A garden across disciplines
Reading a ground this layered takes more than one discipline. The residency crosses landscape architecture, soil science, botany, and ethnography - the multidisciplinary method the Amarte development grant sets out to support - each a different way into the same garden. Its clock is set by the people who hold it: Maarten and Monic have tended one plot for fifty-five years, and their sense of it - "the garden is never over" - runs through everything the Index records.
It begins with the community's marks: the portals, bells, and salvaged thresholds each gardener sets at the edge of a plot - an index of how a shared ground is claimed and tended, one gate at a time.
Foraging builds a herbarium across the garden's gradient, from cultivated bed to spontaneous ditch-edge, seasonal petals and found materials pressed alongside.Coring opens the ground itself, tracing the shift from worked soil to marine clay to peat - later filtered, stored, and re-wetted to let the buried seedbank surface.From these readings, in exchange with ceramicist Esther Hoogendijk - whose practice makes time and natural forces visible in cast objects - the Index begins to take material form: a set of pieces meant to hold the garden's strata, its ground cover, and its rhythm of decay and return.