School of Sustainability

Reading about soil aloud, in a walled garden, after dark

On the evening of 30 May, with a full moon coming up, a group sat on the veranda of a former Belgian pavilion in an Amsterdam park and took turns reading aloud. The pavilion is a leftover of the Floriade, the 1972 world horticultural exhibition that once packed the park with plants from every continent. Below it lies the old monastery garden, walled and whitewashed.

It is planted with young conifers, Jupiter's beard, sage, mint, evening primrose, tall grasses, buttercups and wild oregano; its keepers call it the Shadow Garden. The garden has been tended since 2021 by the artist duo Onkruidenier - Jonmar van Vlijmen and Ronald Boer - working with Zone2Source, the art-and-ecology organisation that runs the site as a testing ground for art and ecology in the park.

The occasion was the second Gardener's Assembly, a two-day gathering of artists, gardeners, farmers and researchers, backed by the Horizon Europe programme SoilTribes. The first, in late 2024, had started an exchange network among Amsterdam's art-space gardens and community gardens, and this one picked up the thread, with the Friday evening given over to nocturnal ecology: what a garden does after sunset.

The Perennial Reading Group, an open group led by Anne Diestelkamp that meets in gardens across the city to read about ecologies, worked through texts by Anaïs Tondeur, Germain Meulemans and Beatrice Zerbato on soil and atmosphere, caves and underground worlds, light pollution, and the moths and bats that pollinate after sunset. As daylight faded, the readers took turns aloud.

After the reading, outside the garden gate, came food. Artistic researcher Chen Zhou, who works on darkness and what happens underground, built an edible landscape from layered jellies in four colours, each layer a stratum of a real place: newly planted trees from a government transition scheme, an artificial topsoil under moss, and below that the concrete left behind by a demolished cement factory. No harvest and no decision is reported; what remains is the method.

Makery · Read the source