The Sweetmans – A Country Cottage Year (1974) by Ken Griffiths

Dear Readers, there is probably something for everyone at the ‘Soil’ exhibition at Somerset House, but you’ll have to be quick if you want to see it as it finishes this weekend (13th April). There are huge video installations of myceliae moving through the soil, plants growing etc etc but as usual it’s the small things that I love. Like the photo series above, which shows Mr and Mrs Sweetman standing in their garden as the plants grow and fade, with one photo taken each month in 1974. . When I looked at the last photo, only Mr Sweetman was standing there.

“Oh no,” I thought, “Poor Mrs Sweetman has died!”

Well fortunately not, because actually it was too cold for Mrs Sweetman to come outside, so she can just about be seen waving from inside the cottage (if you squint).

And what are these blobby things, I asked myself? They look very much like lichens to me. However, they are actually the inside of abandoned Namibian termite mounds, which have been filled with zinc in an artwork by Agnieszka Kurant called ‘A.A.I System’s Negative’. They are extraordinary structures, so detailed, and they echo so many other natural forms – the lungs, for example, or the roots of a tree.

Now, this was interesting. In 1983 David nash swapped a circle of lawn from the Serpentine Gallery for a circle of rough turf from North Wales. The London turf had only three species of plant, the Welsh turf had twenty seven. So far, so expected, but in 2024 Mike Perry swapped a piece of wilded turf from Springfield Park in Hackney for a piece of sheep mown turf from farmland in West Wales (photo above). This time the Welsh turf had four species, the London turf thirty-nine species. As I keep banging on about, there is currently more biodiversity in towns and suburban areas than there is in our farmland.

The picture above was created by Daisy Ginsberg, and it gives a view of what a garden might look like to a pollinator who can see UV light, polarised light and possibly infrared. What really excited me here was that Ginsberg has a website called ”Pollinator Pathmaker‘, which enables you to design a pollinator garden. Great fun, though it doesn’t have that many ways of tweaking it just yet. Still, anything that helps people to think about what they could plant to maximise value for pollinators has got to be a good thing. Have a play, and see what you think!

And finally, how about this display of how fungi/slime moulds/bacteria and a whole lot of other organisms breakdown organic material? There was fruit going rotten under a glass dome, yeast doing its stuff in a food mixer, a random deer’s leg and all sorts of other good stuff. It reminded me of when I was a kid and had a whole selection of moulds growing under my bed, at least until Mum found it and made me throw it away. Honestly, though, without the agents of decay we’d all be buried under hundreds of metres of rubbish. Let’s hear it for moulds of all kinds!