ACHTUNG! Heracleum mantegazzanium

[oucho]

I would like to make a small zine about 'wild' plants in urban or other human landscapes. They shouldn't be managed by humans and don't have to be pretty or full of rare plants, it can be one plants or a community, it could be about insects or animals too. I got the idea from Gilles Clement who is a French landscape architect who carried out a biodiversity survey of agricultural land and man-managed forest in France in 2003. He found that both were low in biodiversity but he also found that embankments, road ditches and other areas difficult for humans to access and manage were really high in biodiversity and he called this the third landscape. He's also known for growing giant hogweed in his garden which has phytotoxic sap and is a notifiable weed in Britain, the photograph above is of a giant hogweed in the botanical garden in Berlin.

Gilles Clement also designed a park in Lille which has a giant concrete retaining wall island which is accessed once a year by a horticulturalist who measures the biodiversty and other than that is left alone:


I think this will be good because:
-you have to go outside and walk to participate
-most of us probably don't have access to gardening space but observing is also a form of gardening, my experience of looking at sites near me is the closer you look the more interesting they become
-we can all be creative together

It doesn't have to be an obviously 'positive' narrative about plants: it could be an abandoned lawn full of dock weeds or buddleia destroying a building.

Obviously photography is welcome but it would be nice to have some other things too, maybe you could knit bomb a wild shrub or tattoo a dandelion on your mum. You could count how many people sneeze walking past a site and compare it to how many people sneeze walking past a front garden during a peak pollen day.

[bels]

Good luck getting people to do something other than take photos.

[oucho]

well photos are good but I promise to make a non-photographic thing for your zine if you do one for mine