupulina, Hopklaver
Papaver rhoeas, Gewone klaproos
Plantago lanceolata, Smalle weegbree
Prunella vulgaris, Gewone brunel
Rumex acetosella, Schapenzuring
Silene dioica, Dagkoekoeksbloem
Trifolium pratense, Rode klaver
Trifolium repens, Witte klaver
Tripleurospermum maritimum, Reukeloze kamille
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| Studying local ecologies in nature reserves helped to fill the gaps of all the missing plants and species. |
Seeds we added to the mixtures:
Achilea ptarmica, Wilde bertram
Aira caryophyllea, Zilverhaver
Apera spica-venti, Grote windhalm
Anthoxanthum aristatum, Slofhak
Avenella flexuose, Bochtige smele
Betonica officinalis, Betonie
Campanula latifolia, Breed klokje
Clinopodium vulgare, Borstelkrans
Dianthus armeria, Ruige anjer
Dipsacus fullonum, Grote kaardenbol
Epipactis helleborine subsp. helleborine, Brede wespenorchis
Galium saxatile, Liggend walstro
Jasione montana, Zandblauwtje
Knautia arvensis, Beemdkroon
Myosotis arvensis, Akkervergeet-mij-nietje
Onopordum acanthium, Wegdistel
Rhinanthus minor, Kleine ratelaar
Salvia pratensis, Veldsalie
Saponaria officinalis, Zeepkruid
Silene latifolia subsp.alba, Avondkoekoeksbloem
Silene nutans, Nachtsilene
Smyrnium perfoliatum
Solidago virgaurea, Echte guldenroede
Stachys sylvatica, Bosandoorn
Trifolium arvense, Hazenpootje
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| Reintroduction of the historical forrest tulip, one of the first wild tulips to arrive in the harbour of Antwerp and since connected to historical Stinzen gardens in this area. |
Plant species introduced as potted plants or bulbs:
Mostly via Gesamthof, Arboretum Kalmthout, Natuurpunt, Nijssens bloembollen, Botanische tuin Gent, Bloemerij, Ecoflora Halle, and Cruydt-Hoeck.
Ajuga reptans,
Anchusa officinalis,
Asplenium scolopendrium,
Asplenium trichomanes
Athyrium filix-femina
Blechnum spicant
Circea lutetiana, Groot heksenkruid
Chrysosplenium oppositifolium, paarbladig goudveil
Convallaria majalis, Meiklokje
Cyclamen hederifolium, Napolitaanse cyclamen
Daucus carota, peen
Dianthus carthusianorum, Kartuizeranjer
Dianthus superbus, prachtanjer
Dipsacus fullonum, Grote kardebol
Dryopteris filix-mas, Mannetjesvaren
Echium vulgare, Slangenkruid
Euphorbia Amygdaloides, Amandelwolfsmelk
Galium verum, Geel walstro
Helleborus foetidus, Stinkend nieskruid
Lamium maculatum, Gevlekte dovenetel
Lonicera periclymenum, Wilde kamperfoelie
Lychnis flos-cuculi, Koekoeksbloem
Ornithogalum umbellatum, Gewone vogelmelk
Osmunda regalis, Koningsvaren
Polygonatum multiflorum, Gewone salomonszegel
Polypodium vulgare, Eikvaren
Polystichum setiferum, Zachte naaldvaren
Primula eliator, Slanke sleutelbloem
Primula veris, Gulden sleutelbloem
Pulmonaria officinalis, Gevlekt longkruid
Ranunculus ficaria, Speenkruid
Tulipa sylvestris, Bostulp
Urtica dioica, Grote brandnetel
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| We're rearranging the privet hedge from a formal square shape to an informal big bush. We want to restore the original garden layout in an English romantic style as well as give them more freedom to grow. |
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| The Ligustrum vulgare or wild privet is a good supporter of local ecologies, the shrubs is a safer space for birds and the flowers are visited by lots of wild bees. |
Natuurpunt Bird shrubbery:
Acer campestre, Veldesdoorn
Cornus sanguinea, Rode kornoelje
Crataegus monogyna, Meidoorn
Euonymus europaeus, Wilde kardinaalsmuts
Frangula alnus, Sporkehout
Ligustrum vulgare, Wilde liguster
Prunus avium, Zoete kers
Prunus spinosa, Sleedoorn
Rosa canina, Hondsroos
Rosa rubiginosa, Egelantier
Viburnum opulus, Gelderse roos
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| We had 7000 liter of compost delivered to add a thin layer (no more than 5cm) in three beds where the soil had become very depleted. This way we don't need to dig in the garden and don't disturb tree roots nor archaeology. |
Archaeology just below the surface
The Academy garden used to be a cemetery, the bones of the monks buried here are still here. As a fan of archaeology I respect the layers of soil and the stories they tell. The garden has never been investigated and everything should remain in place with the care we usually give to a cemetery. Because of this we dig as little as possible and never deeper than 10cm except in the patch where planted the shrubs for the birds. We did this where we uprooted the Cherry laurel, and there used to be an oil tank in this location. The archaeology is already disturbed because of these constructions, but we worked very carefully to take out the root and plant the small shrubs to not further damage anything.
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| The bird bush is 5 months old and still very open, the idea is these shrubs will grow to form some kind of shelter together. |
Mind the trees.
One of the challenges of this garden is the increasing number of students, staff, and visitors walking on the soil. The compression of all these footsteps over the years reduced oxygen and without the necessary air in the soil tree roots die. Slowly the trees die as well. To decompress the soil we’ll need the help of animals who can dig tiny tunnels, from a mouse to beetles, sandmining bees, ants, and worms. They are the saviours of the trees but only if we create a good habitat in the right places. That’s why the tree beds are so important and why we build supportive fences around them. The SF or string figure in the shape of a supportive fence and the other way around, protects the roots of the trees and all the living critters that are looking after them. In the tree beds we plant species to further increase the health of the soil. Especially the string figure of mycelium with tree roots, minerals, sugar, and nettles has been an interesting discovery. We found out planting nettles with the white strings of fungi attached to their roots helps to develop a healthy network of mycelium patches along the woodchip we added on the topsoil under a tree.
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| The fence is low enough to step over, they are meant to keep safe, focus attention and plant ideas. |
This is an ongoing art & ecology project, part of the research program in the Royal Academy. In September a new garden year starts at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. All students are weekly welcomed during the open garden sessions to join in with this project. We restore ecology and build very simple gardening skills from 17 to 19h in the old Academy garden.
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| Snowdrops, first hope in a new year. |
A Sympoiesis Garden
2 July 2023
In September 2022 we started to garden in the old and new gardens of the Royal Academy in Antwerp. In many ways this was a test year to discover the wider and smaller ecologies of the Royal Academy in Antwerp. For ten months we got to know the garden, meet the people who work and study here, kneel between tree roots and scan the sky to find our way into the gardens. Everything was new for us, and we were doing something new as well. Lead by curiosity this was an adventure in gardening.
From the start this project is deeply embedded in the books of Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, Jamaica Kincaid and Ursula Le Guin, among many others. The garden is the real and tangible contact zone of ideas and engagement for students in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. To garden with students in the historical garden meant that we could think together, humans and nonhumans, about this thick present we're in. We're facing some serious trouble and climate change is so big it can become overhelming.
To garden in a more traditional sense wouldn't make the difference we're looking for, instead we have to become an entangled kind of gardeners and question our actions and relations with our nonhuman kinship. When we touch the garden, the garden touches us. This mind shift is the result of "thinking-with" and "making-with", the very essense of our Sympoiesis Garden. This community garden is about more-than-human-community and we want to change the way we look at nature, using all our artistic skills to find meaningful connections in this nature-culture.
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| This week we lifted the metal frame that was to make the pond safer because the iron was leaking into the water and changing the pond ecosystem. Lucky the secret garden seems quite safe as it is. |
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| The tiny leaves of lemna trisulca float in the water and give shade to keep the water cool. Frogbite floats like tiny waterlilies in the pond. |
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| We're lucky to have so many aphids on our artichokes, beautiful big wasps are building a nest next to the pond and they are smart enough not to eat all of these at once. |
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| We're adding oxygenating plants to keep the water healthy. |
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| The pond is green, full of life with plants and little critters. |
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| The yellow flag flowers, lots of bees drink their nectar. |
By miracle Ecoflora Halle decided to bring back native -wild- waterplants into their collection, right now when we made the pond. On April 2 we visited the nursery and brought back to the Academy garden:
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| The greens from our potager have been given away at the entrance of the Academy in our carrier bag installation. |
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| The name and recipe are also the packaging, practical design for our give away project. |
The soil in our garden might have lots of different toxicities, not just PFAS but other toxins as well. That's why we made a very big planter with organic soil for our vegetable patch. It's a big succes and the vegetables are growing well, whenever they are ready we give them away and sow something new.
This poster announced our walk & talk in the garden by guest speaker and ecology specialist Joris Thoné. On May 4 we spent a sunny afternoon in the old garden and listened to Joris' explanation on how gardens evolved in the last centuries. The reason to ask Joris is because he is one of the informal teachers behind this awareness of ecology.
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| Admiring our leaf mould during the garden tour. |
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| The garden tour took place along our little woodland patch in the old garden. |
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| The new bee hotel, almost finished. |
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| The vegetable planter in the secret garden. |
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| The garden has a lot of old stones and masonry for insect habitat. |
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| A tiny Sand Mining Bee visited us. |
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| Two days before the Open House, the garden was covered in a thin layer of snow. |
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| The community garden in Silsburg (Samentuin) |
Acquilegia vulgaris (akelei)
Anchusa sempervirens (groene ossentong)
Alliaria petiolata (garlic mustard, look zonder look)
Allium schoenoprasum (chives, bieslook)
Arum maculatum (lords and ladies, gevlekte aronskelk)
Crataegus (hawthorn, meidoorn) -not exactly sure-
Crocus (several, unknown)
Ficaria verna (speenkruid)
Foeniculum (fennel, venkel)
Geranium (unknown variety)
Glechoma hederacea (catsfoot, hondsdraf)
Hypericum perforatum (St. John's wort, Sint-janskruid)
Lamium purpureum (paarse dovenetel)
Narcissus (daffodil, narcis)
Plantago lanceolata (smalle weegbree)
Symphytum officinale (common comfrey, smeerwortel)
Viola odorata (English violet, maarts viooltje)
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| Crocus |
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| Anchusa sempervirens (groene ossentong) |
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| Crocus (Jeanne d'Arc?) |
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| Plantago lanceolata |
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| Lamium purpureum |
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| Lords & ladies and some very small lesser Celandine leaves. |
While we walked trough the garden we looked for what we could move to the Academy's garden, what would work in a different setting and soil? So many leaves looked interesting, with strange shapes and patterns, but at this time of the year it was really hard to tell what was growing in this plot. At first glance it looked as if there was nothing but trees and grasses. We needed to look differently in order to find the plants that were hidden in the soil. Instead of recognizing plants we looked at the conditions: what might like to grow here, and what would be left in a visible trace at this time of the year? Plantblindness has many forms and this excursion was an exercise in thinking differently. We weren't looking for plants, we were trying to see an ecology and who might be part of it?
We all have at least some plantblindness, some of us have barely any (not me) but even the most educated botanist can learn about a new plant. In Silsburg I have seen more plants I didn't recognize than plants that I could remember the name of. To know that I don't see these unknown plants make a difference because at least now I can try to discover them and remember that very old question: "What is the name for this?".
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| Old logs in our new garden. |
At the end of the day the logs have found a place in the garden, and the plants are dug into a strip of soil to create a makeshift nursery. The wood is still full of life, from ants and earwigs to slugs and more. It didn't rain and a narrow strip of bright blue sky appeared between the steel coloured clouds. Birds swooped into the garden to investigate the wood while we left.
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| Joséphine Dekker brought the snowdrops out of her garden, big clumps were packed in wooden trays. |
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| The botanical snowdrop Galanthus nivalis is a small and gentle flower, it is the wild plant from the forests of France introduced in the Netherlands. |
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| The snowdrop Galanthus S. Arnott is a cultivated snowdrop, sterile and selected for it's beautiful features. |
Resisting the snowdropmania we're buying only wild plants because they make sense. The small flowers work with the senses of early insects and are vital for survival. That's why we're not going to buy the cultivar, a beautiful plant but no longer connected to a cycle of ecology.
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| A clump of these snowdrops consists of 20+ single plants, we count the bulbs (not the flowers). |
During the garden sessions frequently clusters of plants were mistaken for 'one plant' and planted out in a single hole in the soil. We had to dig them up and look closer, because what seemd to be one entity was actually a group of small bulbs, seedlings or root systems. This fenomena of not identifying a structure is part of plantblindness, a condition we all suffer from when we don't know what we see, don't recognise what we don't know and don't see what is not recognised. Instead of individual plants we see an abstraction. These snowdrops are a family portrait, not a single plant, and they will be separated bulb per bulb to be replanted in the old garden's forest patch.
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| The forest patch with the single snowdrop plants. |
09 February 2023
Big and little works, this week you could find us mostly in the secret garden. A herb mountain and a forrest patch are in the making, we added Hypericum, Asarum europaeum and Geum urbanum tot he forrest patch, the herb garden got a nice old sage Salvia officinalis and garlic. We also added seeds of Lunaria rediviva, Ruta graveolens, Silybum, Malva alcea, Dianthus superbus, Myrrhis odorata, Dystenia takeshimana, Smyrnium perfoliatum and Oenothera.
On Thursday we gave a tour to the deptartment of In Situ, we talked about gardening to restore ecology as a non-human centred practice. Artists can use this practice to reflect, to find a different kind of input and inspiration. We talked about Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Renaat Braem, Napoleon Bonaparte, Plato, Ana Mendieta and the fritalaria from Iran as a living monument. Time went fast and we're very grateful for connecting with such a nice audience.
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| The walk and talk kicked off in the secret garden where we discussed 21th century gardening. Photo by Timothy Laskaratos |
02 February 2023
We are in the old garden, the 15th - 18th century Franciscan monastery's cemetery that became an Academy garden in 1810. The moss garden is already a moss garden, by itself and of itself, because the grass won't grow and the moss is forming a gentle carpet. Little ferns pop up between the green patches, rainwater pools to sink into the sandy soil. There isn't much top soil, hardly any at all. Digging gives us bricks, glass and bits and pieces. We went with an intuitive gardening method, following the natural course of the water we extended the path into a little river, and then it split into two rivers with an island in the middle. The excess soil from digging was piled up in the middle, we were surprised to see how much height our mountain gained from only those two rivers. We placed the moss on top of the mountain and planted two old ferns on the river banks.
The landscape looked like a dinosaur, or a camel back, or twins (both twin mountain tops, twin ferns and twin rivers) and it reminded us of the land art by Ana Mendieta. Her close relationship with land, soil, water and local plants is inspiring, her innovative performances and interactions show the land as belonging within an ecology of human and non-human stories knotted together in her art practice. Ana Mendieta is an iconic artist within this emergent art and garden contact zone. In this moment a materiality manifested with a semiology that works. It makes sense. We must remember. We must think. "Think we must" wrote Virginia Woolf at the break of the Great War. Donna Haraway writes about Virginia Woolf's thinking and in a string figure of thought Haraway adds Hannah Arendt's and Isabelle Stengers' ideas on how we think and what stories we are thinking with. This string figure emphasises that it matters which words word words and which world world worlds. This string figure appeared and we could recognise it.
We decided to call this place Ana, and the mountain really looks like Ana.
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| Sketch of the moss patch named Ana. |
26 january 2023
It's freezing and the usual preparations (potting overspill of wild plants out of the Gesamthof into the Academy) isn't going to work. The ground is frozen and the plants are in deep sleep. What are we going to do on two afternoons when it's so cold? It's very quiet in the Academy, there are exams and jury days and only a few students walk in the halls. I brought books (from Aldo Leopold and Donna Haraway) and planned on updating the message boards with oil drenched paper to prevent the composting of our communication. Instead we compared soil colours and discussed the similarities between plants and people, like a double name.
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| Our brave snowdrops. |
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| Finding interesting plants. |
In the old garden we've planted a few thoroughly frosted cyclamen coum and snowdrops. They were lingering in the Gesamthof and are probably better of in the warmer full soil than in frozen plastic containers. I'm hoping for a carpet of snowdrops, perhaps in thirthy years time? We planted 12 bulbs. And then I started on something I have been nervous about. The moss garden. In my mind I see a landscape unfolding with old ferns and a shallow creek with rainwater, mosses hanging from dead wood and name tags talking about ancient plants. In reality this patch of soil is probably the hardest part of the grounds to grow anything at all. Even the mosses are in doubt, facing north in a corner shaded by shrubs on both ends. At the end of the day we found several baby ferns growing between the false strawberries.
On the second day we worked in the secret garden. When I posted the photo of the new garden on social media, inviting students to join us, I felt it wasn't good advertising. Who would like to work in this dark and empty patch of soil? And this has been often my experience, people like to garden in a garden that looks already good. They don't like to work in a sad and empty bit of shade. When we need the students the most, they won't come, and when the work is done they will volunteer for more. What I can't show in a photo is the satisfaction at the end of the day when after all this digging we have something resembling a natural landscape. And even then you have to be able to see the potential in the mud. Pioneering isn't visible until after it is done.
18 January 2023
This is the first week of our new schedule, the garden sessions are on Wednesday and Thursday. We met in the secret garden next to the printmaking studio. One patch of the garden has a pond and a herb mountain, new plants are pushing trough the soil and it looks promising. In the other patch we cleaned up, made new paths, planted a butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii) and have sown Pachyphragma macrophyllum and Smyrnium perfoliatum.
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| A strange inbetween space. |
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| After an afternoon's work the garden looks very promising. |
12 January 2023
Our new circle around the sun started with a cold, wet and stormy day and we decided to stay indoors. In order to restore the garden we have to include people. People are a part of the local ecology and we haven't really heard their voice yet. What do the people in this environment think of the future of the Academy garden? We set up a poll station at the entrance of the cafetaria to ask everyone's opinion. While we baked pancakes and made tea we discussed different aspects of the garden and room for improvements. The answers were gathered on notes and pinned on the board between inspiring topics. The result is a grand tour of speculative fabulations of possible futures for the Academy garden.
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| Our poll station at the end of the day. |
We will translate the notes into a document with the gathered information, a tool to share the view of the people who are close to the garden. This document will give a good input towards decision makers in charge of the garden's future.
We gardened with words to extend nature indoors, the paper notes with Speculative Fabulations, SF, a science fiction of the garden, made many of the passersby into gardeners for a moment. By inviting people's thoughts into the garden making we involved people in the garden for a moment.
21 December 2022
Tomorrow is the last community garden day of this year in the patches of the Royal Academy. We're a small group of enthusiasts who continued gardening during the cold last week in minus 3 degrees arranging wood chip in a path and breaking ice for birds. The patch has transformed from three trees in nearly bare soil to a living land although with not much plants at the moment. When I see the patch I wonder what we could add that would want to live there. Conditions aren't easy: very dry in summer, shaded under the trees, not a lot of nutritions, possibly wet in spring and yet quite exposed. There are flowers growing in the desert, but not much is growing here. We planted and seeded lots of wild plants from the Gesamthof.
The woodland patch
Acquilegia vulgaris (akelei)
Alchemilla mollis (garden lady's-mantle, vrouwenmantel)
Allium triquetrum (driekantige look)
Anemone nemorosa (bosanemoon)
Ceratophylum demersum (gedoornd hoornblad)
Comarum Palustre (wateraardbei)
Cyclamen hederafolium
Cygnoglossum officinale (veldhondstong)
Dianthus armeria (ruige anjer)
Digitalis purpurea (foxglove, vingerhoedskruid)
Echium vulgare (viper's bugloss, slangenkruid)
Epimedium rubrum
Eranthis cilicia
Galium odoratum (sweetscented bedstraw, lievevrouwebedstro)
Glechoma hederacea (catsfoot, hondsdraf)
Helleborus argutifolius (Corsican hellebore, nieskruid)
Hesperis matronalis (dame's gilliflower, damastbloem)
Hyacinthoides non-scripta
Iris pseudocarus (gele lis)
Lemna Trisculca (puntkroos)
Lunaria annua (honesty, judaspenning)
Muscari
Myosotis (forget-me-not, vergeet-me- nietje)
Narcissus
Oenothera (evening primrose, teunisbloem)
Plantago coronopus (buck's horn plantain, hertshoornweegbree)
Pulmonaria saccharata
Rosa canina (hondsroos)
Salvia sclarea (clary sage, klareisalie)
Scirpoides holoschoenus (bullrush)
scrophularia nodosa (figwort, knopig helmkruid)
Verbascum (mullein, koningskaars)
Viola odorata (English violet, maarts viooltje)
Alchemilla mollis (garden lady's-mantle, vrouwenmantel)
Allium schoenoprasum (chives, bieslook)
Buddleja (orange eye, vlinderstruiken)
Calendula (marigold, goudsbloemen)
Dianthus armeria (ruige anjer)
Eupatorium (snakeroots, leverkruid )
Fragaria vesca (bosaardbei)
Hesperis matronalis (dame's gilliflower, damastbloem)
Iris pseudocarus (gele lis)
Laurus nobilis (bayleaf, keukenlaurier)
Lunaria annua (honesty, judaspenning)
Malva alcea (hollyhock mallow, vijfdelig kaasjeskruid)
Muscari botryoides (grape hyacinth, druif hyacint)
Stachys (lambsear, ezelsoor)
Verbascum (mullein, koningskaars)
With the leftover seeds we made small packages and printed the names of the plants with this incredible print technique: Inés Ballesteros & Michela Dal Brollo gelatin printer. The print plates used to be transparant but all the ink of years of printing coloured them deep blue-violet. The copy works up to ten times before fading.
1 December 2022
The making of a pond. We finished our pond in a couple of hours on a cold and sunny winter day. The soil was almost frozen, and we had to move about a lot to keep warm. The pond doesn't look as nice we'd like it to be, there is a rusty grit laying on top as a safety measure. Of course it's not a 100 percent safe, still a lot can go wrong. But comparing culutures I noticed -while abroad- that Belgians aren't really used to accessible open water. Even the city park has a fence around the pond. And just so, to be on the safe side with children running very fast, it seemed like a good plan to cover at least deepest parts. We added pots with bullrushes and yellow flag (the pots are to keep them from spreading too fast), but lots of plants are still missing. We'll add them next time.
The pond was made with the help of many students, they are not in the photos because it feels weird to make photos of people who are gardening and it feels equally weird to ask people if I can take a photo of their face. Instead I promise not to photograph their face and it allows me document the making of these garden patches without accidently taking someone's picture. It also adds a bit of secret, some kind of privacy, if you want to know who's part of our garden group you have to be there and show your face as well.
But this garden project wouldn't be possibel without the help of many, there are the weekly gardeners who joined the group and share their enthusiasm. There are the visitors who are curious and like to ask questions. There are the staff of the Academy, the people who work daily to make the whole ecology run smoothly and who let us use their materials like spades, wire cutters, hammers, saws, etc. And then there are the people who give us precious materials, like this dead wood full of life: the fungus filled branches that were given to us to add to the garden. Thank you so much for this gift, it adds life to the soil and is a feast for beetles, worms and birds. They really added a lot of character.
The garden is ready for planting and sowing, it will need ferns and herbs and shrubs and ground cover...
23 November 2022
The making of a pond, we're halfway. We're digging in a new patch of soil, there was a hole after the demolition of a house, and the landscape was refilled with unknown earth from elsewhere. But the history of a place seems to remember, like a ghost from the past this place sticks to its nature of being a hole.
The secret garden meant working towards ecology from an almost empty patch. The first step is to add water, and here unlike in the old (cemetary) garden we can dig. The academy didn't have water bodies on their grounds, and that's why we added the baby lake in the form of big bucket in the old garden. In this new patch we can dig a small pond for wildlife without disturbing too many skeletons. With a bit of effort we can make this place a welcoming home for insects, birds and who knows who else.
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| We're sculpting the edges, like a big inverted chocolate cake, layer after layer for plant support. |
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| It was cold and wet and after a few hours the 'cake' was ready. |
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| With some preparation we could ad the protactice pond sheet, or shroud it looked like a burial. |
Next week we'll add the lining, water and gravel to finish the natural pond. We'll do the planting as well, and if you hesitate to help: know that you can dip a toe and feel if this is your kind of place to be. We are still looking for students to join our garden group and join us on Thursdays from 12 till 18h, when the weather is nice. On rainy days you find us in the cafetaria with tea and dry seed packages.
17 November 2022
Instead of gardening together we had a Soup Session, the Royal Academy's choice for sharing research practices within the Academy. Every researcher gets the possibility to share their interests, questions, worries and plans while drinking soup together. For this session we had two soups: a big pot of tomato soup made in the Academy's kitchen and a small pot of celeriac soup with miso made by me because I have an allergy for tomato, I'm gluten intolerant and dairy intolerant and it is safer when I cook my own food. The double soup option for participants, the big pot of 'main' soup and small pot of queer soup, was a nice introduction to today's topic: soil.
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| Soup session: cooking celeriac soup in the Royal Academy's garden. |
Soil and miso have in common that they are not exactly dead material, the fermentation is a living multitude and so is soil. We didn't bring the soup to boiling after the miso was added to keep the fermentation working otherwise the healthy benefit of this soup would be lost. The fermented miso paste is a living action and a direct support for our digestive system which is also full of living actions. Humans - like soil- are also multitudes. We can't function on our own, our ecology is not all that different from a garden. To make a garden healthy is to make soil healthy, it is all about the living symbiosis of a wider ecology. We're working with life in earth, a vast multitudinous togetherness like seas, moving and changing - far removed from the solidity we think of. To touch the infinite grains of sand, the decomposing organic matter, the many critters living inbetween these, the threads of fungus bodies, the seeds, spores, roots, stones, the worm slipping away is to touch the life other life is built on. If we want to look after the garden we have to look at the soil.
'Academy' comes from Hekademia, the gardens outside of Athens where Plato was teaching his students in the olive grove. The Academy has her roots in the gardens of Athens, of Athena full of wisdom. Before Athena stepped out onto the stage after being born from a man's head she was not a man's idea of the perfect woman, she was a plank falling from the sky. This older story interests me more than the men in the garden, the plank was a divine piece of a tree without human features. This tree, probably an olive tree, was more than a symbol, Greece used to be covered with forests until people started to harvest the trees for precious wood. At some point they realised that without the trees there would be no olives, no oil, nothing to start a fire, no boats, no chariots, no cooking and so on. They knew trees alive and to be respected, a plank was not a symbol but a real piece of wood from real trees. This story is about making sense.
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| Sorry for the inadvertently advertising, I made only 3 photos during the event and this was the best one. |
I didn't take a photo of the miso, but I did take a photo of measuring ut the seaweed in wooden bowls, drinking soup from a wooden cup is being involved with 'plank', with the trees around us. The seaweed is a good nutritonous value for people and soil. When harvested with permission it can be used as a fertiliser to improve the soil conditions. While drinking this soup, a nice winter vegetable recipe that blends Flemish tradition with ingredients from Japan, we talked about the research as practice of artistic curiosity. This project is about starting a practice that includes the wider ecology of the Academy: from worms to students, including the lifelong inhabitants like Trees and Robins. During the talk I swithced from I to we according to the content, when I sai I it means me, my pronouns are 'she' and 'her', but when we speak as a garden, as a whole including humans and nonhumans, we say we with the pronouns 'they' and 'them'. This is not gender based: instead of a binary system we use a multitude including all kinds of gender and non-gender. My interpration of woman is inclusive with an open definition, woman can be as masculin, feminin or any kind of 'in' and still be fully woman. Inclusive open definitions are necessary in this research, because they allow for a different kind of story telling. The garden as a whole is a real inclusion of everyone that belongs with the garden.
10 November 2022
The Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp is a patchwork of walls, with some of the oldest church walls extending into neoclassic and contemporary architecture. Little patches of green can be found in various places, and one of those patches is the secret garden in front of the print making studios. A garden is never an empty space, a white page, but this flat square was almost empty apart from a great fig tree.
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| The fig tree is growing from the corner, and its roots are probably established in the old wall. |
This secret garden is a place that can reflect the students in the Academy, where the historical garden is full of history and we shouldn't dig in it, this new patch is open for play. Restoring ecology is not about separating humans from nature, we are a part of the ecology. The lack of wild boars, moose and dears is a good excuse to dig and root in this rather flat patch of land.
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| We already planted about a hundred small forest strawberry plants. |
The secret garden, or student garden, is planted with the plants spilling over from the Gesamthof, and especially the herbs are welcome addition. Healthy and gratis these herbs can help students in tea and cooking, while a herb garden is a very nice place to take break. The location wasn't entirely full of sun, and to create a better condition for the herbs we decided to make a mountain. The drainage of the soil as well as added height would give better options.
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| Drawing with flower on a windy day, it has a Helen Frankenthaler feel. |
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| The new pavement is so clean, we added a dam to keep the soil from spilling over. |
Making a mountain meant digging a hole, and with the herb garden we also made a pond, it's not ready yet. There still needs to come in sand and a lining, with lots of nice pebbles, some old wood and possibly a little field of marsh plants. In the right corner you can see the bayleaf we planted, and underneath are arum italicum seedlings. Next to them we added the white asters from the monastery garden at Morpho, the printmakers are in for a nice surprise next autumn.
The most important question now is: how to make this pond childproof? The sides are to be filled with plants, so the real water area is about 1 m² wide but quite deep. Should we add a fence around the garden? Or can we make a metal mesh under the water surface? Tricks and tips are welcome.
3 November 2022
Stones are often overlooked in a garden design, they are used as a building structure or put down as decorative; but this garden patch doesn't work with a design gently sketched and thought through. When looking closely a garden isn't a white page and garden designs are often human centred. Thinking of the Plantationocene, to design nature has an imperialistic taste. Instead we work from within a situated existing ecology and the stones matter a lot. Stone has a dense nature, one side of the stone reflects sunlight and creates a tiny micro climate with a warmer temperature on this side, the stone itself holds the warmth (butterflies love to catch a bit of heat) and it radiates after the air temprature has cooled off. The shade side of a stone is cooler, and will provide shelter in exteme heat, creating a pocket where different biotopes attracts different species. The soil underneath the stone is less prone to evaporation on hot days (all kinds of small animals like to live under a stone), and the stone itself casts a dry shadow on one side. Small pebbles and gravel can improve the drainage and small gaps between stones are prefered beds for ferns and other specilialised plants. To include humans in this garden there is another important quality of stones: when you are looking for a safe space to put your foot, a stepping stone makes a nice garden path working along with plants, insects and people. Coolest of all the qualities of stones is probably their habitat for lichen and mosses as well as the bacteria that break down the nutrition of the rock and started a complex symbiogenesis on this planet, we are many and interdependent as the symbiogenesis theory of Lynn Margulis explains. On this cloudy Thursday we added different kinds of stone to the garden further diversiy the micro-micro climate in our forest patch.
It gets dark early and many of us garden after dusk sometimes; it's quite romantic and also terribly impractical. To adjust to winter, we stop gardening in the soil when it gets dark and we continue gardening in text instead. The book 'Staying with the Trouble' by Donna Haraway is not all that far from a garden patch, and reading together might shed light on how we can get better skills in becoming more nonanthropomorphic sensible. When it rains you can find us under the cover of the 'temple' entrance in the historical garden, it's next to the forest patch. Please feel welcome and if you have a copy of this book it would be nice to bring it.
2 November 2022
On Wednesdays the preparations are done for gardening on Thursday, usually it means we bring big bags full of plants to the historical garden. But this time it was autumn holidays and most students were away, what worse is that the school was closed. There was nobody to answer the calls, there was no one at the door, nobody would let us in, no bell, no name, no phone nr anywhere. Standing in the rain with plants too heavy to carry, it was a moment to take in. Is this how it feels on non-holiday days for people who can't enter the Academy? Is it related to what Sarah Ahmed writes about in 'Living a Feminist Life'? The invisible walls, now turned visible and quite real. This garden project started with a refusal, the application for the research (this garden work is a research project into art & ecology) was not accepted because of my identity as a lesbian artist. The reading committee considered me as 'polarising', not the project - it's not a lesbian project - it was me, the researcher, who was refused. You might have noticed the shift from 'we' to 'me', I see this garden project as working in a community that I am part of, together with students, staff, trees, bugs, birds, soil and many more. The garden was there before I arrived and will be there after I leave, and I am a part of this wider ecology. The application was refused by the reading committee, and it was the faculty of the Academy who decided their decision was wrong. I am very grateful for the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp to refuse the refusal and press on in making change. Thank you to everyone who went against the decision and helped to realise this garden project.
27 October 2022
Another big change is the paths we are creating. Gardening is a way to give people a place in nature, and a path - or in this case a series of stepping stones - is a safe(r) way to let people enter this garden patch. In a small place the soil gets crowded and we don't want to step on plants too often. That's not the full story. Where do we belong in this small ecology, what are we to the others? How will a tree become aware of our presence and how do we feel about belonging in this garden patch. We are not residents like the worms, beetles, snails, trees and birds; we're visitors and a walking path is a visitor's home, it welcomes people in.
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| Three types of 'soil': sandy soil without organic matter, sandy soil with some nutritions and compost: not actually a soil but the local compost made from the green waste collected in Antwerp. |
To diversify the ecology is to work with different types of soil. There is a strange human connotation with the difference in soil, we call black soil 'rich' and light soil 'poor', and often gardening is about getting your soil more 'rich' to have strong plants and nice produce. Some plants prefer a lighter soil, a low nutrition and less organic matter. Those are not poor plants, and we can change the story of thinking in terms of rich and poor when an ecology is about specialised organisms. In the garden patch we're creating a part with extra compost and a part with lighter soil, letting the seeds of wild plants choose where they want to grow. If you ever visit Belgium you will find the end of the train platform is often not weeded, and between the gravel and stones all kinds of wild flowers grow on a very light soil. These ends of the platform are often the home of stunningly interesting plant combinations and far more intense than an evenly cared for nutritious border.
We planted Lungwort (Pulmonaria officinalis), Clary (Salvia sclarea), Dame's rocket (Hesperis Matronalis), Dog-rose (Rosa canina) and Daffodils (Narcissus) on a very warm late autumn day. There is still a lot of soil uncovered though it's not the goal to finish the garden as soon as possible. I'm not trying to create my garden and there is no end goal to this project. Instead it's about change and ongoingness, and we're creating it together (I'll introduce the fellow gardeners later) with a multitude of possible outcomes. To leave a patch of open soil for butterflies to land and for seeds to fall is not all too different from creating an unfinished garden for gardeners to enter.
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| Garden view with the 'study' for the museum of fine arts in the back. |
The Royal Academy of Antwerp has a garden that doubles as an open-air museum of old entrances, these gates - portals- porches - entrances... are from the time when the Spanish ruled Flandres. It's a weird feeling to see students entering the garden full of unreal passages. The gates lead to nowhere and the doors remain closed. The past is tangible in a thick, ongoing presence, the word used by Donna Haraway is kainos; she writes about in "Staying with the Trouble". This place becomes more and more interesting, the wall with the gates and the pediment is part of a 'small' study for the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp or KMSKA in short(er). While the museum was intentioned to be built in the city park, the plans changed. The location of the citadel in the south of the city was chosen instead, effectively burying the Duke of Alva's fort under the new building that opened in 1890. The KMSKA holds a colonial past, the location was used for the international exposition of 1885. This was the year the Congo Free State was created, and the world exhibition showed a Congolese village to promote the colonial spirit. While the Royal Academy and the museum are both older than Belgium ( we are digging in a garden instructed by Napaleon B.), there is no place untouched by our colonial past. The past is present in this thick presence.
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20 October 2022
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| The patch with permission to garden on the historical grounds of the Royal Academy in Antwerp. |
This research project on art and ecology had the work title "The Sympoiesis Garden", inspired by Donna Haraway's book Staying With the Trouble. This and many other books will be our gardening companions amongst other tools. I think of this project as 'making sense', that is a material and figurative description of what artists and gardeners do in this garden patch. Making sense has a history in the visual arts, it's full of curiosity. Making sense is about the senses, it is like the rope fencing off the patch signifying a change in landscape instead of locking nature in. The rope fence is a string figure, as a fence it holds nothing in or out. The garden is full of string figures, from string bean supports and a soil full of fungus strings, to the ropes guiding people around precarious patches of soil. These SF figures work as Speculative Fabulations, Supportive Feminism and Science Fiction in a thick present. The garden group will be submerged in the Donna Haraway concepts, but it is not a requirement to have read her books; her concepts become material-semiotic realities that you can touch, its about making sense. This garden project is not only about Donna Haraway, we will look at many interesting writers, like Anna L. Tsing, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimerer and others. We're also going to have a closer look at the trouble we're in, and find a path trough the mess of queer kinship, situated knowledge, climate change, artist's support, peer connections and how to think together as artists in a garden patch.
P.S. The patches in the name The Royal Academy of Antwerp Garden Patches comes from Anna L. Tsing's book 'Mushroom At The End Of The World. Tsing describes a patch and patchiness in a way that comes very close to the part of the garden we are allowed to work in (more about that later). The patches matter because they are in the historical garden. This old garden in the grounds of the Academy is a protected area, we're not allowed to touch anything because of the Royal Decree from 1974. However, for this project we have a special permission to work in two patches in this garden to restore ecology. I would like to thank everyone involved who helped to open up this densely closed of administration and find a possibility to garden in this garden.
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| We added small containers for strong plants like Bullrushes (Scirpoides holoschoenus), Yellow flag iris (Iris pseudocarus), Marsh cinquefoil (Comarum Palustre), Coontail (Ceratophylum demersum) and Lemna Trisulca. |
The first step towards restoring ecology is 'water', when there is no available water in the garden we will make a place for water. This is a recycled cement bucket that we could reuse as a pond. We can't dig a pond because the garden used to be a monastery cemetery in eighteenth century, and anywhere below the ground level we might find surprises. The pond stands on top the soil and to give access to small creatures we built a path alongside the bucket with stones leaves and soil. There isn't enough water for frogs, but one never knows what might arrive.
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| The pond looks a wilder than it is, but once the sand sinks to the bottom it will be a nice addition of water. |
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