Learning from Plants – on gardeners’ expertise

Gardeners are experts on plants, on how to care for them and to live together with them. Their expertise grows from seemingly mundane yet intimate encounters with plants and is highly specific and significant, yet often overlooked and underappreciated. By paying attention to gardeners’ everyday practices, Cornelia Ertl explores how expertise in plants and their care unfolds within more-than-human dynamics of interacting and relies on the abilities to attune to and respond to vegetal being(s) – to develop “a feeling for the plant”, as gardeners call it.

Cornelia Ertl is a social and cultural anthropologist with a focus on the perception and shaping of more-than-human environments, marginalized forms of knowledge and plant-human entanglements. In her PhD dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin, she sheds light on the significance of ambiguities in everyday practices of plant care at the Botanic Garden Berlin and on the complexity of gardeners’ expertise. Previously, Cornelia studied social and cultural anthropology and ethnology in Berlin and Munich, focusing primarily on the interrelationships between grown, built and social environments in the rural Amazon region. Other fields of interest are more-than-human care dynamics, critical plant studies, and sensory ethnography, as well as artistic and speculative approaches to exploring and imagining shared worlds. Contact: cornelia.ertl(at)web.de

You can watch a video of the talk here.