Rough Trade Books x Garden Museum: From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure | By Susanna Grant & Rowan Spray
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure is gardener and writer Susanna Grant’s exploration of her thinking on history, value and meaning of nature in the city.
Examining the premise that naming species allows us to expand our understanding, our interest, our ways of looking at the world around us, and the idea of plant-blindness—our tendency not to see what we can’t name in the nature that surrounds us—she throws a spotlight on five of her favourite wildflowers with accompanying images by photographer Rowan Spray.
These stories are interspersed with reflections on Grant’s own countryside childhood and her work in London’s community gardens: why we can't walk where we want to, planting as an act of resistance and, above all, the necessity of weeds and their beauty.
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure | By Susanna Grant & Rowan Spray
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure is gardener and writer Susanna Grant’s exploration of her thinking on history, value and meaning of nature in the city.
Examining the premise that naming species allows us to expand our understanding, our interest, our ways of looking at the world around us, and the idea of plant-blindness—our tendency not to see what we can’t name in the nature that surrounds us—she throws a spotlight on five of her favourite wildflowers with accompanying images by photographer Rowan Spray.
These stories are interspersed with reflections on Grant’s own countryside childhood and her work in London’s community gardens: why we can't walk where we want to, planting as an act of resistance and, above all, the necessity of weeds and their beauty.
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure | By Susanna Grant & Rowan Spray
The idea of ‘the garden’ is a complicated, curious thing. They loom large in the imagination—a locus of desire, aspiration, colonisation, care, effort, property, land and ownership, loss and literature.
Rough Trade Books partnered with the Garden Museum to create a set of pamphlets examining all of these ideas and more, with a group of writers and gardeners generating new work inspired in some way by our notions of all things green and pleasant, or perhaps less so.
Has there ever been so much rich thought around the radical potential of gardening, with so much urgency surrounding how we maintain our little bits of earth, of the meaning that plants carry?
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure is gardener and writer Susanna Grant’s exploration of her thinking on history, value and meaning of nature in the city.
Examining the premise that naming species allows us to expand our understanding, our interest, our ways of looking at the world around us, and the idea of plant-blindness—our tendency not to see what we can’t name in the nature that surrounds us—she throws a spotlight on five of her favourite wildflowers with accompanying images by photographer Rowan Spray.
These stories are interspersed with reflections on Grant’s own countryside childhood and her work in London’s community gardens: why we can't walk where we want to, planting as an act of resistance and, above all, the necessity of weeds and their beauty.
