After considerations of potential locations in already existing gardens of public institutions or in public space, I decided to establish the garden on land I already owned myself. In 2015 when prices were still affordable, I had bought a meadow and a block of arable land located between orchards, vineyards, and fields in a close vicinity of Kyjov, South Moravia, Czech Republic. I knew this forgotten piece of land since I was thirteen and walked through it with our children's tourist club. I fell in love with it and kept coming back since then. This meadow, or rather a several-decade-old fallow, did not look like anything in the vicinity of my hometown where large fields predominate. It reminded me of the wonderful meadows in the White Carpathian or Beskydy mountains, even though its size is miniature in comparison to these vast grasslands.
My intentions for the purchase had been conservation ones as the location is rich in biodiversity which I wanted to protect. SInce 2014, the area has been mowed thanks to a grant scheme that is distributed by the Agency for the Conservation of Nature and Landscape (an organ of the Ministry of the Environment). In the recent years, the local branch of the not-for profit Czech Union for the Conservation of Nature of which I am a member, has been taking care of the place, which means mowing the grass and shrubs and removing the biomass on an annual basis. We do this work, which is carried out once a year in September and October, with temporary workers (friends affiliated with the Union) and sometimes with volunteers. Ideally, it would be nice if some local farmer would take the hay, but the soil is not fertile (hence the biodiversity - the more nitrogen, the more grasses and fewer other plant groups), so the biomass of the grass does not come in volumes sufficient for economic harvest.
When I made the decision to establish the conceptual garden in this location some seven years after the purchase, the part of the land where I was about to set the garden up was just a bare field. I knew that the flower beds can only cover a small part of the whole 0,4 hectare field in order to be manageable. The garden proper which I decided to call The Rainbow Garden in Kameníky by Kyjov has now the size of about 100 m2 and is situated in the middle of a nascent meadow. Before 2019, conventional agriculture (the soil-devastating cycle of corn followed by wheat by rape and back again) had been practiced in this part of the field. The task I had set up for myself was to bring back life and restore a grassland with autochtonous herbs and grasses so that the strip of land would connect two previously disconnected areas and create a sort of a biocorridor for insects. (Some butterflies, for instance, are rather sedentary and only fly over distances of several hundred meters in their lives.) At that time, I had been already intensely involved in the (manual) conservation management of several other grassland locations around Kyjov and had acquired some knowledge about these matters from my friends and colleagues who are professional biologists and conservationists. Before the Rainbow Garden, I had dedicated hundreds, maybe lower thousands of hours to the collective restoration and maintenance of a 7-hectare large municipal orchard and meadow at the outskirts of Kyjov called The Boršov Meadows, where my friends ran a forest kindergarten and where we had organized dozens of community events.
Manual work on The Rainbow Garden garden is time-consuming and back-breaking. The soil is clay, so digging is only possible after intensive rains. No-dig methods are not an option here as iris barbata does not tolerate high concentration of nitrogen, so excessive mulching with compost would not make sense. Fencing the garden proper is a necessity as it protects the plants from curious deer and boars. However, it is time-consuming since I have decided to use the traditional, now forgotten method of wicker fencing (which my partner characterized as a hybrid between a beaver castle and a stork nest). I do most of the work on the Rainbow Garden proper myself, although I get occasional help from friends based in Kyjov (this is notwithstanding their help on the rest of the 1,25 ha area, which we manage from the previously mentioned grant scheme). The Rainbow Garden beds require regular weeding (iris barbata does not tolerate other plants growing too close to them as their leaves retain moisture which is a breeding ground for fungi (the ideal habitat for iris barbata is basic rocky substrate which I cannot simulate du to financial and technical constraints). I only mow the field surrounding the garden once a year, but the biomass needs to be raked and put away, so that the excessive nitrogen is not deposited in the ground and the biomass does not prevent plants which are weak competitors to grow. As has been already said, biodiversity-rich meadows in fact require low levels of nutrients.
In 2023, I organized the first event whose aim was to bring life to the garden and start the process of giving it a social dimension . Although I distributed posters in my hometown and a few surrounding villages inviting the public for “A Rainbow Picnic in a Rainbow Garden,” no strangers turned up on the day of the event. Maybe this was because only coordinates were given on the poster and no other information was included? Probably not, as other queer events I have organized in my town, such as lectures or picnics, were also scarcely attended. Nevertheless, those of us who came to the garden enjoyed every bit of the picnic and the first session of the flower beds reading.
What I knew I wanted to improve for the following year was channeling the promotion via queer organisations in Brno, especially the Brno Pride Week event. This way, not just the immediate circle of friends would attend but also queer strangers who might be attracted by the location or the character of the event. I also decided that I would stage two different events at the blooming time of the irises - one for the general public and one for queer people who would gain in the separate event the comfort of safer space. Unfortunately, as the spring was progressing, there were signs everywhere that the blooming season in 2024 would be at least a month ahead, so it would not be possible to align it with the dates of the Brno Pride Week. Eventually, I had to invite people for the queer picnic personally via messenger and emails, which made it impossible to turn up both for complete strangers or for friends or acquaintances who might be closeted queers or straight allies and ideally would have been recruited by the neutral, impersonal promotion of the event being an official part of the Brno Pride Week program. As it turned out, some people mixed up the dates since the events were happening on the same weekend.
Since 2020, The Rainbow Garden in Kameníky by Kyjov has slowly taken its intended shape. Like other artist gardens, I envision it to be a long-term project. Ian Hammilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungenness, Nicky De Saint Phalle’s Tarrot Garden in Tuscany, or Lech Wilczek”s garden in the Bielawiez Forrest were built over decades (and with helpers). Their shape was perfect to the visitors, but perhaps never perfect to their creators who labored daily on these gardens. Most of them are adjacent to their creator’s houses, so regular (if not daily) work in short intervals was possible. In contrast to the highly aestheticised gardens mentioned above, The Rainbow Garden still looks like a field within a field, it still lacks structures (such as paving), complex textures or microhabitats formed by shrubs or larger trees.
It was only in the process of building the garden as such that I realized it has to acquire social layers, and shared memories in order to mean anything at all. The symbolic meaning I have wanted to bestow on this garden was that of being dedicated to queerness. Queer spatial practices are inevitably wedged into existing structures, they are precarious and oppositional, sometimes negotiated (as in queer bars which were tolerated by the owners), sometimes taken without permit (such as cruising areas). TTypically, they are urban locations with notable exceptions such as Ecosexual weddings by Beth Stevens and Annie Sprinkle, the Hungarian village community of lesbian women documented in Mária Takác’s film Secret Years, the Radical Faeries communities, and possibly a few others. Open country landscape, however, is overwritten with power relations just as well. BIPOC people, for instance, face prejudice when they want to experience the countryside as hikers. Heterosexuality is written in every fiber of the society, including tourist infrastructure. According to social geographer Gill Valentine, “repetitive performances of hegemonic asymmetrical gender congeal over time to produce the appearance that the street is normally a heterosexual place.” Even though Valentine’s assertion refers to urban environments, parallels can be found in the vast majority of open, outdoor public space - with notable exceptions, such as cruising areas as discussed above. Tourism and specifically hiking in Central Europe is practiced along the lines of family, youth organisations, informal groups of friends, elderly people clubs, or even formally, for instance under the auspices of the Czech Tourist Club. None of these social constellations even remotely acknowledge queer sociability, perhaps with the exception of informal groups of friends.
On top of that, the ideological marks of Christianity in the forms of small chapels and crosses are ubiquitous in the Central European landscape. If places dedicated to queerness are scarce in urban contexts, they are practically non-existent in rural ones. One of the goals of my Rainbow Garden revealed itself to me as I was in the process of creating the garden: in fact, it could be also understood as a memorial to queerness, a cultural resignification, or as a symbolic sanctuary which is not hidden but is accessible 24/7 and visible from everywhere.As of now, the Rainbow Garden in Kameníky u Kyjova refers to the queer symbolic only by a little gate painted in the colors of the rainbow flag, but I have also started installing a set of signs imitating tourist signposts which are executed in fired enamel on metal posts. I was inspired for this interventionist strategy by groups such as REPO history which in the 1990s placed signs informing on oppositional history of urban places in New York, Chicago, and other American cities.
My signs are placed next to the official tourist signs close to the location of The Rainbow Garden and appropriate and redefine the traditional coding of the signage of Czech and Slovak hiking routes whose dense network is marked by yellow, green, red, and blue colors. My signs are also color-coded, but unlike the official tourist signage which only uses one color for one route, they incorporate the rainbow flag instead. They are in fact a play on Sara Ahmed’s notion of “disorientation,” or, as I would rather say, re-orientation, in this case not of a life trajectory, but of spatial trajectory. Walkers are offered one more route on top of the existing ones - one that leads to my Rainbow Garden.
