Tending beyond the garden
Gardener in residence, Nature Festival 2022
When pondering the practice of gardening, there can be discreet depth in the thinking and actions when it comes to the care and curation of plants in space through time.
The time spent observing and reading about the garden and the ecological processes, carefully considering and contemplating the individual plants and their neighbours. There is curiosity, ongoing research, and a hunger for learning. Processes are both participated in and applied in the garden. The lumination from bright sparks of ideas and how they can be enacted through planting and tending. Experience, understanding, and skills that build over time within a garden as you get to know the place better. The creative, intuitive, and spontaneous forces within the gardener play in the space together with opportunistic and planned actions - anticipating and responding with practical activities at points in time through the seasons and happenings. Nature is the ultimate collaborator.
With those approaches, ways of working and creative applications, this practice, or art of tending, always has possibilities and transferability beyond the garden and in more ways than metaphors. We at Super Bloom are curious to explore the possibilities of plants. What and where else may we tend?
Tend permeated the program for Nature Festival, South Australia last October as a theme. Tend was also an open invitation from curators to practitioners and the community to tend, to bring their attention to, to watch over, to put the effort in, to tend beyond the garden, to tend to loved ones, relationships and each other. It was an honour to join the Nature Festival as its inaugural gardener-in-residence.
Festivals, community organisations, and cultural institutions have cultivated exchanges with artists through the tending of Artists in residence. To be a gardener-in-residence is attuned to our understanding that gardening is an art form and valued experience to nurture the conversation, tend within the community and pilot works (more in Tender in the next edition of these plant musings)
A foundation of Nature Festival is the exciting and open exploration of the ground and intersections of environment, arts and culture. Works and contributions can be tested and trialled in fertile terrain with less bounded possibilities. There is such potential when gardeners and artists are at the table as valued contributors. The encompassing definition that nature is also not something removed from us, but that we are nature too.
Gardening is within the great realm and understanding of nature. Bringing a broad definition to gardening that gardening is the act of caring for and tending a plant, be it a single pot on a windowsill or an expansive backyard. The space of gardening is a point that is accessible and a spark point to cultivate a connection to nature. Gardening can be a key to nourishing relationships with nature and germinating further sustainable thinking, practices and action to care for the country in our community.
Amongst so much, the residency luminated the parallels between practice and practitioners in the art world, the importance of wonder and beauty for resilience in a changing world and how applying ideas and exploring creativity with nature and initiate action for a better world.
Nature Festival 1st to 15th October 2023
