A VISION

Why plants?

We believe that our relationships with plants are important. Raising plants is an act of care. Sharing seeds and cuttings builds community. Plants are beautiful. Animals like ourselves have an irreducible attraction to their patterns and smells that reaches far back beyond the first human.

Deepening our relationship with plants is not only about how to care for their physical needs, though it’s nice to reach that level of understanding. Plants span the botanical and the cultural. Plants offer routes into difficult and beautiful transnational histories. Plants, with their radically different sense of time, can help us unstick from gridded, quantified time that has ruled our days since we began to burn ancient plants to speed production. Plants are the underlying basis of life on earth, beings attuned precisely to the sun’s rays and our earth’s subterranean potentials. Some plants will outlive us by 50 generations. Others germinate, live, and die in the span of time it takes to read just one fat book. 

Why tiny books?

Don’t you love a tiny book? The clarity of purpose and generative constraint that comes from only having to fill this much space. It will not be a sprawling tome, a comprehensive history, an encyclopedia (tho perhaps exceptions can be made). No, it will be a dagger of a book, a firecracker, an orchid, a neutron star, a mote of dust—the nucleus of a raindrop that splashes on your forehead and runs down to your mouth, a seed. A lot of idea can fit into a tiny book, but probably only one. 

We do mean more than a short book, though. To us, a tiny book must, physically, be shoveable into a pocket. The tiny book must be held easily with one hand while you sip coffee. The tiny book must be readable in one sitting or savorable for a month. 

Tiny books are also not economical for normal publishers, except in the rarest of circumstances. Why give shelf space to a $10 tiny book, when you could put a $30 bloated book in its place? But the size and shape of a tiny book is perfect. And they should exist in the world, no? 

Why streetwear?

Well, two reasons. First, see above: tiny books don’t work for publishers as a business, generally speaking. 

Second, streetwear spreads and grows. You might call it viral, but I would prefer to think of it as growing like a weed (a good thing). We want to spread plant-mindedness. It feels like an antidote to a deep ache, something in the back between the kidneys and lungs. Tiny books can go far, but t-shirts can go farther. 

What if, though, a t-shirt could also be an idea? There are a lot of streetwear brands that traffic in plant *vibes*. Like, a shirt that just says P L A N T S on it. OK, fine. Others that cut-and-paste random nature-y stuff onto fabric. Also, fine. 

But what if a shirt or a pair of joggers could be a whole argument, an entire explanation, a portal to real understanding of nasturtium or tule reeds or indigo or the Florentine Codex? That would be awesome. And maybe more people would come to closer to the shirt and maybe to the books and ultimately to the plants and what they have to teach us. 

Why Oakland Garden Club? Is this just for Oakland people?

Well, everything must be rooted somewhere, and we are here. BUT living in this dynamic, radical place next door to the future gives us a certain perspective. It’s one that captures a lot of our approach to plants. We’re not trying to center white suburban homeowners in this work, as so much garden/nature/botanical content and products do. Oakland Garden Club is for everyone, whether you can grow one succulent in a pot in your sharehouse or you have a vast native pollinator garden somewhere in the hills or you hate gardening but lovingly catalog the wildflowers you’ve met. 

Why Oakland Garden Club? Is this just for gardeners?

Gardening has taken on a certain cast, hasn’t it? Picture a gardener and you probably both imagine a demographic (whether you are in or outside it) and a kind of activity. Let’s call this the petunia view of gardening (nothing against petunias or Petunias). But if there’s one thing that’s become ever more clear in recent anthropological research: indigenous peoples all over the world, and at different times, did not just “live in nature,” but actively tended it. The very spot where downtown Oakland now sits was an actively managed oak forest/garden tended by the Ohlone peoples who lived here for many, many generations. The Mayans of the Yucatan actively selected useful plants in what might look to the untrained eye like a wild jungle. 

Take the perspective even wider: a garden is a place where humans work with the soil and sun and biota to produce more life, more beauty. We may take from the garden—flowers, herbs, food—but we do not consume the garden itself. We give to the garden and the garden gives to us. The nature of the relationship is reciprocal, not solely extractive. 

In that sense, the hills of the East Bay or our country’s national parks or a random abandoned lot can be a garden. This is a way of seeing the landscape that—unlike “nature”—explicitly requires humans. Not any old humans, but caretakers. Us. 

Why Oakland Garden Club?

It’s nice to be part of something. Join us. There’ll be a membership card in it for you soon. We’ll even laminate it. For now, you can sign up for the newsletter. And eventually, we’ll have events, too. We dream of honoring Odette Pollar’s Plant Exchange by helping others connect the way she did.