What is Oakland Garden Club?

Oakland Garden Club is a seedling. We’re going to publish streetwear and tiny books with writers and artists about particular minds meeting particular plants.

This newsletter will consist of mini-essays, crônicas, dispatches from the more-than-human world. I’ll write some, and we’ll share others’ work as well. Plants do good things for your mind: they cultivate long attention, local awareness, and seasonal reflection.

OGC is for people who love plants as plants, but also as portals to different ways of being, entangled global histories, and long human culture.

Why plants?

Plants can retune our attention to different ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Raising plants is an act of care. Sharing seeds and cuttings builds community. Plants are beautiful. Animals like ourselves have an irreducible attraction to their patterns and smells that reaches far back beyond the first human.

Deepening our relationship with plants is not only about how to care for their physical needs. Plants span the botanical and the cultural. Plants offer routes into difficult, but beautiful transnational histories. Plants, with their radically different sense of time, can help us unstick from gridded, quantified time that has ruled our days since we began to burn ancient plants to speed production. Plants are the underlying basis of life on earth, beings attuned precisely to the sun’s rays and our earth’s subterranean potentials. Some plants will outlive us by 50 generations. Others germinate, live, and die in the span of time it takes to read just one fat book. 

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Let’s Be Fronds

Why Oakland Garden Club? Is this just for Oakland people?

Well, everything must be rooted somewhere, and we are here. BUT living in this dynamic, radical place next door to the future gives us a certain perspective. It’s one that captures a lot of our approach to plants. We’re not trying to center white suburban homeowners in this work, as so much garden/nature/botanical content and products do. Oakland Garden Club is for everyone, whether you can grow one succulent in a pot in your sharehouse or you have a vast native pollinator garden somewhere in the hills or you hate gardening but lovingly catalog the wildflowers you’ve met. 

Why Oakland Garden Club? Is this just for gardeners?

Gardening has taken on a certain cast, hasn’t it? Picture a gardener and you probably both imagine a demographic (whether you are in or outside it) and a kind of activity. Let’s call this the petunia view of gardening (nothing against petunias or Petunias). But if there’s one thing that’s become ever more clear in recent anthropological research: indigenous peoples all over the world, and at different times, did not just “live in nature,” but actively tended it. The very spot where downtown Oakland now sits was an actively managed oak forest/garden tended by the Ohlone peoples who lived here for many, many generations. The Mayans of the Yucatan actively selected useful plants in what might look to the untrained eye like a wild jungle

Take the perspective even wider: a garden is a place where humans work with the soil and sun and biota to produce more life, more beauty. We may take from the garden—flowers, herbs, food—but we do not consume the garden itself. We give to the garden and the garden gives to us. The nature of the relationship is reciprocal, not solely extractive.  

In that sense, the hills of the East Bay or our country’s national parks or a random abandoned lot can be a garden. This is a way of seeing the landscape that—unlike “nature”—explicitly requires humans. Not any old humans, but caretakers. Us. 

Why Oakland Garden Club?

It’s nice to be part of something. Join us. There’s a membership card in it for you. We’ll even laminate it. And eventually, we’ll have events, too. We dream of honoring Odette Pollar’s Plant Exchange by helping others connect the way she did for years. 

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a newsletter about plants as plants and plants as portals

People

Host of KQED's Forum, proprietor of Oakland Garden Club, writer