Burial Garden (2015)
Duck (2014).
Conceived by:
Kathy High
Burial Garden (2015)
Color photographs documenting performance with drawing/plan
In Becoming A Plant: Resurrection Project, I design a garden to oversee my natural burial gravesite. The plants are chosen based on their common names – and the poetry (or irony) of those names. So, for example, the outermost part of the circle will include perennials such as Turtlehead (Chelone glabra), Sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale), and False sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides). The next circle of plants will include grasses and rushes names Switch grass (Panicum virgatum), Sweet grass (Hierochloe odorata), Soft Rush (Juncus effuses), Sensitive Ferns (Onoclea sensibilis), and so on. These plants will make up my ‘headstone’ and grave marker – a plant poem representing different aspects of my life – from the coy to the innocent, the intuitive to the jaded. I will continue to include other indigenous plants to flesh out other aspects of my personality, researching the plants’ various properties.
To date, I have been experimenting with plantings to test this garden. To promote growth and honor the dead with burial, I have placed animal carcasses that my cats have hunted under the flora. This is death, and decomposition at work: organisms devouring each other in a constant process of symbiosis – things eating things, exchanging, becoming. This is a process of naturally buried human bodies becoming plant – with no regrets.
