Monthly Archives: February 2010

Rhizome and the Plot

The Allotment Plot’s specificity is plant life growing at a Place which contains the Plot. The Place and its multiplicity is fold and refolded. The plant life’s roots and radicles are growing around the groundwork of the Plot. The Art Practice is wrapped with roots that radiate and shoot. All plant life being in its specificity not entirely rhizomatic.

allotment46 Tiny Pepper Plants Tomato Growing

“A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic.” (Deleuze & Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus).

A Caterpillar

Why is the caterpillar on the broadbean plant at the allotment plot in February? Where has it grown from? Surely no butterfly has fluttered by and perched long enough to deliver eggs that have then grown over a week into a fat caterpillar? Or has the caterpillar overwintered on the broadbeans surviving the chill of winter, choosing not to turn into a crysalis or to evolve into a moth or butterfly? Was the caterpillar found by a passing bird that spied a worm so dropped the caterpillar into the broadbean leaf to cradle? The multiplicity of event occurs and mystery at the allotment plot.

Caterpillar

Studio Re-potting

The first seedlings were re-potted in the studio allotment on the 4th February. The tiny seedlings were tentatively dug out of their plug trays with a spoon, then delicately transplanted into the waiting earth in their new (recycled) pots. Their radicles (embryonic roots) were carefully covered. Their hypocotyls (embryonic shoots) uncertainly sitting weakly in the soil, bowed under the weight of their new cotyledons (seed leaves). Quantities of germinated seedlings were recorded.

Seedling Re-potting

Seedlings germinated and re-potted: 13 Tomato Zuckertraube, 12 Tomato Gardeners Delight, 6 Tomato Chadwick, 4 Nastirum, 5 Cosmos, 2 Carnations, 5 Pot Marigold, 4 Flat Parsley, 5 Sweetpeas, 2 Sage.

Not all the seedlings had sprouted. Only one onion had sent a slender green spike out of the soil. No Aubergine or peppers had appeared, their radical transformation from dormant seeds to photomorphogenesis would seem to be delayed in transmission by an undetermined set of reasons that can only be speculated but would seem rooted in probability.

Re-potted