[LUCAS]:

A few years ago, my gardening buddy Lisa Kelly did a project called The Lively Plane. It was all about Plane Trees, also known as London Plane Trees. These are the deciduous fellows you see planted around the streets of inner Sydney, they grow big and tall, they are very resilient to soil compaction, they filter summer light and let in the winter light, they drop huge quantities of seedpods which get up everyone’s allergic noses, they’re loved and hated.

Lisa collected a large quantity of fallen Plane seeds, and lovingly hand-germinated them. The germination rate wasn’t high, but enough survived for her to raise a small army of potted trees.

[Lisa watering her Plane Trees, on the balcony of her studio above First Draft Gallery, early 2009]

These were exhibited as part of the exhibition There Goes the Neighbourhood at Performance Space, and many of the potted saplings were distributed to friends and interested visitors after the show finished. (Here’s a page on Lisa’s blog about the project…)

[Lisa Kelly installation view at Performance Space, 2009]

On a recent visit to Lisa’s yard, she showed me that one of her planes has now naughtily “transcended” its pot, put roots in the soil and shot 9 feet in the air. This could potentially become a problem… But I digress…

The main point of this story is coming! So, the other thing that Lisa brought along to her project was a fascination with these particular steel “tree guards” which she had noticed down at The Block in Redfern. They were kind of modernist in design, but hand-made, not standard council issue. They were designed, it seemed, to stop trees being chopped or run over. Lisa studied them, measured them, and drew up plans for a re-fabrication of them by a local ironmonger. The re-issued tree-guards joined the budding plane trees in the exhibition:

But, like the few plane trees which didn’t find new homes, the steel tree guards ended up in Lisa’s backyard, where they’ve been cheerfully rusting ever since.

Lisa and I decided they could probably find a new life with us at TENDING, (aka refugee reception centre for botanical art projects). So a few weeks back, we schlepped them over with a ute. Lisa, in her mindful, unhurried way, spent the day with us, pottering about, keeping the tree guards in the corner of her eye they whole time, waiting for the moment when their true potential would be revealed. And then, towards the end of the afternoon, she knew what to do:

Three tree guards, three existing tall palm trees. Bingo.

So we set about reconstructing the guards around the palms:

The tree guards come in two pieces and slot together.

The second half slots into place.

Quite pleased with this odd but fitting combination…

Photographer’s shadow, palm tree’s trunk, tree guard’s legs, artist’s legs…

The framed obelisk…

When we had finished installing the third tree guard, we were inspecting and admiring our handywork. I guess we had never really paid much attention to these sorry looking palm trees before – especially since they seemed a bit sickly – their foliage had dropped off a few months ago during a storm, so they were just these strange misplaced wooden columns. But perhaps it was the fact that the tree guards framed the columns so nicely that made us look more closely.

And what we found was this: initials and dates, deeply inscribed on the trees.

REALLY OLD dates:

W.L. 11.10.44

1.4.56

W.L. 19-8-44

DW 1.12.44

WL 23-7-47

Who were W.L. and D.W.?

…and what was going on for them in these decades, during and after the war?

Some visitors to the garden have mentioned that the SCA Library, which is right next to us, was the former housing quarters for some of the most intractable inpatients of the mental hospital (which is what the art college used to be.

What did W.L and D.W. think about? And what did they do, as they roamed the grounds?

– – –
(Lisa has posted some of these images to her own blog too…)

[LUCAS]:

These are the days gardens were made for! Glorious sunshine following more rain than Sydney has seen for years.

We were joined this morning by Lisa, who rode with us to Tending, carrying in her bike basket two small trees: a mulberry and a cherry guava. Both these elegant woody creatures had emerged unsolicited from Lisa’s compost bin. Lisa’s backyard is rather small – but she has a thing for creche-ing young trees, so she decided to bring them along to join the gang at Tending.

Although our future tenancy at Sydney College of the Arts is by no means guaranteed, I love it when people bring along plants that will take a LONG time to bear fruit, or to grow to their full potential. There’s something joyfully and recklessly optimistic about it.

* * *

When we arrived, we were greeted by Corinne, who was already hard at work digging a hole. We first met Corinne a few weeks back and had a good chat about theory and philosophy of “connected-ness to land”. This week she was more into the practice of it, getting stuck in with her gorgeous hi-tech spade (you can see it on the right in the photo above). Corinne’s not sure yet what she will plant in her modest plot. She mentioned something about bringing along some cow poo… and she donated to us two bottles of very rich looking worm juice – lovely stuff…

* * *

Whenever we arrive at TENDING, we noodle around for a while, seeing what might have changed since last week. We call this “greeting the garden”. This week we were keen to see whether our “pumpkin cages” had worked to thwart the nibbling rats which have recently been visiting. (Our few small and juicy looking watermelons, some of the cucumbers and pumpkins have been nabbed by our rodent pals before we could enjoy them.) So, using chicken wire, we crafted these (not very attractive) suits of armour for the pumpkins which remain:

…so far so good… And the hanging pumpkins seem to be out of harm’s way, for now…

Speaking of animal-vegetable interactions… there were a lot of insects in the garden this week. Wasps buzzing around the banana trees; dozens of ladybugs on the pumpkins, and unidentified crawlers like this one:

Evidently somebody else had seen the wasps, and worried about them – a shrill note was scrawled on our blackboard: “WASPS IN THE BANANAS”. Diego (our resident, self-appointed wasp expert) declared the wasps to not be a problem (yet). He responded: “GREAT! BIODIVERSITY”. (I imagine he’d revise his benevolent wasp-stance if he got stung by one of them, but there’s no use speculating on future unknowns…)

* * *

It took a while before we got around to planting Lisa’s small trees. I think she was keen to inhabit the garden for a while, sussing out what might be a good spot – after all, if everything goes according to plan, these guys will stay where they are for decades! She decided to nestle the cherry guava inside Betty’s Jungle. We found a space for it, where it will hopefully be nurtured by the surrounding plants, and eventually grow up to shelter them:

It blended in pretty well…

The mulberry, on the other hand, we decided to plump right in the middle of the lawn – not far from Gilbert’s lemongrass patch. So we cut a nice circle…

…scalped the lawn…

…discovered remnant sandstone pieces not far down (and had a chat about whether the roots of the mulberry would be able to work their way through)…

…dug in some compost and planted the tree…

Relaxing after this feat, lying on my back watching the clouds, I had a small moment of marvel, at how an organism can manage to synthesise elements from the air and the soil to produce something as wonderful as wood!

* * *

We had heaps of other visits this week, from students popping in to check whether it’d be ok for them to start their biological artworks in TENDING.

For the record, we say “Yes!” to just about everything, and we don’t even have to be there when you set it up. Just leave us a note on the blackboard. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Tending, alongside a bunch of other events at Sydney College of the Arts, is going to be featured in this year’s Art Month Sydney.

We’re curious: who will we encounter on Wednesday night?

Here are all the details
(NB: don’t pay any attention to the Art Month map of how to get to SCA, it’s wrong. Follow these instructions instead.)

And here’s a lovely flyer which Nerida the Public Relations and Marketing Manager made for us (pdf).

We like this spiel about the project which Nerida used for the flyer – simple and clear:

An experimental garden project at Sydney College of the Arts. Since July 2010, artists (and keen amateur gardeners) Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto have been tending the garden. Over time, others have become involved in the project which intervenes lightly in the social and biological fabric of the college.

[LUCAS]:

[Betty harvesting some banana leaf]

Yes, it’s certainly fun to have the students back at uni. Although it’s true we’ve enjoyed the quiet of the summer, pottering around on our own with a few trusty gardening buddies, the return of the youthful artists of the college also means the return of a Tending VIP: Betty, our mentor, champion and great providor of cuttings and propagations!

Betty is fresh back from a trip to Laos where she reports having eaten riverweed (“a bit like seaweed but less salty”) and many other herbaceous weeds, and marvelled at the local folks’ ability to cultivate anything, anywhere – “so opportunistic“, she said. (These folks, who have a permaculture garden near Wollongong, seem to have had a similar adventure to Betty this summer. Check out their photo of the “dry season riverbank vegie garden”)…

Anyway, having returned to Rozelle, Betty was keen to rummage around and see what had been growing in her absence. She was very impressed with the rapid expansion of the bananas (and took a few “pups” home for her own garden, as well as harvesting a stack of banana leaves for use as “disposable dinner plates”).

Betty also pointed out that our sweet potatoes seem to be thriving, and why don’t we try to dig some up?

And so we did.

Here’s Diego bandicooting around for some spuds.

And LO ! Our first sweet potato of the season emerged, proudly white on the outside (purple on the inside):

And before long, another one, this time purple on the outside, white on the inside:

Betty decided this was a good sign: the time was right for us to get serious about sweet potato farming. And so this is what she told us to do (we duly followed her instructions):

-make a long thin pile of soil, about 50cm wide, and about 40cm high, with a peaked middle:

-Take cuttings from your sweet potato plants (the leafy bits not the spuds) and tie them in a circle:

-semi-bury these in the elongated soil mound. Repeat all the way along:

Et donc, voila!

That, folks, was the easiest bit of gardening we’d ever done!

The secret here, according to Betty, is to give the sweet potatoes their own bed, so that when you dig around to harvest them you’re not disturbing all their neighbours. She also said the green leaves of the sweet potatoes are good cooked, alongside amaranth (which we also have a lot of).

POSTSCRIPT 1:

Later on, we were having an energetic chat with Carolyn and her friend Corinne. Corinne has just begun her PhD at Sydney College – her research is about people’s relationships to land – so of course we had a lot to talk about. While we were talking, this student emerged from the ceramic workshop, which backs onto the Tending garden. She walked around with her nose to the ground, as if trying to find something she had lost. We paused our conversation, and looked on, curious. Eventually she came upon the table in the middle of the garden where we’d left the just-harvested sweet potatoes. She picked up the smaller, purple one. Holding it up, she called to us, tentatively: “May I take this tuber?”

It turns out that she had forgotten her homework assignment – to bring a small object to make a ceramic slipcast – and that our potato was going to save her educational butt.

We gave her our blessing – with the return request, of course, for some of the clay-potato-replicas, if and when they emerge from the kiln.

Permanent 1:1 scale spud sculptures! Can’t wait to see ’em.

POSTSCRIPT 2:

Diego took home the other sweet potato. I look forward to hearing how it tasted.

[LUCAS]:

It’s now mid-February. We began this garden back in the middle of last year. Our contract – to gently guide the growth of this wonderful place, and to publically notice it, on this here blog – will run out in June.

With the new year, we began to try and turn our attention away from the soil and the beds, away from the very much here-and-now, away from the changing weather of the changing days. We’re now thinking of the future.

Now that there is ‘something’ established here, concrete, tangible, leafy – now that the space has been well and truly ‘occupied’ by our kindly colonialism, it’s time to think about how to make it last a bit longer. Will it all go to seed? To weed? Should we disassemble everything, smooth over the dirt and let the grass grow back? Or can it survive us? When we’re no longer coming along every week, who will tend to Tending?

So we’ve been chatting with Carolyn, who works with Ross (our ‘benevolent overlord’). Carolyn has offered to help out. Together, in the coming weeks, we’ll be talking with the artists, lecturers, workers and students who form the community here at Sydney College of the Arts, looking to come up with ways to make Tending their own. To make sure it continues to evolve. And to do ourselves out of a job!

[Before we began the planting – August 4th, 2010]

[Lush growth ensues – January 20th, 2011]