£4.99
A voyage around 12 flowers and a hands-on plant practice.
Description
What might a plant practice look like and what do plants have to say to us?
From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.
Connecting with plants, whether a huge old oak, wild nettles, curly kale or a sunflower, helps us to be rooted and in touch with the time and place we’re in. It takes us out of the senseless, amnesic repetition of mechanical clock time and into the time of the planet, of seasons and weather. In that rooted Earth time, you stop running around, you get your bearings, you start to remember.
The plants keep us in time; they rise, they scatter seed, they fall. They are where they are. They are in the bigger Now. That’s what they connect us with. They bring us home.
– from ‘Foxglove’, The Plant Pamphlets
With instructions, recipes, and original illustrations by Anne-Marie Culhane. Edited by Charlotte Du Cann.
Mark Watson (1962–2024) consciously worked with plants since the 1990s. As ‘a kind of plant activist, connecting people, plants and places’, he led walks and workshops, gave demonstrations, and hosted talks and conversations with fellow practitioners. He curated a plant medicine bed in the Bungay Community Library garden in Suffolk and taught ‘Plant Dialogues’ as a core part of the Dark Mountain Project and at Schumacher College. This book comes from the seed store of his work.
The Plant Pamphlets is an all-colour softback booklet, 72 pages long, printed on recycled and FSC-certified paper.
