Bára Lungová
What you are going to explore is a result of a collaboration of visual artists and social anthropologists who agreed on the idea of mapping by the means adequate for their disciplines the phenomenon of spontaneous gardening in Brno. Our aim was to create an emotional map of non-traditional gardens which would offer its users insights into the motivations for gardening in open public spaces, into different forms this gardening may take, and into ways in which certain types of spaces and plants inhabiting them can be viewed from an unconventional perspective. The chief aim of the project is also the emphasis on the validity of small-scale, bottom-up interventions in public space which remind us of its origin as a common that should be possible to be shaped and to be accessed by everyone.
The resulting product is an audioguide available for the public at www.socialmaps.app with a map of the route encompassing twelve stops with a short textual description and longer audio track accompanying each stop. The exposition that you are going to explore here is an elaboration of the walk which contains longer texts and a richer photographic documentation of the sites. The structure of the map on the second page of this exposition approximates but does not copy faithfully the actual route on socialmaps.app - it is designed in a manner which should navigate the reader on the virtual sheet. For the exposition here, we have chosen several of the total of twelve tracks.
The idea of collaboration of visual artists and social anthropolOgists (one of whom also hold an MFA) stemmed from the desire to interpret certain types of urban places which have been appropriated and transformed via unconventional gardening practice with both the language of contemporary art and from the point of view of motivations for creating “non-artistic” forms of gardening by people who see this practice as a part of their everyday life.
As for the term “spontaneous” gardening that we prefer to use instead of “guerilla gardening,” the former term does not connote the air of political radicalism that is sometimes invoked with the latter, especially in popularizing literature (Richard Reynolds, n.d., Dream Green, n.d.). Not that there is anything bad with radicalism in appropriating urban public space, but the practices of non-artistic gardeners we describe or the artistic practices we employ ourselves in this project do not accomplish such intensity so as to be understood as radical. We use the word “spontaneous” in the sense that is it used in a different, older US project named “Spontaneus Interventions” which is a database of local grass-roots initiatives that popped up in different cities; “spontaneous” is here used in the sense of bottom-up, (sometimes) officially unsantioned collective or community endeavors which take back and improve public space to make it more inclusive (Spontaneous Interventions, n.d.).
These acts of spontaneous interventions can be perceived as everyday acts of enchanting the world. Jane Bennet claims that contrary to the claims of modernity being disenchanted, there are many aspects of our dwelling in this world which enable appreciating the secular aspects of its enchantment. She believes that seeing and appreciating enchantment needs not be only reserved for privileged people as it can be found in areas which can be available by everyone. She also stresses the element of play and ethics that can stem from seeing certain phenomena as “enchanted” (Bennet, 2001). Although Bennet deals in her account with phenomena which could be characterized as the “modern sublime” and which are complex, we could argue that activity such as gardening have the potential to “magically” transform a simple place into a complex assemblage of significations, emotions, sensations, and living entities where there previously had been only few or none. This is especially true for places in the urban texture that have been left over, that are unaccounted for in the big masterplans, that are the “reverse side” and the “blind spots” of urbanism (Haluzík, 2020). Sometimes they are called “terrain vague” (Haluzík), “thirdspaces,” (Soja 1996, Clément, 2015), or “junk space” (Koolhaas, 2002). Spontaneous gardening can take place in vacant lots and wastelands; frequently, however, it exists as a practice of wedging the beds or even just the individual plants into places which have some technical function in the urban structure (such as green stripes between road and pavement or the patch of lawn in front of a block of flats)l - even if it is designated as “greenery”. Wastelands, vacant lots, or “interstitial spaces,” they typically provide the domains which spontaneous gardeners typically venture to occupy.
The places that we have interacted with as artists or that the participants and informants of the ethnographic research cultivate in Partisans with a Hoe can be typified as such liminal spaces: they are “interstitial spaces: ” stripes of greenery, parts of traffic infrastructure (railway bodies), there is a car park, several vacant lots or stripes of greenery around a building. Some of these spontaneous gardens are even more precarious: one garden is portable, existing in several hundred flower pots which can be removed, others exist in formerly neglected planters in public spaces with high density of passers by, while another one is located in a hollow tree stump in an orderly municipal park.
In countries such as the USA, grassroots activities reclaiming public space for gardening has been practiced for over five decades as a result of a broader civil rights movement (Lachmund, 2019) and unlike the earlier, “patriotic” gardening promoted by the authorities during war time, the guerilla gardening movement has often been connected to issues of food sovereignty and reclaiming of the commons. (Garden Futures, 20xx)
In Europe, where the originally reformist and liberatory tradition of allotment gardening bound with the working class has been alive since the last third of the 19th century (zdroj - Jehlička/Danšk, Gibas), the popularity of guerilla gardening as a form of initially unauthorized reclaiming unused spaces and building communities via community gardens is a phenomenon that can be only traced back to the 2000s. (Lachmund, 2019). In post-socialist regions of Europe, the community and guerilla gardening can be put into the wider context of grassroot urban activism, which has gained significance during the last quarter of century (Jakobssen, 2015).
At the same time, there are still remnants of a common memory of having a more active relationship to certain aspects and some parts of public space in some post-socialist countries, if only in highly scripted and restricted uses, devoid of any political expression.
For instance, citizens were encouraged to take part in building public amenities, such as “houses of culture, ” or in taking care of public spaces in the 1950s - 1980s. In Czechoslovakia in particular, so-called “actions Z” were organized regularly for “volunteers” in which all citizens had to participate. Typically, these events would involve collective clean-ups of streets or the green spaces in housing estates (zdroj). On limited scale, people were encouraged to actively form their immediate living environment, given that their actions would not override the intentional and planned uses of public space and public amenities. Tending to one’s front garden on municipal land was encouraged and was common practice, just as was ornamental gardening in housing estates, typically practiced in the immediate surrounding of each housing unit. The author of this text remembers beautiful front gardens both in neighbourhoods with single family houses and in housing estates of different Czech and Slovak cities and towns in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of them are still surviving and are a testimony to a different paradigm of understanding public space both as remnants from the previous era and in some cases, as examples of a newly awakened interest in actively reshaping the living surroundings in the sense of grassroots, informal placemaking. Encroachment of public space by private capital and increased mode of policing and surveillance have been present in theoretical reflections since the 1990s, most notably with marxist social geographer David Harvey (The COndition of Postmodernity, Rebel Cities, etc). Jakobsson (2015) summarizes these trends for European post-socialist countries. Artists were reflecting these tensions since 1970s (particularly in the USA and Western Europe), but a wider trend can be documented in the 1980s and 1990s (as documented in Thompson’s and Sholette’s Interventionists, 2004). After the turn of the millennium, this mode of questioning, appropriating, and transforming public space has become even more wide-spread, both as a language of art (often within the so-called participation turn) and as a tactic of grassroots activism.
(Artistic reflection of tensions between private property development, the ideals of the commons, the right to access to green space and to the notions of “fruitful” utilization of space were explored from the 1970s on in important artworks such as Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (Alan Sonfist, n.d.), Agnes Denes’s Wheat Field (Agnes Denes, n.d.) or The Crossroads Community (The Farm) in San Francisco initiated by Bonnie Ora Sherk (A Living Library, n.d.).
Since 1980s , grassroots urbanism and interventionist art has led to a variety of formats of reappropriating semi-privatized public space, gardening projects being among these formats. The gardening projects sometimes solidify into a long-lasting enterprise, even as they were often designed as temporary or provisional (Hou 2010, Fitz et al., 2019; Spontaneous Interventions, n.d., Arte Útil, n.d.).
While artistic projects typically require at least some small funding and a basic legislative apparatus (such as a lease agreement, etc.), some projects which are inspiring and fun at the same time are being carried out in the gray zone. San Francisco-based Rebar collective active since the 2000s echoes in some of their practices Bonnie Ora Sherk and Gordon Matta Clark (díla): they leased spaces in parking lots on a short-term basis and remade them into mini-gardens, providing benches, small libraries, and other equipment (Merker, 2010).) Drawing on De Certeau’s notion of tactics and Bourdieu’s notions of doxa and habitus, Blaine Merker expands the notion of tactics and characterizes insurgent, grass-roots subversive initiatives disrupting the strictly assigned meaning and use to public spaces as tactical urbanism: (The artistic group) “Rebar understands tactical urbanism as the use of modest or temporary revisions to urban space to seed structural environmental change (Merker, 2010, xx).
Another urban interventions group, The Guerilla Grafters initiative (Guerilla Grafters, n.d.) revolves again around the issues of commoning the urban landscape by making its greenery edible. Guerilla grafters select ornamental trees in public space and graft onto them edible fruit varieties. Their activities are framed by the context of urban landscaping which understands greenery as an element of aesthetic and ecosystem services within the urban texture, but does not take into account the “agricultural” potential of urban spaces. Chandra Russo sees the contribution of initiatives such as the Guerilla Grafters perhaps not so much in the practical result of residents profiting in bulk from large amounts of fruit that is suddenly available in the streets and public parks, but in the visibility and demonstration of the capacity to imagine future otherwise, which is mediated most significantly by the publicity of the project itself (“the project’s success in capturing imaginations and prefiguring compelling alternatives to current eco-social arrangements depended on the ability to evoke culturally resonant fantasies” (Russo, 2021.).
Apart from being inspired by the interventionist artistic approach which skews the dominant uses of public space towards more playful, democratic, and accessible uses, our artistic team pays a good deal of attention to plant lives themselves. We understand our work in the context of the posthumanist turn and specifically of the “botanical emergence in art” (Aloi, 2019) where artists research the political, aesthetic, and environmental histories of different plant groups as autonomous agents in dynamic entanglements with human communities. This “vegetal turn” is manifested in art, philosophy (Marder 2013) literature, journalism, and popularized science), (Mancuso 2015; Simmard 2021; Cardina 2021; Pollan 1991), social geography (Gandy 2022a; 2022b), social anthropology (Tsing, Mushroom) and areas in between where these disciplines meet (Tsing-, Living on a Damaged Planet, Feral Atlas, Latour and Weibel - Critical Zones).
Our artistic interventions do not only reinterpret gardening practices or forms (as in the case of “ironic gardening” of Barbora Lungová or Nela Maruškevičová!s intentional sowing of “weeds” from vacant lots into specially crafted planters located in the context of historical buildings. The interventions also focus on the plants and their lives themselves, as in the song remake dedicated to guerilla-style planted rosemary on a historical bridge in Prague, or in the case of vacant lot behind an old factory where plants have taken up a ruin and have created a “garden” enclosed by the walls of the surrounding buildings.
The other part of Partisans With a Hoe documents in visual and narrative form achievements of everyday, non-artistic gardeners, some of which tend to their places fleetingly while others have meticulously cultivated their gardens for years or even decades. We want to emphasize by our project the importance of even such small upgrades of open public space which make the city friendlier, generous, more hospitable, even if it is on an inconspicuous scale. Such inputs balance to some extent the aim of municipalities to police public space and make it a site of defence rather than inclusiveness and community (Smith and Walters, 2017j). They also balance large investment projects designed by landscape architects and sanctified by municipalities. It is true that big projects can improve quality of living of a given location and even consider biodiversity enhancement as a factor, but often such projects are just another tool of gentrification. (Harvey, 2012). The miniature-scale acts and projects of amateur, spontaneous gardening do not only represent microsites of greater aesthetic and botanic complexity - they offer visual generosity for the other residents and walkers and can offer a different, idiosyncratic mode of aesthetics due to diverse kinds of gardening knowledge, criteria, and more intensive levels of care on the side of the spontaneous amateur gardeners as contrasted with landscape designers and maintenance firms. While for urban planners and municipalities, the given spaces and places are rather abstract and they are occupied with technical and functional solutions, the everyday lived experience of “users” in these spaces has the potential to be affective. It is mainly through the perspective of affect that data acquired from ethnographic research have been analyzed and interpreted.
As for methodology, the artistic part of the research consisted of a combination of visits to the sites, study of textual resources (websites, social media, press releases, academic resources) and two interviews were conducted.
The route on socialmaps.app was designed on the basis of a another non-artistic project using the Echoes app for thematic audioguides in different cities; we have designed the socialmaps.app website in such a way that more audioguides around the city will be possible to add in the future if there is interest.
The ethnographic part of the research consisted of two areas of investigation: in the first step, the team conducted a discourse analysis of a facebook group called Street Gardeners from Brno and Beyond and highlighted the main topics and areas that contributors of this chat group shared. In the following phase, several contributors from the group were interviewed with the addition of other informants who were recommended to the researchers were recruited from their own circles. The study of the Sedláčkova Edible Park also involved a study of available publicity material and posts on social media.
CONCLUSION
Our research and the route around Brno that is its outcome can be interpreted as a map of desire lines. Naomi Smith and Peter Walters adopt this term from Deleuze and Guattari and analyze how the concept may be used beyond its technical application in urban design to its more abstract and liberatory meaning as vectors which users of public space inscribe into it in acts of defiance of the limitations of use inscribed in the design of public spaces which are increasingly less inclusive and even purposefully hostile to groups of people deemed as unwanted (homeless people, minorities, youth, elderly people, children). Desire lines need not be understood solely as lines of performative repetition of walking spaces otherwise, but can be extended to other practices - including those of guerilla gardening. (Smith and Walters, ibid.) The individual stations can be characterized by people inscribing their desires to emotionally interact with the concrete space, either by emphasizing their unique quality or by enhancing it by investing their time, physical energy, and above all their emotional energy to transform it and make it lovable. The ethnographic section of our project has shown the ties the participants declare towards “nature” in the form of the plants and trees they feel responsible for and against the “enemies” represented by actors who damage those plants or whole gardening projects, whether by neglect, indifference, or exercise of power. Some participants have also accounted for the precarity of their projects; some of them focus more on the process of gardening itself and the a sense of adventure they gain from their gardening endeavors, some adopt specific forms of gardening (such as the mobile garden in pots) which reflect their tenement living as a symtom of the wider housing crisis. Frequently the gardeners are motivated by sense of joy they acquire directly from their gardening, from the sharing of their successes (or failures) with other likely minded gardeners and even imaginary “public.” The artistic section offers a different aesthetics of understanding either vacant lots themselves, certain groups of plants and their proper or improper belonging and certain types of gardening practices (playful, fleeting, ironic, minute). The visual documentation of the sites was made predominantly by Polina Davydenko whose refined compositions enhance the beauty of the seemingly insignificant places play a crucial role in Partisans With a Hoe. Hopefully the photographs help to translate the discreet charm of the places we and the spontaneous gardeners in Brno try to enchant.
You are looking at a miniature version of the virtual route on this page. To explore individual nodes, go to the real-size version of the map.
2. Hortus Vaguus (Pekařská St.)
Lucia Bergamaschi
On the collapsed roof of a long-abandoned distillery, urban greenery has flourished. A new wilderness is reclaiming space that was once the subject of human construction, blanketing it with time. Access to this green space takes place through a section of the distillery that stands to this day. These two parts are separated by a wall that functions as a gate between that which is abandoned and that which is preserved, between order and chaos. Communication runs through the cracks, the holes in old pipes, and the broken bricks. Medieval enclosed gardens (horti conclusi) and paradise gardens depicted in Gothic paintings served as inspiration for the project. My research then shifted toward understanding how these spaces are delineated and perceived in broader (legislative-administrative) contexts. The key starting point for this research was finding out that this space was designated in the Land Registry of Brno as ‘other’ land.
As stated in the Explanatory Report of the Gardening Act of 29 October 2019, lands designated as ‘other’ in the Land Registry are often appropriated for gardening activities, thus contributing to the development of green spaces for the broader public benefit of gardening. In her essay ‘Zahrádkářské osady v urbanistickém kontextu měst’ (Gardening Settlements in the Urban Context of Cities, 2021), Lucie Miovská noted that since 1989, the definition of ‘allotment gardens’ has fluctuated between development areas, production areas, and allotment sites, without considering other directions such as ‘sites with recreational or social, ecological, and urbanist significance.’ Another, more recent reference is the concept of ‘vague terrain’ where vagueness is both ‘absence but also the possibility of flourishing, a function that a given place in the city could potentially acquire.’ The only thing ‘vague terrain’ lacks is the city’s own productivity. Vagueness thus relates to the function we ascribe to a space. In the case of vague terrain, it refers to ‘places without an apparent function’ or ‘places deprived of function’ that we tend to repair, to fill up – through reconstruction, revitalization.
The first work of my project titled The Garden is on Fire involved an event where plants from the rooftop wilderness were collected and roasted. It was an intervention intended on the one hand to connect with the nearby unreclaimed greenery (vague terrain) and on the other hand reflected an attempt to ritualize non-places, the way public vague terrains are predominantly used. According to Byung-Chul Han, non-places become places through a connection to a space in a time. This makes them social, such as in the case of festivals and ceremonies.
The second, subsequent part of my research, the Vague (Sound) Garden, comprises a work that uses sound to appropriate the hidden urban garden, and bring life to the street – in this case, Pekařská. The work is situated in a specific time and space, acknowledging the current state of the area where urban wilderness has appeared. Three months of sound recordings enable visitors to now experience the garden's space as if they themselves were standing in it. Simultaneously, the sounds of the garden recorded and heard on the journey from Old Brno towards the Brno’s center provide a counterpoint to the noisy, asphalt street almost devoid of greenery. This encounter fosters listeners’ reflections on the mutual interaction between nature and the city, and emphasizes the importance of preserving existing green areas in our urban landscape.
3. The Gardens
Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina
The gardens in front of apartment buildings are often created "invisibly." Most people never ask themselves who actually takes care of them. One such front garden that we included in our research is the result of care and attention from several generations of older women – the sort of people whose work, often nursing or care work, gendered work, receives the least appreciation. And this despite the fact that they often occupy a crucial position in the local community, and possess knowledge that would otherwise disappear. One area of this knowledge is that of plants, their species and cultivars, their history and their needs. The women are able to pass this knowledge on precisely by maintaining the semi-public space of the front garden with specific types of plants that they have kept alive through physically demanding watering and weeding. The sight of these plants infuses the surroundings with evidence that these women exist (that is, if the view of the garden is not blocked by some car parked on the sidewalk or halfway into the flower bed, as is often the case, and which causes a great deal of anger). When we talk to the current caretaker of the front garden, we are amazed at the amount of knowledge about plants that she manages to put into her torrent of words. In addition to their physical form, a seemingly endless world of names and descriptions of different varieties and subspecies of flowers, herbs, trees, and shrubs is revealed to us. And not only the official, common names, but mainly local and popular names and nicknames, collected across generations, family, and friendship networks. These names can be secret, half-lost, forgotten even by the gardener herself, they can express affection and the relationship between man and plant across time, they can be intimate, formed by experiencing diversity in taste, in ripening time, in texture. We capture at least some of this name-knowledge in the recording.
1. Vídeňská/the Albert supermarket
Bára Lungová
This location represents evidence of new spontaneous plantings of fruit trees in the vicinity of Vídeňská and Reneská streets. The immediate surroundings of and around the Hluboká tram stops are interesting due to the existence of historical plantings of solitary fruit trees, which may be dated back to the first postwar decades when the small housing estate was built nearby, or maybe even to slightly earlier times when this was an agricultural and industrial landscape. Generally, fruit trees are absent from public space in cities – both in this country and in Western Europe. Nevertheless, I still have fond memories of times in my young age of growing up in a small South-Moravian town where many streets were lined by alleys of pear or cherry trees in the 1980s and 1990s. (House construction and plantings occurred simultaneously in those streets in the 1920s and 1930s.) Within the Czech Republic, policies concerning the planting of fruit trees in open public space vary widely. While some cities actually encourage volunteer citizen gardeners to plant fruit shrubs and trees in open public space according to the so-called “greenery adoption schemes,” other cities either actively ban such trees (within their greenery adoption schemes), or they themselves avoid choosing edible taxons in openly accessible public greenery. The typical arguments they present include more demanding care (pruning, the cleanup of rotting fruit), or hygiene (fruit might get spoiled by dogs, other people, etc.).
Some of the possible spontaneous interventions reacting to this taxonomic lacuna can be seen in the activities of a loose international collective of “Guerilla Grafters,” who graft fruit trees onto decorative ones.
The young trees featured in the audioguide were apparently planted in a rush, with a minimum effort of soil preparation and minimum financing (no protection against damage; the tree size indicates a possible domestic origin). Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed for them.
5. 6. 7. To Fend Off Blindness
Nela Maruškevičová
Desolate urban clearings, street medians, abandoned plots, neglected areas. Overlooked sites which turn into tolerated “lands of asylum” of ruderal plants and wild green undergrowth. For the majority of people, such locations become nearly invisible, despite their omnipresence. Still, every day we pass by them – or through them – on a daily basis: we walk our dogs, we sit on benches, or we park next to them. We reflexively take them for granted. Weeds grow everywhere, but we apparently don’t find this to be very interesting. Plant blindness in practice. Is it possible to make these plants visible in any way? Can their aesthetic and structural qualities be appreciated to any extent at all?
With these thoughts in mind, I decided to create profiles of six sites in Brno. I regularly gathered the seeds of ruderals growing in these “lands of asylum” and consequently planted them in simple planters. All these weeds, more or less typical, represent the specific attributes of each place and represent its botanical character. I then complemented the atmosphere of the location by recording audio recordings in which I articulated my own impressions of the moments when I recognized the plants and gathered their seeds.
I believe that art can play an important role in reevaluating the relationships between people and plants, hence my decision to place the planters in three courtyards of various galleries in Brno. Such places are sanctuaries, offering an environment for reflection and serenity that people typically do not experience in most types of other urban public spaces. Almost any object placed here acquires an aesthetic value and – even more importantly – a space to negotiate a dialogue with the viewer – something a ruderal plant does not typically have privilege to enjoy.
First location
Zvonařka, an old bus station located on the corner of a vast green space. Behind the cracked platforms, there is a small weedy spot. Practically unnoticed, mostly used as a shortcut.
Provaznický hill is located in the vicinity of St. Anne’s Hospital. It looks inconspicuous despite the fact that is it’s the only green space on Pekařská Street.
Second location
One of the larger lawns on Cejl is located directly in front of the Ponávka swimming pool. Now and then, someone walks by, cars are parked in a short distance. most of the time people avoid it.
There is a long strip of greenery lining the cycling lane by the bridge over Svitava where Křenová Street changes into Olomoucká Street. Most of the time the strip is green, sometimes it is red because of poppies.
Third location
Under a billboard placed at a crossroads by the Zimní stadion stop there is a patch of green alongside which the trail to Bobycentrum continues. Another shortcut.
The last place is squeezed between Moravian Regional Library and the Law Faculty.
Three highrises in a construction site on the other side cast a shadow here.
4. The stump
Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina
Guerrilla gardening makes it possible to trace the diverse goals and motivations behind the individual actions of gardeners. Cultivating plants or other making other gardening interventions that take place in a “no-man’s-land” (or maybe a “no-woman’s-land”) may be driven by a desire to aestheticize the surroundings, to use an “unused” space, to carry out environmental or political goals, etc. If nothing else, guerrilla gardening is a potentially adventurous and creative endeavor, especially because it is situated in a kind of gray area of legality. It stands outside institutional structures and thus requires discovering and creating untrodden paths, looking at the space around oneself "differently."
Such an adventurous approach to guerrilla actions has been taken by a local group of friends who, during their irregular nocturnal gardening interventions, transformed several tree stumps in Brno's Lužánky Park into flower pots. In these pots, they grew selected plants with varying degrees of success. Like many of their (and not only their) guerrilla ventures, this one is marked by its fragile, temporary nature, which stems primarily from the absence of a wider (institutional or other) network of care that usually surrounds and sustains urban plant life. When such care is only provided by individuals, the likelihood increases that the plants (which are particularly vulnerable in urban environments) will fade or wilt. The spatiotemporal instability typical of human beings – going on vacation, moving from place to place, getting involved in different relationships and schedules – often leads to the abandonment of cultivated areas. Still, life in these areas carries on.
8. Rosemary on the Prague Bridge
Kateřina Konvalinová
If you happen to be in Prague and are walking Godknowswhy on the right bank of the Vltava, let yourself be carried by the current of tourists towards the Mánes Building, or the former Mánes Building, to be exact. The building itself is not particularly interesting these days, but nevertheless, you can find a delightful little manifestation of civic gardening just a couple steps away. It’s a huge planter, an element of the Jirásek Bridge’s massive architecture. In fact, there are three or even four of these planters, but I have not been able to find the fourth. Each of them lives its own life – but that is another story. Today, we will focus our attention on the one in which someone had planted a rosemary plant, which in turn allowed an old, well-known folk song to become a living legend.
However, we are standing by the so-called “Prague Viaduct” in Brno, where these two places meet in time and space via a sprout of rosemary.
If you pass by, you can tend to it a bit, and hum the following song in the meantime:
9. Špitálka
Bára Lungová
This is a strictly productive garden, where yields are maximized through extremely efficient permaculture methods. Strawberries, garlic (allium sativum), and daylilies (they’re edible, did you know that?) grow between the corn stalks and gypsywort spreading out along the railway embankment. The gardeners grow beans of uncommon varieties, herbs for seasoning, lettuce, even a loquat tree. Aerial maps show that the garden has been in existence for about ten years.
10. Flower pots
Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina
The issue of housing is an aspect that also shapes gardening practices. The lack of a private plot of land on which one can grow plants can trigger an impulse to seek alternative ways of caring about flora, for example by intervening in public or semi-public spaces such as front lawns, grass fields, urban concrete planters, or by surrounding oneself with houseplants in private space. The situation is complicated by the instability that the current housing crisis has brought about. Private ownership is becoming completely unaffordable for most people, especially in cities, which means they are forced to rent. Some examples from abroad have shown that even renting can bring stability and effectively address such a basic need as housing is. In the Czech Republic, however, this sphere is poorly regulated, housing is treated as a commodity, rent prices rise disproportionately fast compared to income, and rental housing carries a risk that the tenant will have to leave in a very short time. In such circumstances, where there is no certainty of staying in one place for a long time, it can be difficult to form an emotional attachment to cultivated plants on terraces, yards, or front lawns connected to the rental property. One of the tenants of a house on Vranovská Street copes with this impermanence by using portable pots in which he grows common garden plants. The plants can thus move with him if necessary.
12. Slatinka
Bára Lungová
This garden in Slatina/Slatinka is located just next to the railway tracks by two signal houses. The railway worker who created the garden was originally a schooled gardener with several years of practice who later in his career changed jobs and started working with the railway company. His gardens have been the result of continuous everyday thinking, planning, and manual work, which he has been carrying out for about a quarter of century. Mr. Š. created the garden primarily for an aesthetic purpose - he looked at it constantly during his daily routine as a signaler. However, he does not want to keep the pleasure just to himself, and he often thinks of the passengers on the train or the bikers passing some of the flower beds that lie next to the bike path from Slatina to Šlapanice.
The railway garden contains plants which require high soil quality – daffodils, tulips, strawberries, cucumbers, onions, or tomatoes. Since the only thing that was there originally was concrete debris, Mr. Š. had to dig out the beds, line the holes with chicken wire (as protection against moles, which were his nightmares), and fill them with high-quality compost and mulch, which he had made from poplar leaves he brought on a wheelbarrow from a distance of more than a hundred meters. The individual beds are composed in a grid pattern. The beds that Mr. Š. built next to the cycling lane are surrounded by colored gravel which he periodically weeds chemically. The aesthetic aspect of the beds is a very serious matter for Mr. Š. He aims at combining the colors of the flowers and the other used materials in what he sees as the most spectacular way possible.
11. The Sedláčkova Edible Park
Hana Drštičková, Anastasia Blokhina
Public space is always interwoven with flows of power that shape its character; it can be seen as a battleground for the interests of various actors. One example of such a battlefield is Sedláčkova Edible Park.
The park began to emerge in 2014 as an attempt of a few people from the neighborhood to make use of a piece of land that had not been managed by the local government administration, and thus had a form of “terrain vague,” a place without a clearly defined function. Prior to its transformation, the overgrown, sometimes impenetrable, unmaintained space was mainly used as a shortcut between other points, as a transit space. For some (mainly homeless) people the undergrowth provided a refuge precisely because of its oblivion; nevertheless, these people were never included in the debate about the use of the place and its future more generally. This insight adds its own separate aspect to this story when thinking about terrain vague such as this.
Thanks to intense efforts of some of the local residents, the area has taken on the form of an Edible Park over the last few years, in spite of bureaucratic and communication obstacles from the local government. The area has been cleared of litter, overgrown shrubs have been trimmed back, pioneer species of woody shrubs have been removed and replaced by fruit trees, a pond was formed, which was particularly useful in the drier summer months, cultural events have been held here, etc.
However, the Sedláčkova Edible Park will most likely disappear soon, to be replaced by an architect-designed park that will be centrally maintained via official structures. The attempts to bring the park under management of neighborhood groups have so far been unsuccessful. Even so, and perhaps because of this, the Edible Park presents a fascinating case study of a guerrilla gardening project that goes beyond the common minor interventions in the landscape, and brings questions about the very nature of public space and the right to intervene in it into mainstream discussion.
Out of town stops: Kyjov
Bára Lungová
I moved to my present studio in 2012. It is a disused heating station, which serviced the surrounding apartment buildings. The area was redeveloped just on the eve of the fall of the communist regime in 1988/89. Before that, it was a street of village-type housing with large gardens. This area is just a two-minute walk to the town square, but looks as if it was a suburb. The two parks which were incorporated into the urban design of this location in the 1980s have been built over in the last two decades: a new apartment building was constructed on one of the previous parks in the early 2000s, and a parking lot replaced the other park in 2014. The rest of the patch of green was “revitalized,” (as the city council jargon says) two years later, making it another small parking lot. In other words: when I started renting the boiler house in 2012, it was completely surrounded by greenery, and now it sits in the middle of two parking lots.
When it comes to inhabitants’ preferences for parking places or trees, the former always win. It is a pattern that has unfailingly repeated itself in my hometown over the years. A bunch of people try to protest, but the loud majority, supported by the council administration, always favors the maximalist reconstruction plans, which destroy the majority of lawns and trees and includes the maximum possible number of parking spaces.
Before the space directly in front of my studio was rebuilt into a parking lot, I cultivated a small garden composed of wild grasses and a semi-formal flower bed. (I did it guerilla-style, just taking over the space gradually.) Before the reconstruction, I even organized a public gathering in the place itself where I had invited people from the neighboring houses to see the plan of the reconstruction (which the city council did not care to publish online), to enjoy some music and cake, and to fill in a questionnaire in case they wanted to express their opinion of the plan of the reconstruction. Despite the fact that I delivered answers to the city council by nearly fifty respondents, of whom almost four-fifths were against more parking lots, the council organized their own gathering, where loud supporters of the parking lot prevailed, and construction started just two months after the public hearing.
When the reconstruction was finished, I started planting shrubs and plants in the spaces that planners had left for greenery (I actually negotiated some of these spaces – at the time, I was a backbench council member of the city government and a member of the environmental advisory board to the council. The board’s view of the parking lot-vs.-park dilemma had been passive, i.e., silently supporting the parking lot). I planted several rambler roses and a climbing vine, and gradually started expanding with my “garden” into the large parking lot. I have since created a flowering border, which now contains 45 varieties of chrysanthemums and 15-20 iris varieties, combined with other plants which complement the irises in their flowering season. This year, I have planted about ten more rambler roses and a young acer tree. I want to bomb this desolate space which was a park just ten years ago with beauty, even if it is just at the fringes.
As I do the gardening, I often interact with people. Several of the neighbors regularly chat with me about everyday things including my plants, the weather, or other small things; other people comment on the plants or the aesthetic aspects of the borders, or even ask me for plants in some cases. Sometimes they comment on the fact that some people pluck my flowers (I don’t mind as long as they do not damage them; in fact, if this is something that can brighten their day, then my garden is all the more purposeful). Different people come near my studio. There is someone who uses it as a free gardening center, and customarily steals my potted seedlings and cuttings which I grow just below my studio windows. Then there is the occasional pair of teenage girls who sit and chat between my flower pots; once I saw them kissing. After that, I put a rainbow heart sticker I got at some Pride march on the window, just to tell them they have chosen the right spot for their dates.
Out of town stops: Senica
Bára Lungová
I discovered these front gardens when I was staying in a nearby hotel on Nádražní street. A row of small apartment blocks built along the street in the 1950s is lined by a rather wide stretch of lawn, a fence going alongside it, a sidewalk, and front gardens between the sidewalk and the fence in some cases, parking spaces in others. The situation apparently differs according to the negotiations among the flat owners themselves in the respective buildings. In some houses, the creative gardeners only had improvised flower pots at their disposal (because the rest of the space was taken up by parking spaces); some of the neighboring houses boasted such a display of creativity, diversity, and even coziness that one would rather expect it in a private garden (the aesthetic being rather closer to an allotment garden than a sober, manicured garden found in modern, single-home residential areas). In this particular front garden, documented in Polina Davydenko’s photographs, there is a miniature lake, a plastic statue of an old woman (asking for a contribution for garden maintenance – in my view), a miniature ruin built of bricks, a garden clock on a trellis, the obligatory bench, a tank for water storage, and a whole array of plants - there must be at least a hundred different species and varieties of them. The feeling of this space conveys a strange confusion between public space – it is squeezed just between a sidewalk and a strip of lawn which separates the housing area from a road. At the same time, you have the feeling of being inside someone’s garden because of the density of the creative inputs, the plethora of plants and trees, and also because of the fence separating the garden from one of its sides from the rest of the street. However, you never pass through any gate while walking past these front gardens. The fence might be a relic from some former spatial arrangement around the housing area, but is not very functional at present.