Tea by Post

marks the beginning of long-term slow-growing work, situated at the intersection of visual arts, ecology, food studies and anthropology.

Opening with a public call-out for seed sharing, it began in spring 2021. After distributing SAE envelopes and drawings to participants across Ireland, a multitude of seeds and cuttings arrived back by post, including calendula, chamomile, lemon balm, mint, rosemary, sage, hyssop fennel, thyme, among others. The packaging of the seeds was often beautiful, thoughtful and creative, including drawings and handwritten notes. The post was a joy to receive!

The beginning of Tea by Post coincided with a series of house moves in my personal life; this in itself brought reminders of precarity and instability from the start. Moving from Dublin mid-pandemic, I began the initial seed starting in the security of my parents’ garden in Kildare. I am grateful for their gardening experience and advice! Meanwhile, we were house-hunting for a few months, as the seedlings grew steadily on sunny windowsills, waiting for bigger pots and more ground.

Then came a move to Leitrim in late spring, to a 70s bungalow with a wild garden. With the herbs replanted, summer brought an abundance of growth and colour and insect life. The fennel, in particular, was astonishing - tall and sturdy with buoyant plumes, teaming with bees, wasps, iridescent flies, and striped hover flies. The garden revealed treasures: an old rose bush by the front wall with big pink aromatic flowers, wild spotted orchids standing tall among the grass, a track by the garage filling up with horsetail as big as its prehistoric ancestors.

I began to think more of my collaborators in the garden, and those I had displaced. The ants who scurried about when I lifted plants from old pots, the slugs (so many slugs!) who had multiplied in the dense wet grass and, of course, the fennel inhabitants. I thought too of the soil itself; reading the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, I began to think about the temporality of care, of the timelines of soil, of our impositions of productivity and results, and the creation of artworks.

As the hedgerows of Leitrim grew more abundant throughout summer, I also thought about work in general and the control we exert over processes. Here I was surrounded by wild water mint, tiny ditch-sweet strawberries, fragrant meadowsweet, dark green nettles, all growing carefree and easy. And yet, I was still out with a torch at night hunting for slugs among the hyssop leaves. I thought about interventions, how much we do, what is necessary and unnecessary (I have not come to conclusions yet).

In September, at the height of harvest, we unexpectedly had to move house again - our landlord was selling. With all these personal relocations, I strongly understood the need for common lands and shared gardens - and why individuals should not bear the brunt of precarity under capitalist housing markets. I am extremely fortunate to have experienced only mild precarity. We were never homeless, never without a garden; our year was punctuated by shifting but we had skills, support and finances to negotiate this, unlike many others. Every morning of September I checked the seeds on the fennel plants, willing them to turn green and then brown. I added them to the bounty collected over the summer - dried leaves and petals of cultivated and wild plants.

A month or so later, in our new house, I sat at the table hand-stitching tea bags to send to seed-sharers. There were three blends, you can read more on them here. The blends were informed by the work of Anna Drews, a herbalist who gave one of four workshops on skills related to plants and our natural environment, funded by Creative Ireland funding. More on the workshops can be seen here. The final packaging was designed in open source software Scribus, and riso-printed by Wild and Kind, a zero-waste non-profit studio in Glasgow.

And so, what I thought would be a neat year-long project will instead be the beginning of a new way of working, with slowness, with less evidence, with more reflection. Even this website, which I thought would be ready by spring 2022 will, I imagine, meander along slowly for a long time yet..! Inspired by the pace of soil, and the work of Megumi Tanka, who writes on the development of websites as organic gardens, this website will hopefully be a slow-growing garden. A brief list of resources (available from the link below) partially inspired this thinking, perhaps you will find something of interest there. I would like to thank my parents for their gardening advice and project support, Deirdre O’Mahony for her expert guidance and mentorship, my partner Fergal for his support, photography and advice, those who gave workshops, the Arts Council and Creative Ireland for financial support, and to the very generous seed-sharers!

Thank you for reading about this project, you are welcome to get in touch on teabypost@gmail.com. Any authors or sources mentioned can be seen on the resources page here.