Winogradsky Days: columns progress

In May last year a few of us got together to explore making Winogradsky Columns in a workshop orgainsed by the Bioart Society here in Helsinki. Our mud and water source was the south east shore of Töölölahti, the Baltic bay that scoops out a large mass of central Helsinki. I made two columns which, unsurprisingly have looked pretty dormant for the most part, their microbial consortia taking their own bacterial time to sort themselves into their metabolic, spatial arrangements inside the containers and to respond to the window environment of my home. Today in the spring sunshine I couldn’t help but notice their verdant vibrancy and almost audible intensity, as if they were in synpathy with the palpable surge of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ beneath the ice and snow.

'that pine tree came to be my best friend' and other plant readings

' . . . they stuck carefully to the narrow paths that wandered through the carpet of moss from one granite outcropping to another and down to the sand beach. Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don't know - and it cannot be repeared too often - is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn't rise back up. And the third time you step on moss it dies. Elder ducks are the same way - the third time you fighten them up from their nexts, they never come back. Sometime in July the moss would adorn itself with a kind of long, light grass. Tiny clusters of flowers would open at exactly the same height above the ground and sway together in the wind, like inland meadows, and the while island would be covered with a veil dipped in heat, hardly visible and gone in a week. Nothing could give a stronger impression of untouched wilderness.'

Tove Jannson, The Summer Book

Natasha Myers A Krya For Cultivating your Inner Plant.

'The 120-meter tall pine tree in the courtyard of the Casa Reisser y Curioni, which dominates all the horizons of this intense city that is defending itself against the aggression of ugly concrete--not of the good concrete—that pine tree came to be my best friend.'

Read further

José María Arguedas, The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, trans. Frances Horning Barraclough (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000) 184-5