Living Things Nursery

This project explores the climatic intelligence of plants and the potentials of systematically working with that intelligence as a landscape architect, a horticultural producer, or an average plant consumer. The Living Things Nursery Catalogue is a critique of a horticultural industry that has had a largely homogenizing force on plant diversity, contributing to a rapid loss of complexity in the ecologies produced by industrialized societies. Through this catalogue, my goal is to build a system for working with plants that is based on a rigorous look at climatic parameters, enabling a global language for plants that recognizes their agency, adaptivity, and intelligence. To do so, I rely on several ecologists, anthropologists, and geographers of the past and present to explain the capacities of plants and the ecosystems they form, as well as multiple contemporary, open-source databases.

An openness to learning from plants will play a transformative role in our collective decision-making amidst the current climate crisis. This is in an effort to not only demystify the workings of plants, but to contribute to a general culture of attention to the agencies, propensities, and intelligence of living things.