Dr Matilda Arvidsson

26 June, 2024

As part of my research and posthuman feminist practice of inter- and intra-species kinship I have worked on plants and gardens.

Gardens and gardening can be found across the globe: in peoples backyards as well as in the integrated features of architectural designs – including those of public institutions. It is a common hobby and a field of academic study in theory and practice in its own right. Gardening is also a common metaphor in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world, with the Garden of Eden as a placeholder for innocence, enclosure and ultimately expulsion resulting in a yearning for a return to the state of origins and innocence.

Embodying Law in the Garden

Coming from a place of trauma and recovery through reading Louise Glück’s much praised book of poems The Wild Iris, Rick Barot’s poem On Gardens, and by spending time among plants both out- and indoors, I have written on Law’s gardens – or the Jurisprudence of Gardens: in Embodying Law in the Garden (2013) I return to the entomology of the garden, to note – with Peter Goodrich – its Indo-European root of gher ‘fence’ and ghort ‘enclosure’, and law’s (en)closure to its Latin root claudo meaning close, end, but also death. In ‘Emboyding Law’ I write on my experience of entering the Office of Law as a junior judge – and the paradox and pain of embodying a law that is not there to be just and fair but is also part of a design of violence, suffering and destruction. Closure, death and destruction was mirrored by the two enwalled gardens at the Court where I served: one official garden and one office garden. Both of which I sought out and metaphorically and to find solitude and kinship: even in the ordered, stylized official court garden architecture there was disorder and there was encounters through which touch took place. Because the living come with roots that we cannot see, and that will not be tamed. And the pollinators of the garden do not emerge from the garden itself: they see no limits in a fence or an enclosure. Life in the garden – also that of law’s garden – is dependent on that and those who cannot and will not be ordered and tamed, but on whose existence – in turn – life, law and gardens depend.

Gendered and Colonial Violence: On Gardens

In On Gardens of the Anthropocene: Gendered Violence, Colonial Legal Enclosures, and Feminist Posthuman Kinship (2025), I draw on Barot’s On Gardens to revisit the gardens of my childhood and ancestry: finding warmongers and settler colonialists as part of my own heritage. I revisit law’s gardens to find a micro history of fruit and vegetable gardens as part of mid last century court house architectures. I revisit colonial botanical practices and my strong kinship bond with plants with whom I’ve lived. I find violence and destruction, but also the conditions of life as part of decomposition, of more-than-human relations, and not the least posthuman feminist kinship of joy! This is a paper which I have presented – or rather performed as a reading – in Rome at the Instituto Svizzero – by invitation from Marie Petersmann – at the Nordic Law and Gender Conference, in Gothenburg 2023, and at the Sisterhood in International Law workshop, in Marmande, France, by invitation from Immi Tallgren. Because of its explicit discussions of gendered violence and its interlinkages with colonialism, consumerism and extractionism in the Anthropocene, it is a text that calls for change – immediate and long term: end sexual violence, end sexual violence in academia, end patriarchy, end settler-colonialism, end occupation, end specisism, end racism, end fascism, end extractivism, end capitalist-exploitation, end violence, join posthuman feminist transversal alliances of kinship, mutual respect and joyful living!

Law’s Architecture: The Garden of Multitudes

In A Jurisprudence of Gardens: International Law, Architecture, and Garden of Multitudes, forthcoming in Renske Voss, Sofia Stolk and Miriam Bak McKenna (eds) International Law and Architecture (Edgar Publishing, 2025), I focus on courthouse gardens as part of international law’s architecture. Drawing on Miriam Bak McKenna’s work on international law and architecture, as well as garden theory and posthuman feminist theory and scholarship I explore gardens as central to the architectural design and lives of international law and its institutions. Gardens are materializations of central concepts and practices of international law: colonialism (from Latin: inhabit, till, and cultivate), racism, specicism and tyranny, but also relations across apparent and invisible borders, corporation, communication and exchange. I revisit this through the design of the gardens at the UN Headquarters on Manhattan, New York; through the garden at the Peace Palace at the Hague (whose gardener still lives on-site); through the history and practices of the botanic garden in international law, and through revisiting the tyrannic ideology of the gardens at Versailles, France. These are all gardens where life and death are designed as part of international law’s architecture. Instead of international law’s settler-colonial aluminum-glass-marble garden with “peoples of the world” on display, its decorative-botanical-racist, and its gardens of imperial tyranny and pride, I envision a different jurisprudence of gardens for international law: one built on inter- and intra-species, more-than-human relations of care and mutual aid; one that prioritize beds of kale to feed the hungry before minutely weeded beds of roses (the roses can live too, but not to the pleasure of the wealthy’s eyes alone and at the expense of those in need of basic food and shelter), and one that asks of all of us to enter into transversal alliances of respect in kinship.

In an interview, Being Together – The Silent Healing Touch of Plants. A Posthuman Account of Life, Death, and More-than-Human Kinship (2024), in Anna Grear’s podcast series The Fatigue Files, I expand on human-plant kinship as part of law, life and death.

On Living after Death

Glück does something unexpected if not in poetry, so at least in the broader context of how one is to relate to plants: she speaks from within the experience of the plant itself, taking on the voice of the wild iris:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Louise Glück, ‘The Wild Iris,’ two first stanzas

This voice has not only spoken to me, but it speaks of a particular experience I share with too many (women): of returning to life after a traumatic near-death. Hear me out: that which you call gendered violence, I remember.

The gendered experience of violence and the rage that comes with having to survive knowing that there is no greater justice to be had in this world, is not lost on Glück:

WITCHGRASS

Something
comes into this world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder –

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything –

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
one enemy –

I’m not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can’t rest until
you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion –

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and the moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

Louise Glück, ‘Witchgrass’, in The Wild Iris, pp. 22-23.

Constituting the field is not about marking out a territory to own and master nature/culture/others (or even an academic ‘field’). It is about embracing the ‘disorder’ of multitude as the foundation of life together; to embrace sturdiness and to refuse to be ‘weeded out’, and to realize (realize that it is Real) that we, as Rosi Braidotti puts it, are in this together, but we are not one and the same.

ON GARDENS
By Rick Barot

When I read about the garden
designed to bloom only white flowers,
I think about the Spanish friar who saw one
of my grandmothers, two hundred years
removed, and fucked her. If you look
at the word colony far enough, you see it
traveling back to the Latin
of inhabit, till, and cultivate. Words

that would have meant something
to the friar, walking among the village girls
as though in a field of flowers, knowing
that fucking was one way of   having
a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow
falling, which means that every
angry thought is as short-lived as a match.
The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the tree
stump, snow on the azalea bushes,
their leaves hanging down like green
bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair
to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics
of a garden, but somewhere between
what the eye sees and what the mind thinks
is the world, landscapes mangled
into sentences, one color read into rage.
When the neighbors complained
the roots of our cypress were buckling
their lot, my landlord cut the tree down.
I didn’t know a living thing three stories high
could be so silent, until it was gone.
Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light
in the windows, as though every sheet

of glass was having a migraine.
When I think about that grandmother
whose name I don’t even know, I think of
what it would mean to make a garden
that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas
of deepest purple, tulips like ravens.
Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks
poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops,

I walk to see the quiet that has colonized
everything. The main street is asleep, except
for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.
There are sheet cakes of  snow on top
of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn
is as clean as paper, except where the first cat
or raccoon has walked across, each track
like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

Source: Poetry Magazine (May 2013)