WEDNESDAYCRIT

WEDNESDAYCRIT WINTER GIVES WAY

Excerpt from A Gardener’s Education

By Marco Wilkinson

In a seed there are two poles, like north and south of a world. They define the limits of extension. Extending, they generate a magnetic field of force around them. Generating this field they gather affinities. Gathering is another word for chemistry, the chemistry they develop with the world around them. Every seed, from pea to pin oak, from Sempervivum to Sempervirens, has from the moment of germination one axiom to follow that overrides all others:

Grow or die.

Crack a bean open and inside you’ll find a plant in miniature. Folded like praying hands are this future plant’s first two leaves, and hidden at the heart of this prayer is a cell. Pointing like a little finger is the radicle, root of all roots, and at the tip of this finger gesturing towards the future is a cell.

A new seed fell to earth in Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania at the Flickerville Mountain Farm, a week after graduating from NYU in search of the work of hands instead of mind, in search of some meaning and a sense of competence.

Crawling on hands and feet like a baby across acres planting lettuce felt like nothing less than growing for the first time into some form I never knew I could be. At the end of each row, a new self waited.

LEFT TOP: Mixed Growth, porcelain sculpture by Renqian Yang, ’18

LEFT BOTTOM: Keeping, an installation by Miki Palchick for the AGRARIANAA show at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. Ceramic pinch pots made for soil collected at each of the WWII Japanese-American Incarceration Sites