forest garden
forest garden
A mysterious expectancy emerges from the ephemeral, rhythmic repetition of cycles and seasons, where time confuses and dissipates. Light tells a different story and unsettling atmospheres emerge at dawn, at the gloaming hour, by the glare of the midday sun, the spectral moon, and intrusive street light beyond. Shadows are exaggerated, trees become ghostly. Blossoms glow. An eldritch screech, a rustling in the hedge, a cacophonous Spring chorus at dawn.
The forest garden is a secret, personal, contained space to observe and listen, walk freely and dance, to research and imagine. The process of research is ongoing and secreted into archives, catalogues, lists, chronicles, descriptions, stories, laments, fantasies. Works emerge as performative acts, field recordings and moving image that deploys a non-linear, fragmented, poetic narrative, with elements of the surreal and the hallucinogenic, when aspects of the research start to speak to each other.
Over the last few years, the garden has re-emerged into the pubic discourse. Climate change and a growing understanding of the state of the planet in our Anthropocene world contributes to the contribution gardens can play as part of a biodiverse ecology.
The aim was to go on a journey of discovery, converting the grass of a small Suffolk garden into a rich wealth of species for edges, hedges, shrubs and tree crops, climbers and perennials and incorporating plants inherited from family members no longer alive.
The forest garden has become a riot of plants and trees designed to generate a food system creating an extraordinary space with height, colour, scent and wildlife.
The driving force behind creating a forest garden was to promote biodiversity in the face of a climate crisis compounded by the intensive, industrially farmed monocrops that dominate the surrounding Suffolk landscape.
The forest garden represents a personal, ongoing campaign to improve this landscape and bring biodiversity back to Suffolk.
The forest garden is a place where time passes with a certain slowness, in contrast with global consumer and commercial culture. This distance from the world facilitates an adventure in which process demands special attention, the necessary awareness of our relationship with nature, and more broadly within the Suffolk landscape.