Foraged: Kitchen Garden Herbaria

KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES

Foraged: Kitchen Garden Herbaria

RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH

The Renaissance of the Earth is a series of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming that consider how the early modern past helps us reshape our environmental future. Historians and agricultural students work hand-in-hand with geoscientists and arts and literature students to transform a kitchen garden into a template for research and a rare book library into an archive for the imagination.

BY MADGE EVERS

A RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH EXHIBIT FALL 2022

impression of leaves and flowers. Once removed, the plant's silhouette is exposed with abstract patterns. Each spore print is unique, rendering visible mycorrhizae, the intimate collaboration between plant roots and fungal hyphae which modern author Merlin Sheldrake describes in Entangled Life (2020) as “a collective flourishing that underpins our past, present, and future.”

The Kinney Center’s collection of botany books, herbals, and gardening manuals, reveals evidence of the human desire to use, cure, correct, or control nature. I notice, looking at John Gerard’s Herbal (1633), that he classifies “the nature of all plants from the highest Cedar to the lowest Moss” in relation to their “use” for humans. Gerard catalogs the visual beauty of a plant’s form, but he was also concerned with their “virtues” or medicinal properties.

For example, he suggests that wormwood cures ailments such as “a weak stomack.”

ARTIST'S STATEMENT My art highlights interdependent relationships across species.

Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals, confounding our most basic taxonomies. They pop up where we don't expect them. As Agricola wrote in 1726, mushrooms thrive in rotten places: "Mushrooms which have their roots in rotten ground spread very far." I have created herbaria that honor the wild life of mushrooms.

Traditionally, an herbarium is a collection of pressed plant specimens, mounted on paper, and described in keen detail for farmers and gardeners. Although my prints also use pressed plants, my technique departs from the herbarium when I place a mushroom, that I foraged from the Center's grounds, gill-side down, on top of herbs gathered from the nearby kitchen garden.

The mushrooms release their tiny powdery spores, leaving an

Like Gerard, William Lawson, in A New Orchard and Garden (1648), demonstrates the human desire for control of earthly matter when he asks, “What is Art more than a provident and skilful Correctrix of the faults of Nature in particular works?” For Lawson, garden design is the art of land management. Land management corrects nature—a logic laid bare in the title of another agricultural manual, The English Improver Improved, by Walter Blithe (1653), which details how to “cure” landscapes such as fens, moors, and forests for maximized agricultural production.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Madge Evers is an educator, gardener, and visual artist whose work celebrates decomposition and regeneration. Referencing photosynthesis and the collaboration in mycorrhiza, her practice involves foraging for mushrooms and plants in the forests and hills of Western Massachusetts. In 2021, she was a Mass Cultural Council fellowship finalist in photography. After teaching for twenty-five years in Rhode Island and Massachusetts public schools, Evers now works as a full-time artist. When the sun shines, she facilitates cyanotype workshops for people of all ages.

impression of leaves and flowers. Once removed, the plant's silhouette is exposed with abstract patterns. Each spore print is unique, rendering visible mycorrhizae, the intimate collaboration between plant roots and fungal hyphae which modern author Merlin Sheldrake describes in Entangled Life (2020) as “a collective flourishing that underpins our past, present, and future.”

The Kinney Center’s collection of botany books, herbals, and gardening manuals, reveals evidence of the human desire to use, cure, correct, or control nature. I notice, looking at John Gerard’s Herbal (1633), that he classifies “the nature of all plants from the highest Cedar to the lowest Moss” in relation to their “use” for humans. Gerard catalogs the visual beauty of a plant’s form, but he was also concerned with their “virtues” or medicinal properties.

For example, he suggests that wormwood cures ailments such as “a weak stomack.”

ARTIST'S STATEMENT My art highlights interdependent relationships across species.

Mushrooms are neither plants nor animals, confounding our most basic taxonomies. They pop up where we don't expect them. As Agricola wrote in 1726, mushrooms thrive in rotten places: "Mushrooms which have their roots in rotten ground spread very far." I have created herbaria that honor the wild life of mushrooms.

Traditionally, an herbarium is a collection of pressed plant specimens, mounted on paper, and described in keen detail for farmers and gardeners. Although my prints also use pressed plants, my technique departs from the herbarium when I place a mushroom, that I foraged from the Center's grounds, gill-side down, on top of herbs gathered from the nearby kitchen garden.

The mushrooms release their tiny powdery spores, leaving an

Like Gerard, William Lawson, in A New Orchard and Garden (1648), demonstrates the human desire for control of earthly matter when he asks, “What is Art more than a provident and skilful Correctrix of the faults of Nature in particular works?” For Lawson, garden design is the art of land management. Land management corrects nature—a logic laid bare in the title of another agricultural manual, The English Improver Improved, by Walter Blithe (1653), which details how to “cure” landscapes such as fens, moors, and forests for maximized agricultural production.

ABOUT THE ARTIST Madge Evers is an educator, gardener, and visual artist whose work celebrates decomposition and regeneration. Referencing photosynthesis and the collaboration in mycorrhiza, her practice involves foraging for mushrooms and plants in the forests and hills of Western Massachusetts. In 2021, she was a Mass Cultural Council fellowship finalist in photography. After teaching for twenty-five years in Rhode Island and Massachusetts public schools, Evers now works as a full-time artist. When the sun shines, she facilitates cyanotype workshops for people of all ages.

KINNEY CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY RENAISSANCE STUDIES

Foraged: Kitchen Garden Herbaria

RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH

The Renaissance of the Earth is a series of interdisciplinary research collaborations, undergraduate and graduate courses, hands-on workshops, conferences, and arts programming that consider how the early modern past helps us reshape our environmental future. Historians and agricultural students work hand-in-hand with geoscientists and arts and literature students to transform a kitchen garden into a template for research and a rare book library into an archive for the imagination.

BY MADGE EVERS

A RENAISSANCE OF THE EARTH EXHIBIT FALL 2022