Troubling the cornfields
🌽🌽🌽
I am currently in the process of going over my course notes ahead of my second RHS Principles of Plant Growth and Development exam. I found the first exam (back in June) a surprisingly stressful experience. It’s not that I don’t feel confident with the subject matter, but having not sat an exam for 18 years, the encounter caught me a little off-guard. My recall of information has definitely slowed, I stumble over what I want to say, and I’m quite easily distracted. The notion of things being ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in this setting also goes against so much of how things present themselves, what the experience of growing things is like, and my own approaches to making and teaching in adult life. There is obviously still a great deal of nuance in the practices of horticulture, but there’s also a written exam to pass.
An important aspect of developing horticultural understanding is the understanding of ‘species’. How plants grow, how they flower, how they reproduce, how they disperse themselves through seed or vegetation, how they die. What differentiates one species from another species? How do we categorise multiple species into one Genus? How does this relate to the plant Family? What are the power structures visible in these categories, definitions and delineations and even in choice of botanical names? Whilst not specifically about horticulture, I found this extract from Giorgio Agamben particularly interesting in seeing ‘species’ as a political tool:
The Latin term species, which means ‘appearance’, ‘aspect’, or ‘vision’, derives from a root signifying ‘to look, to see’. This root is also found in speculum (mirror), spectrum (image, ghost), perspicuus (transparent, clearly seen), speciosus (beautiful, giving itself to be seen), specimen (example, sign) and spectaculum (spectacle)...
…Specious first meant ‘beautiful’ and only later came to mean ‘untrue apparent’. Species was first defined as that which makes visible and only later became the principle of classification and equivalence. ‘To be special [far specie]’ can mean ‘to surprise and astonish’ by not fitting into established rules, but the notion that individuals constitute a species and belong together in a homogenous class tends to be reassuring…
…Everywhere the special must be reduced to the personal and the personal to the substantial. The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus.’1
As the days get shorter, cooler, crisper and nearer, I wanted to share some of these meadow studies from the spectre of summer. Quick, scrappy oil pastels to try and capture the interspecies mingling and tumbling of thickly sown plants. And a little animation test using gelli printing that might be something to explore further…
Thanks for reading!
Agamben, Giorgio, (2015) Profanations. New York: Zone Books