The Wonder Gardens

Under our feet lies a Baroque realm Caravaggio would envy, a great drama of poisons and parasites, slime and decay. Fungi, the great molecular decomposers, generate soil that brings back the dead. Life as it turns out, springs from rot, not flowers. Spider webs and termite mounds are just the tip of the dung pile that begets Nature’s underworld. Kinship in nature is not a peaceable kingdom or a pretty storybook. It is chaos and decadence, a worm-eaten, verminous thriving repast, feasting on detritus and ruin.

Gardening builds creation with every plant or wipes it clean away. A leaf blower kills what composting would conceive. Soil is a storage unit full of secrets, seeds waiting for their days in the sun. Our own itty-bitty backyards are a stage for what the world will be if only we’re brave enough to rip out our parents’ barren lawns and risk disarray.

The Wonder Gardens is our testament to the invigorating pleasures of digging in the earth again, a subterranean garden populated by scavengers. Build your monuments to them instead. They are the life force that stuffs your cupboards. These three artists share their love of what lies underfoot, in the ancient recesses of Pan’s lair. Pan is said to have died when people ceased to worship nature and the wild. We must get on our hands and knees and know the earth again. Restore her to her former glory, those buzzing, blooming, decomposing, ambrosial, fragrant gardens of yore. Let it grow wild, let it all grow wild. Then watch the world come back in again, unafraid.