Celina Jeffery
On the morning of June 6th, 2023, I awoke to an intense orange glow peering through the window and the thin scent of smoke in my bedroom. I rushed to open the back door and experienced something I’d truly never witnessed before – an eerie peach-orange ‘glowing’ sky, the sun peering through the trees accompanied by an atmosphere so laden with smoke that it instantly took my breath away. The smell of smoke was unbearable, and for a split second I thought my house was on fire, as well as that of all my neighbours. Wildfire smoke from parts of Quebec and Ontario had, in fact, emanated and were to settle for two more days in Southern Ontario before moving south. For the second time in a single year – the first being the Spring 2023 derecho storm which ripped my garden apart including splitting a 75-year-old oak tree – the climate disaster was written large in my garden. Most days, it is of course the place I peer out to in joy every morning hoping to catch the morning birds, squirrels, marmots, rabbits, and chip monks that live there and where I spend endless hours tending, growing, but mainly observing – all in a sense of slow, micro time. Yet, in these disorienting moments, I felt nothing but existential anxiety and a sense of estrangement that my garden had become an unhomely space – permeable to the mercies of climate change.
Not long out of major surgery, my body felt heavy, unable to breathe, shut down. As an asthmatic, I was also so scared that the acrid air would disrupt my recovery that I travelled to my dad’s coastal home to escape the smog and spend the remainder of my recovery breathing the salty air, dipping my toes in the ocean, and helping him in his garden. When I arrived, his garden – usually characterized by a wet, heavy clay soil was parched and cracked – there had been no rain in six weeks – a record for Wales – which rains for an average of 300 days a year, and the salty breeze I had hope for had given way to a coastal wind which burned the skin. As if a second reminder was needed, the anonymity as well as the unpredictably of climate change, had gone – it’s here and every Spring will now be greeted with dread, its joyful prospect now characterized by the uncanny promise of an overheated atmosphere and all that is brings. The sense of my garden’s continuity – of the experience of seasons that are seasonal; or the up-ended oak that, like my smoke drenched pine trees, was planted before I was born by someone who is no longer here, has been disrupted. I can now read the once abstract planetary changes of climate ‘disaster’ in my subjective, suburban garden – a garden that will persist, it’s everyday beauty and subtle changes apparent, but with ever increasing heat and the threat of roaring Spring-time storms.
Starting in the Spring of 2023, Canada entered its worst series of wildfires on record – impacting the entire country and including areas that are not typically affected – like Southern Ontario. For a few days during the wildfires, this region experienced ‘code red’ – the ‘highest’ level of pollution on Environment Canada’s Air Quality Index, and as days passed, the smoke clouds famously descended and loomed large over the New York City – its burnt orange skyline attracting international consternation that ‘Canadian smoke’ was impacting the daily lives of New Yorkers. By October of 2023, with fires still burning in some regions, 5% of Canada’s forests had been set alight, and large-scale domestic evacuations had occurred throughout, with notable impact in the Northwest Territories, a region unknown for its excessive wildfires but whose government created a state of emergency and ordered a mass evacuation of residents. Few, except the major politicians, including the premier of Ontario, doubted that these wildfires were the result of a heady mix of climate change coupled with and an El Niño event. A recent publication of the Plant Hardiness Zone Map by the US Department of Agriculture, which is based on average temperatures over a thirty-year period, saw the zones jump on average by 2.5 degrees since 2012.[i] Over half of the USA moved to a warmer ‘zone’, something that is being echoed throughout the Americas and the rest of the world.
The consequences of the Anthropocene are, in every sense of the term, unhomely. It will continue to warm, melt, shred, drown, starve, suffocate, and dislocate the domestic in its wake, but its impact thus far has been uneven. Rob Nixon eloquently characterised climate change as ‘slow violence’ which impacts the world’s most vulnerable, unfurling over the course of decades to destroy the fabrics of mostly traditional and indigenous ways of life, with a pace that perhaps until recently, had been unseen, ignored, or unnoticed by the West.[ii] The trifecta of the Anthropocene’s promise: climate change; habitat and biodiversity loss; and global pandemics, have been met in uncanny fashion in the garden, this most intimate space in which ‘we’ – those fortunate to have access to green space – can grow, create, nurture, think, even entertain the idea of resisting its path. Paradoxical to some, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns gave time and opportunity to re-acquaint with their own or neighbouring gardens, public green spaces, parks, and allotments while giving rise to a kind of cultural re-awakening of the mutual benefits of cultivating or even being in proximity to plants. In addition, the rise in interest in growing native species, becoming knowledgeable about so called ‘invasive’ plants and renaming colonial nomenclature, resisting the use of toxic chemicals and the use of peat in compost, and making habitats for our more-than-human co-habitants – gardening in the Anthropocene is adapting. In other words, while the history of gardens has been led by wealthier populaces in colonial contexts, attracted to the ‘aesthetic’ principles of gardening and resulting in unsustainable gardens[iii], the recent ‘turn’ to climate adapted gardening may give rise to questions being echoed throughout the environmental humanities and all decolonising studies: can humanity re-entangle with plant and insect life in a lateral fashion and push against the ‘capitalocene’? Rebecca Solnitt, suggests that gardens might, ‘if war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.’[iv] Solnitt’s Orwell’s Roses is an intensely felt discussion of George Orwell’s ‘secret’ passion – gardening, first in Wallington, Hertfordshire in the mid 1930s and finally, in his last years on a remote Scottish island, which he filled (with roses) while writing Ninety Eighty Four (1949) and suffering from increasingly difficult respiratory health.[v] Far from frivolous, the rose to Orwell and other revolutionary thinkers, could mean ‘subjectivity, liberty, and self-determination’.[vi]
The garden as modern nature
The sense of creative freedom and joy that cultivating and closely observing plants and wildlife brings is central to this issue of Drain, and was inspired, in part, by the garden of Derek Jarman – a revolutionary in his own right.
Wednesday 8
The shingle heavy with dew sparkled in the dawn. A pale blue mist washes over the willows, the larks are up. Such a show of golden crocuses, a ladybird bathes in the pale blue borage – the pussy willow opens – later, in the cold of the day I walk back home across the shingle – a shimmering opalescent light. Vermeer dipped his brush in just such iridescent solitude.
(Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, 13)
Derek Jarman (1942-1994) – the English filmmaker, AIDS activist, and gardener, created his coastal garden at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent, UK towards the end of his life. Jarman famously noted that in this wind-swept coastal garden, ‘my garden’s boundaries are the horizon’[vii] – without a fence, the cottage, front, and back garden would mingle into the shingles and merge to the sea, bathed in the incessant changes of light and wind. Living in a tar-stained tiny black fisherman’s cottage centred in the middle of this boundaryless garden on Dungeness – a ten square mile stretch of shingled Kent coast,[viii] inhabited by a nuclear power plant and facing the high winds of the English Channel, Jarman wrote his daily observations of the garden, which were later published in the form of garden diaries. ‘Modern Nature’ (1991) comprises a series of beautifully composed daily observations, memories, and imaginings of the future of the garden without him. In 1986, he had been diagnosed with HIV and acquired the garden in part, as a means of getting out of London and reconnecting with gardening, himself, and the surety of his imminent demise. It was an era which had no means or inclination to treat a public health crisis and looming pandemic which had been labelled and demonized as an untreatable ‘queer’ disease.
Jarman fantasized about a garden of roses emerging from the harsh shingle and braving the fierce coastal sea winds, and he began his first and only garden by planting thirty roses. In actuality, the roses could barely survive the conditions of the coastal zone with its shingle-gravel base, high salt water, and wind, and instead, the garden gradually accrued native plants like sea kale, which Jarman interjected with jetsam and flotsam from the sea – driftwood, wooden flints, rusty metal, and even an old, abandoned wooden fishing boat which centred in the garden, amongst them. He succumbed to the most contemporary of ideas – allowing native plants to root, growing resilience in the strong sun, limited fresh water supply and salty (and at the time soil-less) nutrient environment, and for him – an artist-gardener to ‘design’ around it, using upturned driftwood, and stones designed in circles to create paths and punctuations. Beth Chatto’s famous drought tolerant garden in Essex, England, was purportedly inspired by the garden, while the Dungeness site itself is also of ‘Special Scientific Interest’, recognized for its exceptional biodiversity and as a site for migratory birds.[ix]
The diaries also consistently remark upon both the impermanence of life and the medicinal qualities and health benefits of gardens – something which has recently been acknowledged by the medical field itself. The National Health Service (NHS) now prescribes gardening for depression, anxiety, and loneliness.[x] As an activist and leading voice for the AIDS crises, Jarman knew he was ‘gardening on borrowed time,’[xi] yet to his contemporaries like Howard Sooley, who photographed him in his garden in 1990, – it was an intensely ‘optimistic’ gesture – planting for a future without yourself. Jarman’s garden is perhaps even more striking for being situated near a nuclear power plant, which looms large in the distance, appearing as a backdrop to many images of the garden, and had contaminated the site.[xii] The site of the garden inevitably brought the sense of impermanence to the fore – shingles would move every day, the shore could bring new treasures, the wind could tear through fragile young plants, with plants, flotsam, and the cottage alike being blasted by the sun, salt, rain and wind, everything would need to be resilient to withstand – even the toxicity of radioactive waste.
Gardening against the odds of time, health, and the extremity of the site were undoubtedly not lost on Jarman, he seemed happy as Sooley notes ‘Derek never appeared happier, more at ease and content than when he was gardening…. In a way it worked, and for a time he cheated death hiding amongst the flowers and dancing with the bees.’[xiii] Jarman’s embodied explorations of gardening as an essential component of health and well-being, of living in the now while planting for an unknown future, speaks of a quiet resistance, one which characterizes the contents of this issue. Olivia Laing describes Jarman’s gardening as a kind of ‘collaborative’ freedom[xiv] – he demonstrated gardening as creative cohabitation; unscripted, shared, erotic even. Far from planting a garden of ‘dainty’ flowers – sidelined, gendered, queer-bashed; Jarman’s garden was radical, revolutionary even, reminding us of the vital significance of flora and fauna to life and wellbeing of us all and especially in the time of pandemics, global heating, and extinction.
The language of gardening – time and possibility are present throughout this issue which concerns gardening as a creative act. In every contribution by artists, writers, and poets, there is a distinct permeability and rupture between art as gardening and gardening as art. All contents trace these as patterns of feeling: sometimes as reverie, others as creative immersion, while for some it is underscored by ethical trauma but also possibility. The physical characteristics of the garden are embedded in the arts, and the artist-gardener is embodied in the lead essay by Gabriel Sacco, who thinks through Jarman’s queer ecological legacies in his own creative gardening and photographic practice. Mehdi Sharafi’s essay on Anselm Kiefer engages with the artist garden as a kind of studio practice, bringing to bear a kind of porosity between art, gardening, and memory – both individual and collective which may be read through his artwork. Curiously, Jarman saw much of himself in the work of Kiefer, ‘Kiefer’s paintings, I see so much of myself there, the finer part. His Tulips made me blissfully happy. A sparkling grotto filled with treasure.’[xv]
The garden as a human endorsement is a central concept in this issue, one which is unpacked as: resistance in contributions by Ash Barbu, Zainab Hussain, and Anna Paluch; immersive process and inter-species dialogue by Carolyn Lambert, Sandra Gregson, Elizabeth L. Pence, and Anna Reckin; and even ambivalence as in Yu, Kim and Pitre’s white clover maze.
The garden in artistic terms, brings nature to the city, to create community connections and chance encounters as in Mikayla Journée’s essay. Here as in the work of the Collectives, and others, the garden as a site of marginalized memory also proliferates, requiring readers to recognize the colonial contexts of the garden in the wake of Indigenous liberty in which notions of trespass and privilege are ever present. The garden as a creative site of practice, explored through place, material connections and displacement are further explored by Deborah Margo, Desiree Valadares, Zainab Hussain, Saanya Chopra, and Sophie El Assaad (in Planting Roses in January). Throughout, gardens feature as witnesses to threads of creativity, ancestral knowledge or disruption, queer entanglements, and all threaded through the pressures of climate change and biodiversity loss.
This issue of Drain acts as a kind of assemblage of ideas associated with art as gardening and gardening as a creative act. Can we co-world, and rethink our entangled co-existence to the environment through the garden? This preposition underscores the concept of this issue, wherein the garden figures as a kind of disruption of ‘domestic’ nature, troubling the gap between deep time and present, and requiring of us the need to declassify what we fear – a future without ourselves. Here, we shift the metaphor of the garden as beauty to the garden as an uncanny space and ask: will humans co-make ‘modern nature’ to save it?
[i] Steve Lundeberg, ‘New Plant Hardiness Map’, PhysOrg, https://phys.org/news/2023-11-hardiness-gardeners-nationwide-unveiled.html. Date accessed, November 29th, 2023.
[ii] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.
[iii] Darryl Moore, Gardening in a Changing World: Plants, People and the Climate Crises, Croydon; Pimpernel Press Ltd. 2022. P 7.
[iv] Rebecca Solnitt, Orwell’s Roses, Random House, London; Penguin Books. P 5.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Solnitt, P 92.
[vii] Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, Random House, London; Penguin Vintage Classics, 2018.
[viii] Howard Sooley, ‘Gardening on Borrowed Time’, Derek Jarman: My Garden’s Boundaries are the Horizon, Garden Museum, London. 2020. P 36.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] https://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/pets/news/anxiety-depression-nhs-mental-health-gardening-a9090256.html
[xi] Ibid. 40.
[xii] Sooley described: ‘It is advised by the EDF not to eat the sea kale as they store radioactivity, the same is true of the field mushrooms that grow down in the gravel pit.’ Ibid. P 38.
[xiii] Ibid. P 45.
[xiv] Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. P 86.
[xv] Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, P 132.