25.01. Knowing Plants and how to Care for them: on Gardeners´ Expertise

Gardeners are experts on plants, on how to care for them and to live with them. Stemming from seemingly mundane, yet intimate embodied encounters with plants, gardeners´expertise emerges from and fosters their ability to notice and respond to planty ways of expression and behaviour. In examining gardeners´ strategies to acquire, share, and pass on their knowledge and skill, I attempt to grasp and understand the
more-than-human practices and dynamics at play.

Cornelia Ertl is a social and cultural anthropologist with a special interest in more-than-human ethnography and critical plant studies. Her dissertation project is based on a year of fieldwork at Berlin Botanic Garden and explores affective dynamics and relational practices between plants and gardeners. It particularly highlights questions of appropriate touch and attachment, the negotiation of vegetal agency and various forms of expertise and knowledge practices. Cornelia studied at LMU München and Freie Universität Berlin and worked as a doctoral researcher at CRC Affective Societies in Berlin.