The Making of Garden of Letters

My idea for this project came from a night where I was in my own backyard around 1:00 in the morning.

I’ve always had a fascination with plants and their textures, shapes, etc. As I was observing this, I realized that you could vaguely make out certain letters in the leaves and branches of some of the different plants in my backyard. I wanted to explore this more, so I took some flash photos with my phone to observe this further.

I then took to the markup feature in the camera roll app to make some quick sketches and map out an idea of what I could possibly do with my new found collection of plant photos.

After some feedback and more thought, I came up with a few variations based on the original sketches that I drew, but there was only one set of sketches that really stuck.

The layout that I believe was the most successful was the one that was most like the original. As for the layout of the stickers, I wanted to create something like those sticker books you get as a kid. In the end, mine ended up being 8 pages with over 300 stickers.

and lastly to contextualize, I’ve seen people across social media make little signs for their gardens or their houseplants to indicate what type of plant it is, and I felt like it would be fitting to make my own with letters I created from other plants in my backyard. I also thought it might be funnt to put some of these out in Arnhem.