Building the garden both from material, conceptual, and social blocks, I have in mind other gardens made and maintained by queer visual artists for whom these places had multiple significances. Cedric Morris’s and Arthur Lett Haynes’s Benton End house and garden represented in the four decade of its existence sanctuary, inspiration, and island of alterity for the scores of students and visitors of the painting school that the pair ran there. Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungenness represented for the filmmaker a solace in the face of inevitable death he was facing after having been diagnosed with AIDS. Integrating the garden in the open landscape - a shingle desert and a nearby nuclear power station - needed unorthodox imagination. The garden and the Dungeness beach played a role of Biblical desert landscape in which the suffering of victims of contemporary homophobia is narrated as a parallel to the passions of Christ in the film Garden (1990).Gardens made by and for queer communities in contemporary United States are documented in Ella von der Heide’s film Queer Gardening in which the protagonists emphasize the irreplaceable role their garden has played for them both as a place for community gathering that is safe and that enables them to maintain ties with natural processes and food production.
The aforementioned dimensions of queerness in gardening pertain predominantly to the characters of the gardeners as queer persons; however, texts written about Morris and Jarman also emphasize the unorthodox approaches to plant selection, composition, and design that was characteristic for these artists. Morris was a famous iris breeder, an avid plant collector and he brought numerous unusual taxa to Benton End from his travels to Southern Europe. His unique gardening style had a lasting impact on legendary garden designer Beth Chato. Jarman’s gardening in the desert, despite the odds of the climate and other limiting conditions required not only patience to experiment, but also open mind and free imagination. In this respect, their approach to gardening may be also characterized as queer - being the norms, doing the unexpected.
Humanities scholars (Timothy Morton, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and others) who operate with the notions of queer ecologies or of queer natures discuss both the unruly, non-binary, entangled, non-linear, intra-active character of life or even physical processes. Others explore ways in which queer people have related to the living environment, or on the other hand, how certain versions of nature were or have been deemed impure, contaminated, disorderly and have faced eradicating or “revitalizing” campaigns as they have been perceived as threatening the cultural images of “proper” nature. Parallels can be drawn with the rhetoric revolving around the “unnaturalness” of queer existence. The examples of “double” heterotopias of neglected urban cemeteries may be case in point: if Foucault lists gardens and cemeteries as examples of heterotopias as in themselves they contain a dense, miniature, but at the same time parallel version of the world - but one where different rules apply - then neglected cemeteries in the midst of cities constitute an amplified version of this unruliness. Social geographer Matthew Gandy discusses the varied natural and social processes unfolding in Abney park in London, where a wild, ancient, and overgrown forest has taken over a former cemetery; because of lack of
maintenance, the park has developed into a hotspot of biodiversity, but has at the same time become a popular cruising site for gay men due to its labyrinthine-like character. Elena Antoniolli writes in a similar vein about old Berlin cemeteries with low-maintenance regime, due to which there is an abundance of decaying wood and shrubs providing varied habitats for birds, small mammals, invertebrates, and mushrooms. In fact, these cemeteries teem with much richer wildlife than ordinary commercial forests. The wildness of these cemeteries also stands in stark contrast to manicured and well-maintained municipal parks where social and natural interactions are strictly controlled and normalized social values are upheld. Jack Halberstam understands the relationship between queerness and wildness even further, proposing that the two are closely interlinked; wildness, in his terms, does not only mean opposite to domesticated, but as spontaneous, disorderly, defying, and resistant mode of existence.
If queer ecologies should be understood in the above-discussed terms, then the Rainbow Garden project in its ecological aspect would hardly work. For instance, the Iris barbata group are highly domesticated plants - especially their tetraploid varieties. Their flowers have been bred into radically different color combinations, sizes, petal shapes, their stems are much more robust, and the plants are not as vigorous as the ancient varieties of Iris germanica. Visual artist Georg Gessert, who has dedicated a whole book to the history and aesthetics of ornamental plant breeding from the perspective of contemporary art, in fact warns against the idealized notion of wildness perceived as the uncorrupted version of nature which has the sole value. In accordance with numerous anthropological and archaeobotanical findings, humans have been interacting with and shaping their environment and the life paths of non-human entities even dozens of millenia before the neolithic revolution. Rejecting the whole cultural heritage of domesticated plants (and animals) solely on an ideological basis and projecting our ideal existence into some edenic past in which we did not manipulate nature seems as ungrounded in historical facts. Gessert embraces breeding as another artistic discipline, only one which at present works with middle-brow criteria in which standards, rather than extravaganzas rule (flowers must be rounded in shape and as large as possible, taxons imitate one another (for instance tulips imitating peonies), they are with as many petals as possible, with wrinkled edges, etc.).
Understood in the above-discussed context, my garden would work within the queer ecology framework from the perspective of queer gardeners and the community interaction. However, the environmental aspect of the context of the garden in the sense of ecological restoration and maintenance of the grassland habitats that was mentioned earlier in this text represents another layer which is important as well. (However, drawing the line - both the physical and the conceptual one - between the artwork and the conservation project is somewhat difficult. For clarity’s sake, I understand the old fallow/meadow as the conservation project proper and the new meadow I have sown on the arable soil which includes the iris plantings as the artwork as such; I only maintain the artwork with my own funds and predominantly with my own physical labor, whereas the old fallow/meadow is the place where the grant money and the volunteer work goes.)
