Queer botany

I put the Queer Botany salad into ChatGPT Mini, asking it for an explanation, and was given the two options

Response 1
The text describes a project called Queer Botany, which explores the connections between queerness and nature through the lens of queer ecology. This interdisciplinary approach combines queer theory, which examines issues of identity and power, with eco-criticism, which critiques the relationship between culture and the environment. Queer Botany focuses on how the LGBTQ+ community interacts with plant life and aims to uplift marginalized voices within both environmental and outdoor spaces, encouraging more inclusive and diverse representations in these fields.

Response 2
This text describes a project called "Queer Botany," which explores the intersection of LGBTQ+ identity (queerness) and nature, specifically focusing on plants. The project is grounded in "queer ecology," a framework that combines queer theory (which challenges traditional understandings of gender, sexuality, and identity) with eco-criticism (which examines the relationship between literature, culture, and the environment).
Queer Botany emphasizes how LGBTQ+ individuals connect with the natural world, particularly plants, and aims to amplify marginalized voices within both the environmental movement and outdoor spaces. The project seeks to challenge dominant narratives in these areas and promote more inclusive and diverse representations of both nature and LGBTQ+ people.

I was asked which response I preferred. Erm....

I think, perhaps, what the gardener is trying to achieve is a space where LGB and TQ+ people won't be afraid of visiting, will feel positively singled out as special, protected guests. Like a gay bar but garden-y?

I think a lot of people recognise the historical context of gardens - formal knot gardens; highly controlled landscapes; orderly bedding-out; subtly coloured deep borders; conifers and heathers; native plants mixed in with cultivars. All coming in at specific dates. It doesn't take much of leap to add that to what was going on historically and see how the gardens are reflecting cultural shifts.

Derek Jarman wrote about gardening during the AIDS pandemic and linked that to his choice of location between a remote shingle-spit beside a power station. Did Christopher Lloyd's sense (never written about, very reticent on personal topic) of being othered when growing up give him the courage to make the leap of digging out the rose garden and planting terribly unfashionable and brightly clashing dahlias? Probably.

Making beautiful gardens is difficult, making innovative, novel, exciting, gardens even more so.

Often obfuscation to avoid revealing a lack of insight and/or comprehension and/or meaningful and original thought.

Some complex ideas do benefit from careful, expanded, and even difficult language. But some see only the complexity and assume meaning is hidden in the tricksy language itself, rather than the ideas the language points to.

Then some try to offer a smokescreen of obscure and opaque language as a simulacra of profundity.

Finger pointing at moon, I suppose.

I didn't say they were. I said the majority look at gardens and see pretty flowers, not a thesis on lesbian gardeners or the nature of queer botany.
I'm very confident that a vox pop trawl of any UK high street would back me up ..and what's more, you know you agree.

ArminTamzerian yes* *ok. I apologise for saying that your comment was nihilistic. I should've just stuck to the fact that I don't agree with you.

And please, don't tell me to get a bloody grip. We're talking about thinking here, about art and ideas. Your thoughts are not my thoughts.

Don't worry ridiculous. Nihilistic? Please!

The vast majority of people look at gardens and think: what a lovely garden. What nice plants, what pretty flowers. They don't look at a gardens and say, gosh, this garden really speaks to me about the juxtaposition of god and man and the nature of modern sexuality, Vis a Vis queer theory.

Get a bloody grip.

@Shortpoet
Its the difference between someone describing something delightful with humour, and someone creating distance by obscuring meaning and ultimately not saying anything much at all.
YES!
I read something the other day about 'mere empty technique' and thought, yup, that sums up a lot of modern academia/ luvvie-dom. I noticed some years ago a tendency in the social sciences to wrap really simple ideas up in insanely complex wanky, academic language, ideally 6 paragraphs of it, when the idea could be condensed down to a couple of simple sentences in everyday language.

No grants nor kudos in that, however.

Isn't it fantastic?

I LOVE that enormous basin - it is wonderful!

ArminTamzerian said "I would suggest for the vast majority of people the beauty of the garden IS the meaning. There is no other to draw."

What a bleak and nihilistic dismissal. I think @woollyhatter 's beautifully written post above shows how philosophy, curiosity, womanhood, humanity and gardening together make life so much more than mundane, offering delight, fun, contact with growing things and fresh air, and deeper meanings if you want them, by visiting a garden.

And if you don't want deeper meanings, then don't bother with them. But don't try and claim that nobody wants them.

@Motorina Depending on what exactly testicles means in that dictionary, yes, pollen is what produces the sperm cell. (Which, in the case of most of the plants you see, never swims around. Being plants, pollen has to be different. After it (he??) lands on the stigma, a pollen tube grows down to the neighbourhood of the 8-cell egg producing structure inside the flower. As I said, you want strange, bizarre, queer botany, it's right there!)

Apologies if this has already been said - I haven’t read the whole thread. Does this mean pollen is functionally tiny floating testicles?

Fair enough. I think I can live with being in a minority who think gardens are art and have meaning beyond beauty.

"Fundamentally we look at gardens to appreciate their beauty AND draw meaning"

I would suggest for the vast majority of people the beauty of the garden IS the meaning. There is no other to draw. I'd say it's highly unusual for oeyto look at gardens and draw meaning about the queerness of it, it anything else.

Be a great subject for a gardening book.

I do care since the concept of my garden did begin with why are so many WLW women writers into gardening? Might add to the list Anne Lister, Willa Cather, Collette, Beatrix Havergal, Constance Spry, Alice B Toklas, Natalie Barney, Florence Yoch, Katherine Keshko, Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley. And Charlotte Mendelssohn and Alys Fowler (among modern writers). Just for those interested (those not, nothing to see here)

I'm going to have to mildly disagree with you on this point, DiaAssolellat.

Sexuality, as in being lesbian or gay, has a significance in how a person is, and is in society. That has changed over the centuries and around the world - in this part of the world we no longer have to hide our identity for fear of death, whereas there are places in the world where being lesbian or gay still results in a death sentence, whether judicial or just plain murder.

But there is still a difference in being lesbian or gay, it's not just who we sleep with, it ranges from assumptions in everyday conversations, to being sidelined by gender ideology, to being declared 'sinful', and even to being physically attacked for being lesbian or gay - that still happens, you know.

It's not unreasonable to look for expressions of lesbian or gay experience in the work of architects or painters or sculptors or garden designers, especially those who were operating at a time when they couldn't express themselves 100% openly.

But I completely share the rejection of the label 'queer', which is either an insult or a meaningless portmanteau word, or both.

As to being a bit grumpy about that garden, I get it. Fundamentally we look at gardens to appreciate their beauty AND draw meaning.

Precisely because it set itself up to have queer meaning but does not deliver on it is a failure (the fact it was probably funded on the claptrap idea is also galling and not necessarily homophobic). Quoting Shakespeare, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Its portentousness is rather like sucking all the air out of room leaving, at least people like myself, irritated and short-changed at its lack of substantive significance.

Without direction, you could have happily enjoyed it as a garden of “found objects” as another poster saw it drawing what meaning you like from it. Everyone would have left cheerful. But instead labelling it as queer begins to feel more exclusionary than inclusionary. The labelling did that as all semiotics do. It is the difference between thinkers like Judith Butler who beats a concept to death and makes up all sorts of pretentious portmanteau labels compared to Umberto Eco whose Name of the Rose can be taken as a rollicking good detective story or a deep study of medieval thought and where he knits inside his story direct quotes from those medieval thinkers that it becomes a fun spotting game for those in the know. Eco understood pleasure was to be gained at whatever level you read his works.

By the same token, I love mostly that people appreciate first the beauty and emotional solace my quirky lady garden brings (Butler would have put lady garden in inverted commas and then written three paragraphs, half in French, explaining its subtextual meaning quoting Anais Nin etc etc). If you stop to read my plant labels and its dilettante playfulness dawns on you and that makes you smile, fabulous. But it is not a requirement of entry or enjoyment.

For me queer botany is more about dreaming about watching hermaphrodite slugs and snails destroying my brassicas in my longed-for allotment and sharing violet butterfly tea made on a spirit stove with all-comers in my scruffy uninstagrammable she shed. (It will be a while 9 years down on a 10 year waiting list but that’s a consequence of moving to the city recently).

I’m not L or B and I regard queer as an insult.

As has been fairly well discussed, 'queer' isn't especially about homo or bi sexuality.

Only in the sense that people can be hostile to anyone who is.
But tbh I don't see that "queer botany" has much of anything to do with the gays anyway...it looks to be your usual nightmare mishmash of transactivism, gender theory, and spicy straights desperate for attention

I’m quoting this again because it has perfectly encapsulated what I have often previously struggled to articulate. Thank you.

I’m being serious here: are there people in the world who are “hostile” towards gardeners who are same sex attracted?

That's a good question, and could be applied to any of the arts. Preferably without muddying the water by using the term 'queer' which as the post upthread acknowledges, is applied to all sorts of genderist matters that may be entirely hostile to same-sex attraction.

But why is a gardener’s sexuality significant? Seriously. Nobody cares about who others choose to sleep with.