(G2)
13-03-2025
Dear second garden,
You can’t grow anything useful in my mother-in-law's nyttehave on Amager, nor in the gardens around.
I have heard of neighbors who have tried to grow squash, strawberries or potatoes, but that has been a long time ago. Every spring there are some newcomers who naively put seeds and bulbs into the ground; by summer they see all of their efforts destroyed by the snails.
The snails in my mother-in-law's nyttehaveforening are much bigger than the snails you would usually find in Denmark. Their skin is thick like leather and they lavishly carry bright yellow houses on their backs. Someone from the forening had looked them up in a biology book from the 70s and determined them to be vineyard snails, like the ones they eat in France. The big snails with their yellow houses would be pretty to look at, if only they weren’t such pests. They happen to enjoy everything we humans enjoy: fruits, vegetables, beets, roots. Snails are nocturnal animals; in the night, when we humans sleep, they feed on our hard day’s work. When I check under the leaves in the morning, there is not a single berry, not a bulb that hasn’t been gnawed on by the tireless beasts. You can imagine my frustration upon finding the massacred fruit, eaten only halfway as if to mock me, left behind like some unlovable toy.
It’s the older people of the forening who have recently turned to technology and science in trying to fight the snails. There are some who believe that snails dislike salt. This might be true for the native little snails, but the French specimen’s thick skin just lets the salt pearl off as if it were drops of water. Last summer, one neighbor had covered every square centimeter of his garden in coarse kitchen salt. This spring, not even weeds would grow in the salted earth. Another neighbor had plastered her garden with upright razorblades — the snails just glide over the cold steel like over soft grass. Another neighbor, the richest one in the forening, had read somewhere that snails would avoid ionized copper. I’m not sure what ionization is, but one summer day the rich neighbor had lined his potato beds with sheets of the precious metal — the next morning the bed was filled with yellow snail houses.
The most popular anti-snail technology of the forening is much less sophisticated than expensive metals or salt emulsions. It’s usually a setup of two stones, one bigger stone resting soundly on the earth and a smaller stone taken into hand. The dedicated gardener picks up a snail, places it onto the bigger stone and smashes it with the manually operated smaller one. My mother-in-law would call this setup her ‚killing stone‘. She is a very sweet woman, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly, but she makes an exception for snails: „It’s them or my plants“, she would always say, when the stone came down on a yellow snail house. The killing stone is not an ingenious instrument to protect the harvest from invaders. Rather, it’s a tool aimed at the future, a device for population control, one snail at a time. An uninvolved observer might think that there was rage involved, or even vengeance. I have watched my mother-in-law perform countless snail executions, and I can assure everyone that there are no feelings involved. Every performance of the killing stone is a perfectly feelingless technocratic act towards trying to achieve some kind of justice in the garden.
I frankly don’t have the heart to operate the killing stone myself. Once in a while, when I’m sure nobody is watching, I would pick up a snail and throw it as far as I could into the blue sky, so that the snails would land in one of my far away neighbor’s garden. Mostly though I just ignore the snails. I think we should consider ourselves lucky that they only seem to be interested in fruits and vegetables. We still have lawns and flowers and trees. For everything else there is always supermarkets. Someone should check on France though; I think they might have real problems with the snails down there.
Best,
Richard
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06-03-2025
Kære second.garden
Jeg kaldes Forsømt, men endnu er jeg ikke væk.
Tværtimod. Jeg spirer, jeg klatrer, jeg opsluger.
Mit rum opløses i rødder, mine grænser bliver porøse.
Jeg tager huset med mig - lader Efeu æde muren, mos dække trappen.
Snart er det ikke til at se, hvor jeg slutter, og verden begynder.
Længe har det været omvendt.
Jorden er formet, geometrisk, låst fast i rammer.
Træer har stået, hvor de blev sat, vand har løbet, hvor det blev ledt.
En orden, der bredte sig som en uafbrudt flade, der trykkede mig sammen,
indtil kun kontrollerede rester af mit væsen stod tilbage.
Men tiden arbejder i mellemrummene.
Jeg udvider mig i dem.
Lader vækster skyde op gennem asfalten,
mine rødder lirke mellem fliserne,
mine frø drive med vinden, hvor ingen har givet dem plads.
De første år er det små forskydninger, knap nok synlige.
Så vokser de til.
Så overtager jeg.
Jeg ved, hvad det betyder.
Jeg æder det, der formede mig.
Vildskaben vækker mig,
men den bliver min død.
Kh.
Forsømt Have
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28-02-2025
Paris, 25 February 2025
Dear second.garden,
I wanted to greet you with a letter the old-fashioned way, from a place with cliffs and trees. As I could not find a postcard with the desired motive in the tourist kiosks, I ordered a second-hand one from a web-antiquarian. Although I wanted to forward it to you physically, I will let a scanned version reach you by e-mail. It will be accompanied by this letter which I have rewritten a couple of times now. It can be regarded as a small cut into the flesh of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.
The front of the postcard depicts an island which I like to think of as the heart of the park. Crowning the cliff is a temple - or a garden folly. The island is currently inaccessible as it is receiving a touch-up of its skin. The back is naturally marked with the name of the recipient, a postage stamp and an ink stamp. On both sides, the card is overlaid with an image of a temporary intervention located somewhere in the mainland of the park. I know that Victor noticed this camouflaged fence as well. Closing off a pathway while allowing a stream of water to pass beneath it, the fence is dressed in multiple copies of an image of green leaves. I layered the fence onto the scanned postcard as a way to update it.
Writing this letter has let me become more acquainted with the park. 160 years ago, there was not a single plant in the park. As a gift for the working class Parisians, the park was constructed on the soils of a former quarry where gypsum and limestone were extracted, some of which lives on in the buildings of Paris. I read that the terrain was known as Mont Chauve (Chauve-Mont —> Chaumont) referring to its bare and desolate surfaces. In its pre-park life, it was also used as a waste dump, an execution ground and a site for slaughtering worn-out horses.
The park is as artificial as it is natural. There are eucalyptus trees and amusement rides. Nesting herons and wine on tap. Lebanese cedar trees and a bridge by Gustave Eiffel. The water running through the fence dressed in leaf prints comes from the artificial waterfalls in the park and is pumped from the nearby canal. The stairs and railings in the park are concrete casts resembling tree trunks and branches. The granite-looking caves, stalactites and cliffs in the postcard are imitations in concrete and plaster.
It as a constructed organism requiring daily maintenance and closed gates at night. Because of the porous gypsum beneath - the flesh of the park - the fake granite (real concrete) crust has started to crumble. Other parts have recently been closed due to a soil lift, and last year the artificial lake was completely emptied and cleaned. The current renovation project has a budget of 6 million euros. The previous one 25 years ago cost 15 million euros.
When the park opened as part of the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1867, it was presented as much as a work of landscape engineering as a romantic vision of nature. In the postcard from 1904, I see the reconstruction of a picturesque scene. In the updated version from today, I see a display of maintenance, but also an interpretation of what the park is made of: A scene with lush trees and covered wounds.
Bulut Tümer Bursali
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21-02-2025
First, a note of appreciation: Thanks, Victor, Naja, and Johan, for the inspiring forum you opened here. I will continue the exchange with the garden as our shared space of reflection.
My letter unfolds through the lens of a series of works I developed last fall - gardening devices for ongoing maintenance. Both works and words evolved in the wake of graduation, as if to somehow sustain a sense of continuity in my work. Therefore, I see the letter reflecting the theme ongoing work - both in the continuous care and maintenance of a garden and in the ongoing iteration of ‘work’ .
The two specific works I will focus on are versions of a rose shear and a robotic lawnmower - both instruments to ensure a garden stays groomed, neat, and in line with a broader vision, perhaps even a vision of nature. Beyond their everyday functions, they evoke perspectives on gardening that I thought would be interesting to share - some of which surfaced in discussions in the second.garden group last fall.
Rose Shear (2024). Rose resin.
The rose shear represents, to me, the intimate work of trimming rose bushes in early spring. It is a tool with strong sensory feedback: it springs open and cuts with a chewy bite, somehow setting a flow in the work by itself. Something about this device feels so personal - the slightly curved handles, the small sprockets, and the beak-like blade. Like a prop from a fairytale.
Lately, I’ve been shopping in the new small hardware stores opening around the inner city - like Silvan, Jem & Fix, and Harald Nyborg. Their gardening sections are sparse but carefully curated, as if to accommodate both the needs and desires of the urban shopper (me). The rose shear above is a replica from one of these stores, an ideal representative if you ask me - functional, yes, but also strangely alluring, like a relic rather than a mere tool.
Out in the sprawling country malls, the gardening sections tend to present a far more pragmatic lineup of tools, with campaigns often ambivalently balancing human recreation with high-efficiency environmental control. This must, of course, be related to larger gardens, with a higher demand for efficient management. And so, the stores - more like warehouses - where advanced trimmers, pest control products, and weed killers gain more visibility, shaping the narrative of gardening as a practice.
Lawnmower (2024). Digital print on canvas, stretch-wrapped.
An instrumental part of this high-efficiency gardening culture has become the robotic lawnmower. This little, turtle-like robot is perhaps the most transformative innovation in modern gardening . Its ability to cover vast areas with advanced monitoring and mechanical precision makes it more than just a tool - it dominates the space. Its quiet, creeping motion transforms not only the vegetation but also the garden as an scene.
I often find that the robotic lawnmower completely steals the show - or at least my attention. Designed to smoothly maintain aesthetic order, it inevitably becomes part of the landscape itself, blurring the boundaries between the garden as a divine piece of work and the ongoing work of its upkeep. Much of the promotional imagery for robotic lawnmowers captures this interplay so well - perspectivally lowered in a bokeh close-up, fully immersing the viewer via its operation.
It may seem obvious - the influence of robotic lawnmowers and other semi-autonomous systems in the garden of 2025. Yet these hybrids are rarely credited as more than mere servants in the service of pristine garden ideals. Recognizing them as native to the contemporary garden, shaped by industry-driven aesthetics, allows the garden to evolve into a much richer concept - a dynamic environment for ongoing exchange between humans, technology, and ecology.
Laurits Honoré Rønne
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07-02-2025
Sunday, 2. February. Victor, I have to update my will too now. Firstly, I want to note the form of the letter and this diary entry-letter. The form of Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature serves as a model for this text: I am writing to you in a diary, which is part of a text about gardens and cruising. A diary is (often) more open about its constructed situation and about the text we leave behind and its context. The same is the case with the letter and, in my reading, especially your letter about the garden we leave behind, the garden that outlasts us.
I live close to the crematorium where my grandmother was cremated. Although her ashes are buried in another graveyard, I am certain that some of the vegetation, soil, and critters in the surrounding graveyard of the crematorium contain carbon atoms that once made her up. The vegetation, soil, and critters are the garden that remains of her and the countless others who have been cremated there. A graveyard – as I read you pointing us to in your letter – is a garden too and the site of our final becoming-else. This opaqueness, which is becoming-else as some carbon atoms are absorbed in leaves and then composted, makes me more attuned to the infrastructure that (this) ecology is. To me, it is a place entirely caught up in messianic time, while ‘aiming’ at a cariological experience-time.
This requires a certain organisation of the surround and specific uses of bodies. The gardeners who attend to the place, or constructed situation, maintain a particular visuality that is readable as kept while allowing for wonderment regarding the extent of the garden's staging and ontology. For the attentiveness to the surround (i.e. the ecologies we are part of) in gardening and places for mourning, exclusion is constitutive of these particular forms and practices, which are otherwise precluded by other relations.[1] In the larger context which this text is a part of, I am trying to also develop what I think of as the ‘baroque garden complex’: as an aesthetic that informs the organisation of gardens at this place on earth, and which zero-degree point is the thinking of Eden. I do not have much more to say about this at the moment, as I am still reading a lot about this but it is tentative to, touched upon, or developed in the thinking of Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture by Carolyn Merchant, “The Planetary Garden” by Gilles Clement, The Kingdom and the Garden by Giorgio Agamben, and is what Francis Bacon’s Of Gardens is emblematic of. What I am thinking with these texts could be summed up as: The word for world is garden – the world that is these landscapes called Denmark. And so, I think of gardening as an ethically necessary response-ability to the anthropogenically altered ecologies here.
Whether tangents or kinship, response-ability is decisive in our use of the earth and the consequences of these uses and former uses – and this necessary attentiveness to the surround is decisive in gardening, as well as in cruising: Use of the surround as a garden and the erotic impersonal common – “as a sense of incommensurability and an equality of in-equivalence that is shared”[2] – is edging the finitude of us as (part of) ecologies. Additionally, I see enlustment and the cariological of bottoming as being-opened or being-edged, as the edging of finitude and of the orgasmic: the edging of experience.
Of course, the Edenic also haunts much of the thinking about cruising, but that is for another time. However, I will end the letter with the following text by John Paul Ricco: “The art of the consummate cruise is precisely that which is without completion or final satisfaction or achievement. Therein lies the faultless form of its purely unfinishable desire and pleasure. ‘Consummatum est’ (it is done), are believed to be the last words that Christ uttered while on the cross. However unlike the passion of the Christ, this non-sacrificial, erotic and unnamed passion is consummate to the extent that it remains unconsummated (undone). The art of the consummate cruise is that which is without end or that which exceeds any sense of an ending, but instead remains, in its anonymity, promiscuity, and the itinerancy of its departure and abandonment, always on the verge or edge of coming.”[3]
Johan Boemann
[1] See Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, (Duke University Press, 2019).
[2] John Paul Ricco, “The Art of the Consummate Cruise and the Essential Risk of the Common”, Feedback, (4. February 2016),
http://openhumanitiespress.org/feedback/sexualities/the-consummate-cruise-1/.
[3] Ricco, “The Art of the Consummate Cruise and the Essential Risk of the Common”.
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24-01-2025
Haven jeg efterlader
Jeg begyndte at tænke på den have, jeg efterlader mig, når jeg dør, efter at have set en vinduesudstilling i Paris’ gader. En stor, kold scene med to liggende granitgravsten omgivet af plastikblomster og kunstgræs. Det gav mening – det var jo en udstilling – men samtidig mindede det mig om, hvordan gravsteder ofte ser ud i dag. Blomster, der skiftes ud efter sæsonen, velplejede overflader og en æstetik, der føles både uholdbar og fjernt fra naturens egen rytme. Tanken om at ende under en massiv granitblok, omkranset af kortklippet rullegræs, gjorde mig trist.
Dagen efter faldt jeg over Moderne natur af Derek Jarman, den visionære filmkunstner og maler. Jarman efterlod sig ikke kun en række imponerende værker – han efterlod sig også en have. På det øde, vindblæste Dungeness i England, hvor shingle, hav og himmel mødes, skabte han en have, der var lige så rå og poetisk som hans kunst. I sit livs sidste år, mens han levede med hiv, forvandlede han haven omkring sit spartanske hus, Prospect Cottage, til en personlig oase. Bogen dokumenterer disse år – en biografisk dagbog om kamp, skrøbelighed og skønheden i det små.
Jarmans have var mere end blot planter i sten. For mig fremstår den som en refleksion over livets cyklus og et bevis på, at hvis vi tør være sårbare og lægger kærlighed og omhu i det, vi efterlader os, vil det med stor sandsynlighed finde omsorg hos andre i fremtiden. Mange af os vil en dag få tildelt et lille stykke jord som vores sidste plads i verden. Men hvordan kan vi gøre dette til mere end blot en formalitet? Hvordan kan vi give det mening?
Jarmans have minder os om, at selv det mindste jordstykke kan blive en scene for skabelse, en trøst for de levende, og en vedvarende fortælling om, hvem vi var. Måske skal vi se vores sidste jordstykke som en have – et sted, hvor vi planter noget smukt, noget, der varer længere end os selv. Jeg har nu på min to do liste, at skulle opdatere mit testamente.
Victor,
second.garden
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