I found this project to be interesting and surprising. When I was assigned “gardens” as a topic, I was excited but also hesitant. I wasn’t sure how I was going to approach gardens from a critical lens. After a couple false starts down different paths, I found an exploration into native species, invasive species, and rewilding to be a generative topic for me. I enjoyed thinking of different ways to communicate ideas that I learned from my research. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed researching gardens and nature. I had a lot of fun reading about the different plants, rewilding efforts around the world, and controversy about how we think of plants and nature. For a complete bibliography, see below.
The feedback I received on my atlas was generally positive. The biggest piece of constructive feedback was that the second piece in my diptych, the one about native flowers and plants, was not developed. I completely agree — it was the one I had thought about much less, and it didn’t fully fit into my overall theme or visual language. Since sharing my work with the class, I have done a revision on that piece in order to make it fit more with the visual language and to incorporate more thoughtful text into the image. I’m not totally sure that it’s all the way there, but I feel that it is much closer. Here are the two final pieces, and a link with thumbnails and an appendix below:

Link to the atlas: https://bubble-nemophila-4cd.notion.site/Garden-Atlas-b5907c31acea4750b6827b12ab98e1c8
Balancing the research and the experimentation was challenging. I dug into the research and had so much fun with it that I didn’t start experimenting soon enough. I really loved the experimentation once I began, and next time I will begin this process much sooner. I can see how the research and the experimentation could really exist as a conversation, and I am excited to attempt that mode in the future.
I think that my guide did a reasonably good job of following the prompt. My lens through which I presented the topic was the lens of the plants. I was attempting to have the plants give some advice, so in that sense I suppose it is usable. And my hope is that it brings to light some of the complicated — and maybe misguided — ways that we think about different plant species. I hope it also helps people notice the plants around them more, even the unassuming plants.
One thing that I could have developed further is the audience. I had not considered the possibility that the plants would be communicating to each other, and I thought that was a really interesting suggestion that might be fun to play with.
Bibliography
Beveridge, Ross, et al. “From wastelands to waiting lands.” City, 26:2-3, 281-303. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2022.2040200
Kumar, Rishi. “Nature Does Not Exist.” Farmer Rishi, June 19, 2021, https://farmerrishi.com/blogs/farmer-rishi/nature-does-not-exist
Lawton, Philip et al. “Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin.” The AAG Review of Books, 7:3, 214-227. 2019. DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2019.1615328
Nugent, Ciara. “Take a Walk on the Rewilding Side.” Time. September 13, 2019. https://www.scribd.com/article/433010469/Take-A-Walk-On-The-Rewilding-Side
Rivera, Fernando O. “Urban Wilderness: Rewilding our Concrete Jungles.” Crit, no. 88, 2021, pp. 66-69. ProQuest, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fscholarly-journals%2Furban-wilderness-rewilding-our-concrete-jungles%2Fdocview%2F2546190734%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D12768.
Sturgeon, Amanda. “Rewilding: Stepping Back to Take Action.” Architecture Australia, July 2022. https://architectureau.com/articles/rewilding-stepping-back-to-take-action/#:~:text=Economically%20driven%20development%20has%20left,help%20our%20natural%20systems%20recover.
Westrem, Scott D. “Making a Mappamundi: The Hereford Map.” Terrae Incognitae, 34:1, 19-33. 2022. DOI: 10.1179/tin.2002.34.1.19
Woodward, David. “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 75, no. 4, 1985, pp. 510–21. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2563109. Accessed 15 Sept. 2022.
Zefferman, Emily P., et al. “Knoxville’s urban wilderness: Moving toward sustainable multifunctional management.” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening in Elsevier, September, 8, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2017.09.002