Plants opportunistically reclaim spaces. Thinking through this notion, plants become active survivors in urbanity—animate matter that thrives and adapts in artificial habitats.

In the artist book And Yet My Mask is Powerful, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme try to trace back routes leading to the sites of destroyed Palestinian villages. They finally find their way by following the vegetation growing there: “wild fennel leads us to what remains of the village.” (2017)

We learn to marvel in front of man-made edifices, towers, castles, homes. Yet, ultimately, they are bound to a slow dying process, slowly decaying, unless actively maintained, preserved, restored. We learn to value monuments made of stone, not only the building or the object in itself, but also as a proof of history. A history whose representation is fixed, frozen, singular, rather than constantly fluctuating and shifting, to be written and spoken from multiple points of entry. A first step towards decolonization, to move history into the plural form: histories.

Going back to the wild fennel growing in the erased Palestinian villages, what remains after all marks of the constructions that once stood there are gone, is the resisting, persistant and persisting local vegetation. Nature remains the only testament of that history. It is our witness, there long before we came, and finding ways to remain long after we depart. Histories are carried through its flux, never finite, as it grows and dies and gets reborn again.

The term third landscape, conceived by French writer/gardener Gilles Clément (Manifeste du Tiers paysage, 2004), describes the abandoned lots of land within the urban environment. These spaces can be understood as the ‘spruits’ that meander through the city, the transitional spaces between one place and another, roadsides and road islands, neglected lots of land dotted around the city, disused mine dumps, railroad embankments, and planned buffer zones. It defines miniature gaps between the pavement and the wall, the gutter clogged with organic debris, mangled sidewalks exposing soil for opportunistic plants to grow. Clément considers these plants to be claiming and creating a third space within the city, a physical and metaphorical landscape that is the genetic petri dish for urban ecology. He calls this the third landscape. But if that is the third landscape, what is the first landscape?

British gardener and writer Richard Mabey recalls becoming enraptured with the abandoned plot of land nearby his work, where weeds were left to grow and proliferate at ease : “[...] this kind of post-industrial wasteland was actually producing this growth. It seemed to say something about the obstinacy and resilience of nature.” (Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants, 2011)