Book Review: The Light Eaters
This book is journalism — the innovative, creative kind that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s: Honouring its obligation to represent people, ideas and events as accurately and fairly as possible, it show...
Organic Intelligence
Organic Intelligence is, first, explicitly what AI is not. It is perhaps also a conclusion from current research in biology or botany, studies that raise questions like “Are plants conscious?” or “Do plants feel pain?” “Do...
Meadows of the Mind
It isn’t really a meadow. It’s a figure of speech. If a garden is someone’s conscious, intentional arrangement of plants in a space, then the arrangement could be taken as a “picture,” or expression, or...
Master Gardener: Cultivating Change
If you keep a journal, you probably have your reasons, whether you consider yourself a writer or not. It is often said that such writing can be therapeutic, even transformational. The recent film Master Gardener provides a...
Foliate Imagination
Near the beginning of his 2015 book The Cabaret of Plants: 40,000 Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination Richard Mabey presents a highly imaginative, and to me, a least, memorable conjecture. It’s...
Growing Mysteries
I find the garden a pretty humbling experience. It may be especially mysterious to me because I am so conventionally ignorant. This year, anyway, after perhaps four years of trying to grow anemones, we...
