[DIEGO]

We started the morning at Michele yesterday, helping out with a pile of soil which we spread around her garden.
Michele is the lovely lady who famously donated the banana pups for Tending.
Michele is also the producer of the Permaculture Diary and her garden is one of the most awarded and respected backyard in Sydney.

As we were chatting and shoveling we admired the enormous bananas that she just pulled down from the tree, and learned about a number of plants we never heard before.
Thinking back what to write about the experience two words kept coming back, embodiment of knowledge.
At some point, somewhere, I remember talking with someone about the aspect of embodied knowledge, I think was something about the french philosopher Michael Serres.
The fact that Michele knows so much about plants, growing, permaculture, food security and sustainable systems, is only part of the story. There is so much more knowledge that could be gathered from her only by looking at the way she spread the soil on a garden bed, the way she pull out a plant that finished its cycle, the way her body moves amongst the chickens.
Knowledge does not comes in written words alone, far from it.

As we then moved onto Tending, we welcomed Aanya again, who with little Rufus, is one of the great gardeners on the site.
We set-up a new patch, and sown beans, broccoli and garlic.
Again, her hands knew the dirt.
it is a pleasure to be reminded of how simple movements signify so much history and cultural relationships.

We were talking about the symbiotic relationship between human and weeds to keep it on the subject. The way some botanical species have adapted to us to the level of being an osmotic extension: weeds ooze out of our cultural and societal architectures.

Interestingly Bryden is keen on weeds too, and embodied knowledge.. OK this is a bit of a long shot of mine, regardless, here’s Bryden talking about his project, which comprise of a set of willows which he collected from the mountains, and which will be ‘wired-up’ with a solar-powered sound system, and here is me talking about bonsai possibilities with such plants

🙂
Tending on..