Sophie
Standford
About

A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Work on paper
Sound

@hortus_silvam

In the Forest Garden Selected Works

(un)planted in progress
‘teaching the names of plants and ignoring their songs’

Gathering ‘weeds’ from the Forest Garden from the beginning, fascinated by their arrival and their tenacity. They became known to me as the ‘(un)planted’.

This project uses the 500 year old practice of gathering, pressing, drying and collecting plants between sheets of paper, known as a herbarium. Science uses the herbarium to systematise the plant world, to name, to classify, to take DNA, as a way of knowing all that needs to be known, ignoring a much broader, deeper understanding of plants as physical elements of the ecosystem.

Taking inspiration from the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, my herbarium is an act of acknowledging the self-seeded, the (un)planted plants found in the forest garden, deliberately not attempting to identify them, as a way of turning our attention to their ‘songs’.

© Sophie Standford, 2025
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