Sophie Standford
About
A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
On paper
In sound

@hortus_silvam

In the Forest Garden Selected Works

(un)planted in progress
Herbarium
plant specimens
Location: Forest Garden, Suffolk‘teaching the names of plants and ignoring their songs’

Gathering ‘weeds’ from the Forest Garden, documenting their arrival and their tenacity; the ‘(un)planted’.

Utilising the 500 year old practice of the herbarium gathering, pressing, drying and collecting plants between sheets of paper. 

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. 

In contrast, (un)planted takes inspiration from the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, acknowledging the self-seeded, avoiding identification in favour of listening to their ‘songs’.

© Sophie Standford, 2025
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