Sharing Agricultural and Gardening Cultures in Ireland

This volume addresses gardening and agricultural practices rather than the garden as an allegory, a metaphor or a symbol. It celebrates the potentiality of praxis, of pragmatic aesthetics, and the ways gardening or growing plants affect literary and artistic creation. The chapters put to the fore the intimate relations that artists, writers and poets have opened up with the plants and their gardens. They adopt non-extractive, non-exploitative relationships with nature and extend the notion of care to the more-than-human world, in their agricultural and creative practices. Artists and writers addressing the landscape of the Anthropocene are familiar with environmental sciences. On the shelves above their desks stand books by Rachel Carson, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Natasha Myers and many others. Aware that new attitudes towards nature must translate into new practices and praxis they immerse themselves in gardens, observe vegetal growth and respond to plantness creatively, thereby opening up fruitful dialogues and new 'correspondences'.


CONTENTS


Marie Mianowski (Université Grenoble Alpes) and Valérie Morisson (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3)
Introduction 1


Susan Ball (University Paris 8)
Notes from and to the Field: Sensorial Experiences and Knowledge in the First World War Diary of Robert McKay 11


Marion Naugrette-Fournier (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle)
The Garden in Irish Contemporary Poetry: Planting, Neglecting, and Connecting 29


Maureen O'Connor (University College Cork)
A Time to Die, A Time to Plant 51


Pamela Whitaker (Ulster University)
Florilegium: a Floral Compendium to Enhance Quality of Life 63


Catherine Conan (University of Western Brittany)
Technology in/and Mark Boyle's The Way Home : Towards an Ecology of Separation 77


Eileen Hutton (Burren College of Art, University of Galway)
Mycelial Communities: A Soil Project Residency 95


Katerina Gribkoff (Burren College of Art, University of Galway)
The Entangled Agencies and Imperfect Material Realities of Small-Scale Farms and Gardens 107


Christelle Serée-Chaussinand (Université de Bourgogne)
A Honeycomb Search for Meaning: A Conversation with Grace Wells 123


Anne Hodge (National Gallery of Ireland)
The Artist's Garden: Conversation with Blaise Drummond at His Home in Rural County Longford 143


Valérie Morisson (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3)