What is Wildculturing?
Wildculturing, it could be argued is the proto-gardening, the one from which later methods came. However, it’s radically different than the modern methods of gardening most of us know in that it entails an approach to working co-operatively with the Earth. We can Wildculture in our domestic gardens, wild land or in the space between like hedgerows and fallow fields.
While these ways have existed for tens of thousands of years they are all but lost.
These polycultural methods began to fall in sharp decline with the expansion of the Roman Empire and the age of monocultural growing, which began a couple of thousand years ago. More recently in the last hundred years these old ways were overlooked for industrial methods. And these days they continue to be ignored or set aside even by proponents of organic and alternative methods of agriculture. What all these modern methods of ‘production’ seem to be missing, is a soul. They are no longer living arts that honour the land, but instead have become dogmas of dominance.
The old ways were cultured and integrated with the land and the ancestral spirits in a way we can only dream of now. The hallmark of these indigenous agricultural arts is that sacredness and respect towards the plants and the land are paired with regionally adapted techniques.
And while these ways are all but lost, this attentive and fluid way of approaching and working with the land is what we need now more than ever.