Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. —Virginia Woolf

Join Seeds inService Saturday, July 7 at 2 pm for a ceremony featuring calamint, the Bosnian tea of sorrow, which women drank historically with others to heal their sadness.

Transplanted from the original Papermakers Garden, calamint now lives in the Lucy Flower Self Reliance Garden. Bring your favorite cup to sit with plants that give our bodies and minds medicine.

About The Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden

The Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden, is a garden featuring plants reflecting the theme of self-sustainability. Some of the concerns are practical: how in our busy world can we work together as a group to tend to a garden which provides us life? And they are also conceptual: what does self-reliance encompass? The project will explore the feminist theories of feminized labor (domestic arts, cooking, and teaching) and consider the ways women’s empowerment can work towards a more sustainable system. The garden will include drought-resistant plants, easy-to-grow foods and medicinal herbs, as well as advocacy efforts for seed-saving, community garden development, and even growing indoors.

Seeds InService will also launch the book, An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank. The project is a look back at our five years in the Papermaker’s Garden in Chicago and the work moving forward with the Compound Yellow gallery. The book includes stories about our feminist curated beds, a catalog of our artworks, performances, and events, and an index of plants we describe as the world’s first feminist seed bank. Commissioned essays by Claire Pentecost and Tricia Van Eck will be included.

Seeds InService

Seeds InService: A Papermaking Institute (SIS) is an ecofeminist, socially-engaged art practice by Maggie Puckett and Melissa Potter that supports self-determining communities through heirloom seed management, thematic gardening, and hand papermaking arts activism. Through the radical labor of handcrafts and urban agriculture, SIS exposes the intersecting oppressions of women and nature in a globalized world controlled by patriarchal capitalism. Through collaborative and community art projects that range from propagating rare seeds in partnership with national heirloom banks, to public events featuring the untold narratives of women in agriculture, we make visible, and propose solutions to, the modes of production that exploit the labors of women and nature.

Official Website

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Tags: Compound Yellow, Illinois, Lucy Flower Self Reliance Garden, Oak Park, Seeds in Service, Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends