Feral Cabbages of California

2018-ongoing

This is an interdisciplinary project that explores human-plant relationships, deep mapping, and the physical and emotional relationship to land in a time of ongoing ecological destruction. The project stems out of my long term engagement with the feral cabbages of California’s coast both in the wild and in my rented lots in Oakland where the soil is both fertile and polluted. With the cabbage's collaboration, I am creating a hybrid feral cabbage that can potentially adapt to California's rapidly changing climate and urban soil contamination. Feral cabbages offer a model for survival through discovering their ecological niches, forming cooperative communities, and creating multispecies partnerships, including with humans. They are connectors to our plant communities, an avenue for creating a sense of belonging to a place, and a potential source of resilient, nutritious food.

This project addresses environmental degradation and its impacts on health; deeply connecting to place; and the resilience of the living world. The concept of “becoming naturalized” is a term coined by indigenous plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer that encourages nonindigenous folks to take up a land-ethic as immigrants by establishing a relationship with the non-human world with the common goals of mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation, similar to the feral cabbages. Just as with the enormous loss of biodiversity that is part of the sixth great extinction, heirloom crop varieties developed by people over hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of years are also disappearing at a rapid rate alongside the rise of global industrial agriculture. The work examines topics that are both highly specific to California and relevant to wider global issues. Local issues include soil contamination, native and nonnative species, and the history of human habitation in the Bay Area, while global issues include anthropogenic climate change, and the mirrored history of human and plant migration across continents.

It currently exists as an iNaturalist project, 2 essays, 2 public talks, an installation, a feral cabbage garden, and hybrid seeds.

iNaturalist Project: Wild and Feral Cabbages of the World
2021-ongoing

Feral cabbages vary morphologically depending on what cultivated variety they originated from and where they are located. This project uses iNaturalist’s user-created database to catalog the diversity of often isolated feral cabbage populations and the potential progenitors of domesticated Brassica oleracea, including the 11 wild species in the Brassica oleracea group.

Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages
2022-23, Essay in the New Farmer’s Almanac: Volume VI + zine published by A Magic Mountain

Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages
2023, Presentation at the Seed Saver’s Exchange Conference

Feral
2022, Installation and Workshop at Platform Artspace at UC Berkeley. Made possible with support from the Puffin Foundation.

Installation:

Feral and cultivated cabbages

Work:

Becoming Naturalized to Place: California’s Feral Cabbages, half letter, Riso printed zine, 40 pages, A Magic Mountain press, 2022.

Feral Cabbage Seed Mix, contains feral cabbage seeds and symbiotic flowering plants that attract parasitoid wasps that prey on Brassica pests, 2022.

“Wild and Feral Cabbages of the World” iNaturalist Project, 2021-present.

Soil from Block 21 in Oakland, 2022.

All seeds collected from Mendocino Headlands feral cabbage plant in Oakland in 2021.

Point Bonita Cabbage seeds grown in Oakland in 2020

Brassica Birdfeeder with cabbage seeds, 2022.

Potted Hybrid Cabbages: Point Bonita cabbage crossed with Mendocino Headlands cabbages, both grown in Oakland, 2021-22.

Feral and cultivated cabbages

California Academy of Sciences Herbarium: Brassica oleracea L. var. oleracea, cultivated and feral specimens. Collected February 2020 and entered into collection January 2022:

Seed Threshing Workshop with Art Practice students:

Cabbage, Coast, Concrete
2020, 30 minute public talk and multimedia slideshow given at The Prelinger Library as part of the Place Talks series.

This work centers around feral cabbages (Brassica oleracea), specifically the Point Bonita cabbage, which grows only on a spit of basalt in the Marin Headlands and in my front yard in East Oakland. I am researching their migration and dispersal as intertwined with human activity, their resilience in a time of planetary uncertainty, and their frequent proximity to coastal concrete military defenses. The lack of recorded information on this cabbage triggered a personal tenet: paying attention to, caring for, and researching the small things, like these plants, is a way to attune to place, and by proxy, to the planet. By naming this cabbage within the traditional routes of knowledge-making as one practice of knowing, it can be measured against time and a changing, damaged planet.

This project was made possible with research support from The Prelinger Library, Golden Gate National Recreation Area Archives, The Maritime Museum Research Center, California Academy of Sciences, The Bancroft Library, and the National Park Service.