Feral Cabbages of California

2018-ongoing

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.

Feral 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 Arzt's long term engagement with the feral cabbages of California’s coast both in the wild and in her rented lot in East Oakland. With the cabbage's collaboration, she is 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. As a potential source of resilient, nutritious food and as connectors to our plant communities, the feral cabbages can both feed us and teach us.

This project was 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.