In the upcoming semester I will be contributing to the lecture series “Die gehegte Natur – eine transkulturelle Gartengeschichte” with a talk on the history of gardens from the perspective of bees. My talk will take place on 18 July 2024 from 18:00 c.t. – 20:00 hours in HS 1015. I look forward to seeing you there!
Organizers’ description of the topic:
Gardens are mirrors of identities, dreams and visions. They have deep cultural roots and reflect people’s understanding of nature as well as their position within society. In the field of tension between nature and culture, gardens have experienced a plethora of attributions. As “other places”, they were symbolically charged and regarded as ideal places of teaching and knowledge. As real gardens, they served to provide agricultural supplies and fulfilled representative and political functions of princely and bourgeois representation, stimulated botanical research and scholarly sociability and provided the basis for moral education, recreation and health care.
The design of gardens is correspondingly diverse – just think of house and front gardens, fruit, vegetable and herb gardens, botanical gardens, monastery, villa and landscape gardens, the allotment garden and the bourgeois flower window. The diachronic overview and the transcultural comparison of gardens and their protagonists open up new perspectives on forms of transcultural encounters, the exchange of knowledge and the transfer of plants and knowledge. The “Garden Futures” exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein) in 2023 used examples from a wide variety of cultural areas to impressively demonstrate how gardens offer a future perspective as places of the avant-garde, experimental fields for social justice, biodiversity and a sustainable future.