BY ZACH MORTICE
Improbable Botany. Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.
Wayward is a collective of landscape architects, architects, urban growers, artists, and other assorted creative types who design landscape installations for ?exploring new models for how green space can work in cities,? says its founder, Heather Ring. The group?s experimental and often temporary projects emphasize creating ?narrative environments that tell stories through the spaces.? The projects have included chromatic explorations of algae growth and weaving slow-growth sculpture from living trees.
It?s an outsider?s perspective on landscape design that might have earned Ring?s London-based band of designers the high school graduation accolade of ?landscape architect most likely to commission a science fiction anthology,? because that?s just what Wayward has done. Having raised nearly $16,000 during a successful Kickstarter campaign, Wayward will publish Improbable Botany, a collection of 11 short stories of sci-fi landscape futurism that extrapolate our current relationship with the planet?s flora into magical and terrible places. The book will ship in late October, in time for Halloween.
Illustrations by Jonathan Burton. Published/Curated by Wayward.
?We see science fiction as a future forecasting,? Ring says, ?an ability to creatively look at what sorts of developments are happening right now, and what could potentially happen in the future.?
Edited by Gary Dalkin, the ...