[BY DIEGO]
Here we are, the blog journey starts here, the garden will follow promptly.
Me n Lucas are just back from the site, a secluded courtyard within Sydney College of the Arts.
This was my first visit to the site, as i get roped into this gardening experiment, while Lucas have been following and fostering the whole project since past December.
But anyway, read the about page to find out what this ‘hello world’ is all… about. My purpose here is only to start it off, with a header image, and a general heads up.
We will be gardening in the courtyard behind the library, we will be producing herbs and veggies, compost scraps and build garden beds, let the weeds go wild and mow them back to submission, collaborate with students/lecturers/caterers/gardeners and blog about it.
Is definitely gonna be a whole lot of green-thumbed fun, with the benefits of some kooky outcomes, foreseeable results and unexpected turns..brilliant!
So, the result of today’s visit was a plan, which will be kept quiet until we confirm with all parties involved
also, to be noted, today start the first new moon of winter, and is always good to start things with the moon, especially if you want them to grow..
It’s wonderful to see this project starting, Lucas.
For folks looking in for the first time — the ‘Tending’ project is the beginning of a potential ‘research focus’ for staff and students at Sydney College of the Arts.
In my role as a research-focussed professor at the College, I’ve been negotiating to have the gardens-theme materialise at our Callan Park location. Lucas and I have been working behind the scenes for a while, seeding the alliances and finessing the themes and guiding princiiples of the project.
Lucas has come up with the title: ‘TENDING’. I like this title A LOT. For me, gardens are wonderful versions of complex/dynamic systems: they have ‘organising tendencies’ in them, but they are willful and lively and potentially wild too; they exist on a blurry line between nature and culture and they require cooperation … between people, betwen institutions, between work and play, between rules and unruliness, between plans and freedom. They are like comprehensible and l=pleasurable versions of the messy contemporary world — interactive, delicate, hard work, generative, social, beautiful, requiring constant care and cooperation.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how this project tends, who tends it, and what it needs for all its growing and continuing assertions and tendencies.
I will keep dropping comments into the blog — like little seeds of thought — to give a context for the project. Please — join in in whatever way you like . Verbally. Pictorially. Physically, by coming along and adding your input to the plot itself.
So the blog will grow too — like some kind of garden
Stay tuned.
Best wishes,
Ross Gibson.
Hi Diego, Lucas and Ross, and the Tending collective. Had a great introduction today and looking forward to a green fingered future in the courtyard.