gardening

April through November, most of my daylight hours are spent in urban gardens. I have a certificate in horticulture from Brooklyn Botanic Garden and recently started sonnet landscapes together with my wife, the Brazilian artist Joana O Leary. I provide garden maintenance and design and we are simultaneously developing an artistic-curatorial project under the same name. With sonnet landscapes, we explore issues related to the allure of tropical nature in colder climes, and question its commodification and domestification outside of the southern hemisphere.

In my own little garden, on a balcony 13 floors above the East River, I center sustainable and ecological practices, planting perennials and native plants, as well as consumables like herbs and vegetables. I marvel at the regenerative process of the biosphere — how leaves become nutrient rich fertilizer once they fall and are winter homes for sleeping insects, how roots communicate with each other underground and share space, how vines climb, how blooms summon creatures by wing, foot, and wiggle to an otherwise concrete patch of sidewalk. This inflects what I read^*, write, plant, eat.

For more, visit sonnetlandscapes.com

**^* some things on my bookshelf …**

Sam Bittman, Seeds _{New York: Bantam Books, 1989}
Lauren Camilleri and Sophia Kaplan, Plantopedia: The Definitive Guide to Plants _{Melbourne: Smith Street Books, 2020}
Karel Čapek, The Gardener’s Year _{New York: Modern Library, 2002}(Originally published in Czech in 1929.)
Hilton Carter, The Propagation Handbook _{London: CICO Books, 2024}
Graham Clarke and Alan Toogood, The Complete Book of Plant Propagation _{London: Ward Lock, 1992}
Laurie Cluitmans, ed., On the Necessity of Gardening: An Art, Botany and Cultivation _{Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021}
Grace Gershuny, Start with the Soil _{Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1993}
Jennifer Jewell, What We Sow _{Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2023}
Ken Layne, Desert Oracle _{New York: Picador, 2020}
Donald J. Leopold, Native Plants of the Northeast _{Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005}
Gary Lewis, The Complete Book of Ground Covers _{Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005}
Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature _{London: Reaction Books, 2001}
Mary Oliver, Upstream _{New York: Penguin, 2016}
Japira Pataxó (Antônia Braz Santana), Saberes dos matos Pataxó _{Belo Horizonte, MG: Teia dos Povos, Piseagrama, 2022}
Leah Penniman, Farming While Black _{Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018}
Stella Sandford, Vegetal Sex _{London: Bloomsbury, 2023}
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass _{Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2015}
Claire Tuna, Fugitive Gardens: How to Grow Food on an NYC Fire Escape _{Portland, OR: Microcosm Publishing, 2020}