A menagerie of tiny plant books

and associated ephemera including a field guide to bacteria from the San Francisco Art Book Fair

OGC is, right now, this newsletter you are reading, but the wheels are in motion to begin publishing tiny books and streetwear later this year. I’m in talks with two brilliant artists and a rad design firm. Y’all have put several thousand dollars towards the project (?!). I’m also trying to link up with the other publishers of tiny books and interesting plant things. So, on the one truly hot day of the year, I made the voyage across (the parking lot known as) the Bay Bridge to the San Francisco Art Book Fair in (the) Dogpatch.

Inside the sweaty building that housed most of the smaller creators, I circulated past tables filled with beautiful things and punk things, horny prints and delicate editions. This is my true and full account of the most interesting plant and plant-adjacent things I found there, understanding I probably missed a lot (and would love to hear about other things!). Quite a haul, tho.

I have to start with Alex Arzt’s Becoming Naturalized to Place. The surge of recognition that I felt on seeing her project! This is the kind of tiny book I hope Oakland Garden Club will produce. The work details Arzt’s deepening relationship with California’s feral cabbages. Yes, feral cabbages. Turns out that at Point Bonita, a cabbage “likely escaped the garden of the wife of a lighthouse keeper at the turn of the century and has since established an isolated, naturalized cabbage community on a narrow basalt headland.”

Drawn to these plants for reasons that she both explains and (from my perspective) nobody could totally explain, she begins to grow them in the garden of the house she rents in Oakland. “There are at least five morphologically unique feral cabbage populations on the California coast,” she explains. “I am breeding the five all together and selecting for plants that do the best under the most challenging conditions with the intention of sharing seeds.”

The cabbages become her way of burrowing into the place she lives, creating a “deep map,” a term she borrows from William Least Heat-Moon, and which he describes as “a way to be conscious of a place in such a manner as to hold multiple layers of understanding.” Through her “long-term engagement with feral cabbages” she develops “a personal place-based land ethic: giving sustained attention to and caring for plants can reveal unknown histories and relationships, novel ways of being, and new avenues of survival.”

She tests the soil of her home and finds that the land has been polluted by lead. “Learning of the contamination created a shift in my relationship to the land here, which is both poisonous and life-giving. I became afraid of it, and I wanted to immerse myself in it, to continue our ongoing collaboration,” she writes. “In this dichotomy lies a confusing kind of grief.”

This book is serious. It complicates the simple categories of native and invasive and domesticated. You can feel that she has spent time with these plants, and that this quality of attention is what gives her words their weight. She has earned her grief by playing her role in the multispecies story of these cabbages. If you can’t tell, I love this project. I’m not sure how you can buy it, but you can read all about the installation, Feral, that led to the publication. And Arzt maintains a press, too: A Magic Mountain.

There were ever tinier things I loved, too, like Cortney Cassidy’s feels-y walks through the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. They capture some very beautiful moments between her and the plants, and between her and … her other selves. These books are from Issue Press, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and publisher of many other beautiful things. Their covers rule. I’m not totally sure about plants, but Cassidy feels and feels very well (“my moods are looking for the things I need, just like roots”). Are you soft enough?

Now I can’t wait any longer to introduce you to Floral Observer, a risograph newspaper “all about observing the natural world around us,” from Taxonomy Press in Detroit. Floral Observer feels old-timey and 90s Portland and trans-pandemic and highly seasonal all at once. The essays are tight and interesting and warm; the art is estranged and enriched by the riso printing technique.

The little classified section on the back is darling. But what really got me was the I SAW YOU section, which is a missed connections for the more-than-human world. Genius. This idea is so perfect, it is as if it has always existed.

“Little baby crocus that survived the graveling in the spring. You popped up from the stones and looked surprised that you were the only one left. You waved your arms and I could see you thinking that the new rocks made you feel just a little more green. Kathleen, Guilford, CT.”

“Woodchuck scrambling between two abandoned houses. Love to see you rewilding these ruins. Sorry I thought you were an ugly cat. Rachel, Detroit”

“Walking in the woods, I stooped to tie my shoelaces. I saw you, a yearling in your shaggy late winter coat, big wet eyes staring inquisitively. I got closer until I could almost reach out and touch your soft fur. Your steady gaze never wavered. You turend to go at last, then turned towards me and ambled past slowly, then disappeared in the woods. Alicia Sointula, BC”

I am adding mine, post-publication: “Fennel over by the encampment. How are you so vital in the places that kill everything else? What secrets lie within the supposedly dormant parts of your heart genome? Maybe one day, you can whisper to me about how to thrive in chaos, despite everything? Will I hear you? Am I soft enough? Alexis, Oakland.”

Feel free to leave some I SAW YOUs and I’ll send them to Rachel Hays, proprietor of Floral Observer.

Here she is, in jacaranda purple, surrounded by her creations.

I have to shout out Berkeley’s Deep Time Press, too. The raw beauty of their editions was unmatched on the floor. They have this geological/astronomical focus, and that foundation seems to ground the different pieces they make. I picked up Tamara Suarez Porras’ postcard poem series, What Has Become of the Lost Pleiad? They are way too beautiful to send to anyone. Like, if you got one of these, you wouldn’t put it on the fridge with a magnet. You’d frame it and put it near your bed, so you could go to sleep and wake up staring at it. (Though if you are reading this and you subscribe and send me your address, I will send you one via the United States Postal Service.)

Speaking of beautiful things: I bought a print from Nicole Lavalle, which led me to this awesome Detroit publisher, Flower Press, which led me to their zine Houseplants for All and An Intuitive Guide to Connecting with the Earth Wherever You Live by maribeth helen keane. And Lavelle’s fascinating work on “the teeming lineage of hyper-local collective publishing endeavors in West Marin,” then led me to the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History, one of those strange labors of love for which the word quixotic was invented. How did I not know about these things before?

(Why have I seen so many TikToks in my life while not on TikTok? How many Instagram skincare ads equal one teeming lineage of hyper-local collective publishing endeavors? Could I throw my phone in the ocean on a bi-weekly basis?)

Finally, two works that are more plant-adjacent than plant. Oakland’s Amy Burek has produced My Favorite Microbes: A Bacteria Field Guide. She was actually a biologist working in a lab, so this isn’t some wikipedia stuff. The choices are funny and the little one paragraph writeups are fascinating. Her press is called Awkward Ladies Club. And then there is Madi Giovina’s intriguing short short story collection, Crying in Public and other stories. Giovina is working in a magical realist vein, but her world is not one that I had seen built before. Worth reading!

And finally, finally… not plant related really, but streetwear adjacent… Can Can Press from Mexico City had such ferocious, smart, hilarious energy. Capital city creative confidence. At a book fair just saturated with people doing cool things, they were the coolest (IMHO) and they barely seemed like they were trying. I bought a shirt and a Talk to Plants (Or Not) notebook, and you should be jealous. Earthing is hot.