ISSUE 68 — AUTUMN 2025

Gardens are secular sanctuaries; quiet spaces where belief blooms. If experienced from this perspective, with your knees firmly planted into the ground, a garden is not escape but rootedness.

To kneel in mud is to acknowledge our shared materiality; to feel the weight of soil is to feel the world’s pulse in your palm. There is no abstraction here. Only the immediacy of touch, the intimacy of tending, the humbling recognition that your actions, small as they are, will ripple into seasons you have not yet lived. In caring for a garden, you practice a form of spiritual attention. You become attuned to the imperceptible shifts of temperature, the slow thickening of buds, the way frost glitters like a thin veil drawn over sleep. A garden trains you to see time differently: less as a linear march and more as a continuous folding, an imbrication of past and future in each moment of presence.

This issue of Antennae, and the two that preceded it, are dedicated to gardening as creative process. We need to take gardens very seriously as legitimate artistic sites and media—organic tissues generated by resilient and dedicated nurturing capable of uprooting our disciplinary and institutional certainties to show us how we can reimagine art from scratch.

My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this issue, to Antennae’s academic board for its ceaseless support and expertise, and to everyone else who has made this exploration possible.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief

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in this issue

Irina Botea Bucan
Dan Feinberg
Carol Freeman
Prudence Gibson
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

Edith Jeřábková
Sigi Jottkandt
Barbora Lungová
Mariana Menezes
Michael Pollan

David Rimanelli
Caroline Rothwell
Lorraine Shannon
T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss

Michael Pollan
Second Nature:
A gardener’s education

in conversation: Michael Pollan and

Giovanni Aloi

First published in 1991, Second
Nature: A Gardener’s Education
anticipated many of the philosophical and ecological insights that would later shape the field of critical plant studies. In this
conversation, Michael Pollan reflects on how the book’s central
questions about human agency and vegetal autonomy have evolved.

p 12

Performing
the Ragged Garden

text and images: Carol Freeman

In 2020, a guerrilla gardening
project began in the corner of an
apartment block adjacent to a
hotel carpark. The Ragged Garden is planted with ‘uncultivated’ shrubs and rushes that grew on the site before European colonisation, and flowers that may have grown in the forgotten garden of the Ragged School that stood there later.

p 20

Gardens as gifts

in conversation: Barbora Lungová
and Edith Jeřábková

Artist and gardener Barbora
Lungová speaks with curator Edith Jeřábková about the growing
presence of gardens in contemporary art. Lungová traces this shift from early painterly practice to her current projects, such as The Rainbow Garden and The Most Beautiful Parking Lot in Kyjov, where cultivation becomes both artwork and social action.

p 36

The question of
the impervious garden

text and images: Dan Feinberg

Since 2018, I have worked with
root vegetables to break up asphalt and test their ability to aid in water infiltration, soil restoration, and cooling in selected paved sites across the eastern United States.

p 48

T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss’s native gardens

in conversation: T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss
and Giovanni Alo

In this conversation, artist and
ethnobotanist T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss discusses her community-based ecological projects New Growth and A Constellation of Remediation. Rooted in Indigenous permaculture, her practice
blends art, education, and land
stewardship, empowering youth.

p 62

Radesti garden

text and images: Irina Botea Bucan

Jon and I started to plant in 2020,
on the second day of the pandemic, unplanned, an urgent act, to an unknown and famine-predicted future. The text presents a gardening artist’s perspective as a social and everyday practice of learning how to participate in a common-reciprocal process of living with plants, animals, and
humans.

p 79

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg:
Pollinator Pathmaker

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg talks
about Pollinator Pathmaker, her algorithmic, more-than-human
artwork. Drawing on ethology and simulated pollinator vision, Ginsberg devised an “empathetic
algorithm” that optimizes plantings
for pollinator diversity rather than
human taste, decentering the human as insects become audience.

in conversation: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Giovanni Aloi

p 94

a multi-species garden

text: Lorraine Shannon

In Australia, bush fires, Covid-19 and climate change have given rise to a gnawing sense that a shift in how we care for country is required. This includes how we garden. Gardeners have the opportunity to reimagine obligations to the natural world and implement gardening as a crucial aspect of creative coevolution with all species.

p 114

The garden at Casa Azul

text: Mariana Menezes

This article examines botanical
symbolism in Frida Kahlo’s art and
its material expression in the garden of Casa Azul. It argues that
Kahlo’s mytho-poetic use of vegetation forms an aesthetic-
political framework of resistance,
intertwining body and territory in a
decolonial counter-narrative.

p 124

Plant signatures, goodness, and the dose

text: Prudence Gibson and Sigi Jottkandt
images: Caroline Rothwell

This essay focuses on the
Australian artist Caroline Rothwell
whose engagement with the
Doctrine of Signatures helps draw connections between the doctrine’s religious underpinnings
and contemporary interpretations.

p 138

Planning a natal garden

In planning a natal garden Martina Hynan strives to generate an expanded understanding of natality that reflects the interconnectedness of people and ecology. Such an environmental perspective on birth acknowledges the complex interdependency of human and non-human needs in a multispecies world.

text: Martina Hynan

p 151

"The garden may still bring about a “quiet sustainability” and place us within close proximity to plants, but that does not mean it entails a being-with plants."

Dan Feinberg p 64

"I don’t see the garden as an artwork in itself, but as something that I hope to live with, in a reciprocal relationship. I think of myself as an amateur gardener, where the amateur is Bernard Stiegler’s anti-capitalist
hero."

Irina Botea Bucan p 83

"in cities such as Sydney, the property market demands that houses are accompanied by slickly designed ‘rooms outside’ with expensive pavers and a token plant in a pot beside the pool. Like the housing estates where homes are crammed cheek by jowl and surrounded by concrete, these sterile, dead spaces fail to provide nourishment for any species."

Lorraine Shannon p 116

"There are records of imperial gardens of great magnitude built during the Mexican reigns, such as the Tetzcotzingo garden located in the province of Acolhuacan and created in the mid-15th century. Creation of gardens in pre-Spanish invasion Mexico reveals hedonistic, sacred, political, functional, and symbolic dimensions, mirroring and overlapping
relationships between these spheres."

Mariana Menezes p 129