“How many roses barely bloom?” the late French singer Daniel Darc wondered.
We could all count summer petals forgotten between the pages of a book, the bouquets bought too late, the withered poplars on the cusp of spring. There’s the flower that we smothered with care, the groves we’ve never entered, the hedges that watched us grow and the seasons in the city, which we never see .
The Plant Journal, an English review about to release its 4th issue, and Wilder Quarterly, a seasonal publication that released its fifth issue last winter, are both at pains to renew the relationship between its urban readers and nature.
The Plant is notable for: its impeccable art direction; the variety of its contributors, among them photographers Cat Stevens, Scheltens & Abbenes, Wolfgang Tillmans, who were all invited to share their experience with plantlife; the idea was to produce a monograph on a single plant, the camellia, in the third issue; with a focus on the caretakers of gardens and meadows found across the world.
One of the finest virtue of this magnificent collection is how it preserves a sense of chance and disorder in its artistic direction, far removed from the utilitarian aesthetic of a vegetable garden. Looking at these images and their energy, we are reminded of the wanderings of Robert Adams, that tireless surveyor of the same region, the bucolic observer who delighted in moving shadows and the curve of a massif.
If you ripen too quickly, you rot and fall. Throughout its pages, Plant remains tenderly astonished.
Antoine Soubrier
The Plant Journal :
<a href="http://www.theplant.info/Issues/"http://www.theplant.info/Issues/
12 € – Available on March 23rd, 2012
Wilder Quarterly :
http://shop.wilderquarterly.com/collections/single-issues/products/winter-2013
19 $
