I’ve avoided writing about this for at least half a year now, mostly because the subject matter was so emotionally charged that I couldn’t find the guts to open it up. Writing about this back then would have been like rubbing salt on an open wound: there are certain topics where writing helps you put … Continue reading Nature Always Vanishes at Night
As the human world succumbs to the grip of autocracy, we are never short of examples from the natural world where nature itself successfully revolted against power. Today I bring you another story of a failed coup: the failed domestication of the hyacinth. The dominant logic of plant breeding has always been to maximize the most monetizable quality … Continue reading Genomic Autocracies: How Hyacinths Resisted Human Domestication
When I first started gardening, I made one of the most common beginner errors: mistakenly thinking that gardening was all about taking care of plants. It seemed like a perfectly logical assumption at the time, one which however would prove no less than catastrophic just a few months on, as I watched the plant death … Continue reading Conversations with the Afterlife: The Cursed Garden
Today I discovered that one of my Cyclamen coum plants in the upper woodland garden had produced offspring: tiny one-leaf seedlings fighting for space and light under the canopy of a 45 year-old evergreen Jasminum mesnyi that complements their intense fuchsia colour with its narcissus-yellow blooms. Both plants bloom in the middle of February, a most drab … Continue reading Patience
125 million years ago an exceptionally long, baking hot summer began to sweep through the Celestial Mountain in the Tien Shan alpine range spanning modern-day Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. The scorching conditions on the desiccated slopes of the mountain left little room for survival for the great majority of organisms, and the freezing … Continue reading Meditative Degrowth: Sometimes The Smartest Act of Defiance Is To Stay Still
The silence was horrifying as we walked amongst huge ancient rows of beech trees bathed in autumnal sunlight. Everything was so quiet that it felt almost unreal, like we had been dropped inside a postcard frozen in time and given permission to walk about for a bit before it all came back to life. The … Continue reading The Extinction Report: Journey To a Disappearing Ecosystem
The very first thing which happens to a garden when it becomes abandoned is the sudden death of the most greedy, hybridized and mispositioned exotic ornamental plants. Having been bred to only survive in industrial greenhouses under the control of precise environmental management systems, these specimens wither away within days or weeks. Their culling is … Continue reading Rewilded: Free-Range Humans in the Post-Anthropocene
George Tsakraklides 