Foraged: Kitchen Garden Herbaria highlights interdependent relationships across species.
During my artist residency at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, I found in the Center’s collection of botany books, herbals, and gardening manuals, evidence of the human desire to use, cure, correct, or control nature. In his Herbal (1633), John Gerard classifies “the nature of all plants from the highest Cedar to lowest Moss” based on their “use” for humans. Gerard catalogs the visual beauty of a plant’s form while also describing their “virtues” or medicinal properties. Like Gerard, William Lawson, in A New Orchard and Garden (1648), demonstrates the desire to control earthly matter when he asks, “What is Art more than a provident and skilful Correctrix of the faults of Nature?” For Lawson, garden design is the art of land management and a corrective of nature - a logic laid bare in another agricultural manual, The English Improver Improved, by Walter Blithe (1653), which details how to “cure” landscapes such as fens, moors, and forests for maximized agricultural production.
From the early modern period to this moment of profound climate changes, I understand the impulse for control. However, I believe a collective shift in how we perceive the ecosystems of which we are a part offers potentially sustainable paths forward.
