The Impossible Garden is a ground-responsive installation at the Botanical Garden in Reykjavík which uses hypothetical folklore and speculation to open portals to worlds that exist simultaneously with our own, and a map to navigate them.
This project started by looking at the list of all the plants that they tried to grow but eventually failed at the botanical garden - an enormous Impossible Garden much larger than the one we can physically experience, but that I claim still exists in a different time and a different realm.
For this project I narrowed it down to two gardens: one which serves as a portal through time and another one through space. The portal through space is made up of plants that they did eventually manage to grow at the botanical, but they have no explanation as to why since these plants are impossible to grow anywhere else in Iceland. The portal through time is made of plants which haven’t managed to survive yet, but will thrive all across the country if the summers become just 1 degree hotter. A bittersweet window into a verdant future we would be better off never arriving to.
Visitors could find the Impossible Garden’s map and book on a wooden table in the greenhouse. The map is activated by layering it with the garden’s own map-pamphlet. Once activated, they could use it to find the portals, which were marked physically by aluminium-cast enlarged embroidery needles stuck into the garden’s soil. Each portal-plant has a short folktale in the style of the Icelandic álagablettur legends, which is based on a combination of Icelandic folklore and the plant’s own native folklore or uses, following the idea that for each plant to uniquely adapt to this difficult climate, the plant’s own lore had to adapt too, distinguishing the specific plant we find in the garden from other members of its species.
book, map, aluminium
All the plant images are embroidery patterns. Feel free to embroider them, tell their stories, and build your own impossible gardens.
