Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

--Mary Oliver

Sculptor Hugh Hayden

on the significance of using of trees from his home state of Texas in his work

Exhibition: "Among the Trees," Hayward Gallery, London, 2020.

How artist team Ackryod & Harvey grow their photographs

FRSEM63W Vegetal Humanities

Spring Tea Poem
To you I would serve cedar tea
mixed with a touch of April
distilled from shy green stems,
the frosted perfume of spring
rain along with a dollop
of honey and ice
—Keewaydinoquay Peschel

Literature

Richard Powers, The Overstory : A Novel

"From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe."

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

"As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert)."

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays

"What you don't know until you carry a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane, is that carrying a tomato seedling through the airport and onto a plane will make people smile at you almost like you're carrying a baby. A quiet baby. I did not know this until today. . ."

"Hypotheses: The drive to survive is a biological universal. Intelligent behaviour is usually recognized when individual organisms including plants, in the face of fiercely competitive or adverse, real-world circumstances, change their behaviour to improve their probability of survival."

--Paco Calvo, Monica Gagliano, Gustavo M Souza, Anthony Trewavas, "Plants are intelligent, here’s how," Annals of Botany, 125: 1, 2 January 2020.

Scientists

"An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society."

--Ferris Jabr, "The Social Life of Forests," NYT Magazine 2020