The more I engage with others who are collapse-aware, the more I discover a new, urgent vitality and “lust for life” I never knew I had. As I was travelling to the World Adaptation Forum this spring to give my presentation and launch a book, it crossed my mind multiple times that this could be the last trip I take, the last people I meet, the last chance to grieve in the company of others who know just how unstable the global system has become.

But if you think that this was a conference of doomers, this couldn’t be further from the truth. As one of the participants remarked, this was the happiest, most alive conference they had ever attended. Not a surprise, given how transformational and life-giving grief is. Those who prevent themselves from grieving become equally unappreciative of both life and death. The world is refusing to grieve, greedily running to recoup its losses instead, and causing even more grief in the process. Those who know what is coming are attendees of a funeral who have been forced to attend a wedding instead: they are only allowed to grieve away from the camera, heaven forbid they might ruin the wedding pictures with their gloomy face. The self-destructive necrocapitalist show must go on, no matter what.

It is no wonder that the wedding planners closely monitor who comes and goes from the party, and what they might say. The truth of collapse can really bring down the morale, not to mention the stock market: because it is one thing to grieve a person, a pet, a tree, and another to grieve the loss of everything. We are not simply grieving thousands of years of stable human civilisation, but the permanent disappearance of what made this civilisation possible in the first place: the wildlife, and the climate systems that have been around virtually since the beginning of time. This is not the ending of an era, but the destruction of time: past, present and future.

The world is not ready to be reborn, because it is unable to grieve. I work in my garden every day because it helps keep me grounded: as I watch things wither, die, decompose and become reborn on a daily basis, I know that life needs death, just as much as we need grief to make sense of our losses. Without grief, death becomes permanent. And our losses can only accumulate.

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Just as the 2026 World Adaptation Forum in Budapest was coming to an end, silence was already beginning to rewild the space we had all desperately tried to fill with our voices, structured presentations, and conversations. Overloaded with three days of caffeine and overwhelmed by a cacophony of intellectual stimulants, I dedicated my last day in Budapest to explore the silence, only to discover that silence is not a vacuum: it is a busy, bustling creative space that works on its own mysterious pace and follows an entirely different set of physical laws. Silence is where the pieces of our echoes finally begin to fall into place, reorganise, and form new galaxies and solar systems of consciousness. The organisers of the conference called this “The Afterglow”.

There was no better place to see the afterglow than at Margaret Island, a nature reserve set on an island right in the middle of the Danube. There, the most vivid demonstration of the power of silence awaited me in one of the flower beds. In amongst armies of pansies autocratically planted in strict rectangular battalions arranged by colour, there was a defiant rebel: an orange pansy blooming in a sea of blue pansies, bravely defying all orders from above.

But this anarchist was not a product of conscious intention, but of the creative chaos that silence invites when we stop forcing things into categories, colour blocks and “frameworks”. When we let the debris of our thoughts fall into place naturally, the result makes much more sense than any order, hierarchy or pansy colour silo.

I kept staring at the rebel pansy for a few minutes, trying to take a guess where the “mistake” could have happened: an orange seed had been mixed in with the blue pansy seed stock back in the nursery. Maybe an orange plant had accidentally been mixed in with the blue plants during transport, planted in the ground as a seedling before the plants had produced blooms, therefore evading inspection. Or, one of the gardeners decided to play a practical joke. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that silence, and the chaos it invites, always have their way in the end, however much we try to control and organise them. Entropy always wins over intention.

This message matters, because much of what humans do involves artificial hierarchies and categories we construct to make sense of a world that is only meant to make sense through the incredible power of chaos. Order is futile because it always leads back to disorder. Disorder will always find a way to creep back in, whether this means disrupting a siloed pansy flower bed or a siloed way of thinking.

My breakfast conversation with Zsolt, who along with Balazs is one of the two masterminds behind this one-of-a-kind yearly event, confirmed why humans have ultimately failed to make themselves a sustainable part of Earth: our actions, and our thoughts, are plagued by the tyranny of order: hierarchies, labels, frameworks and silos, whether they are racism, speciesism or climate denial. We live only in our heads, out of touch with the chaos that is trying to communicate with us. The orange pansy is trying to make a point, but if my guess is correct, it has probably already been dug out, thrown in the compost and replaced by a “compliant” blue one.

It is not chaos we should fear, but the iron curtains separating the multiple versions of reality we manufacture, never allowing them to mix. Chaos is not a disruptor but a repairer, finding the paths of least resistance which bring balance back into a sea of conflicting orders. Chaos always results in stability, while forced order doesn’t. Trying to control the chaos will only provoke it. Unless we find ways of emulating natural chaos in how we run our civilisations, chaos itself will do it for us through the collapse of our silos, frameworks and crystal castles of false hierarchies.

Like an over-manicured garden that has become a monoculture of thoughts, order will always be fragile at best. A chaos of weeds however is incredibly resilient. The ecosystem, and any system, always needs states of chaos in order to make sense of reality: even quantum particles such as electrons get too bored staying in their own orbits. They wiggle, change spin, jump lane and even jump over to other atoms before they settle. Others yet, turn into pure, chaotic energy.

This is not about learning to make allowances for chaos and imperfection, but about learning that chaos is the actual creator: what has always been there, and what gave birth to us since the beginning. We need to invite the chaos back in. Those who want to control, oppress, and destroy are not direct agents of chaos but selfish provocateurs. The destructive chaos that ensues from their actions is nothing other than the universe reorganising itself against enforced orders. Whenever there is too much order, the system perceives it as an imbalance: of power, money, or energy. It invites the chaos back in so that it can restore the system to a more stable configuration: an unequal society and a planet succumbing to a lethal energy imbalance are both examples of systems no less unstable than a uranium atom succumbing to its own radioactive decay.

We need to trust in the chaos, and to create moments of silence where the chaos can weave its healing work. Each time we get lost, siloed or trapped, it is always the creative chaos, not the order in our head, that will point us to the light at the end of the tunnel. And each time the system tries to separate, sort us and divide us like blue and orange pansies in a flower bed, it is always the chaos that will bring us back together.

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The reason why gardeners and biologists have a unique perspective on things is that they have seen the world from multiple angles. While most humans spend their time walking, standing, or sitting, gardeners spend much of their time on their knees, or looking up inside a canopy, or looking through foliage and into hidden layers of perspective. They can see the angle of the bird, the deer, and the ant. They can see in many more ways. Gardeners are the crime scene investigators of humanity’s clumsy footprints on the ecosystem: they learn to distinguish between fifty shades of green and become highly attuned to what happens at ground level: a place where, for all other humans, is simply where they choose to place their feet.

Two days ago, I found myself on my knees again, fumbling in the dark under a 15-year-old Viburnum tree. I was tidying up its roots while looking for the prized seedlings the tree produces this time of year. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a green shoot emerge out of the darkness. It was coming from a pile of composted kitchen scraps that had already turned the colour of the soil by now. I crawled closer as the psychedelic potpourri of fermentation hit my nose and looked at the shoot’s leaf structure from above. “A potato plant” I thought, making a bet with myself.

Sure enough, as I pulled at the long, thick, white shoot, along with it came a paper-thin potato peel not more than an inch in length. My kitchen scraps had decided to undead themselves.

How could a small piece of potato peel so thin, so perishable, find the strength and energy in the middle of winter to mount such a triumphant comeback? Even for a plant biologist like me this is a miracle, however many times I get to witness it. Nature can undead itself almost anytime it wants to, because it doesn’t operate based on the human concept of waste. Potato peels never die, and if they do, it is because there is a greater plan for them somewhere. In the natural environment death is just a life stage, not an ending, and waste does not exist. The permanent death of things is a human invention created by a system that needed funerals so that it can charge for coffins and flowers.

Nature knows of a million different places to put things away, whereas humans only know of one: the trashcan. We may think we are getting rid of things, but they always come back to haunt us, and remind us that nothing, and no one, is ever useless. Our waste has always been smarter than us: potato peels use us as vectors to spread themselves around the environment, and industrial waste ends up concentrating itself in our cancerous tissues to enact its revenge. Waste may be temporarily hidden, but environmental crime can never be disappeared.

For an in-depth history of trash, and how capitalism invented the concept of waste, read my original essay How Humans Invented Waste

This essay is brought to you from A Garden In The Ruins, a special section within The George Tsakraklides View

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I’ve avoided writing about this for at least half a year now, mostly because the subject matter was so emotionally charged that I couldn’t find the guts to open it up. Writing about this back then would have been like rubbing salt on an open wound: there are certain topics where writing helps you put an event firmly behind you, and there are others where writing makes things even worse: it re-traumatizes you, as well as your readers.

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As the human world succumbs to the grip of autocracy, we are never short of examples from the natural world where nature itself successfully revolted against power. Today I bring you another story of a failed coup: the failed domestication of the hyacinth.

The dominant logic of plant breeding has always been to maximize the most monetizable quality of a …

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Chios is the fifth largest island in Greece, situated a tempting 4.5 miles off the coast of the Turkish mainland. It hosts the classic postcard-perfect idyllic beaches found all over the Aegean archipelago with one major difference: this is a piece of land with its own unique history, a glorious and tragic tale of unmatched pro…

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When I was between the ages of five and ten, my father frequently took me to visit my aunts that lived back in the village where he had been raised. It was a small town tucked away in the leafy mountains of north central Greece, a world apart from the hot, dusty, tourist cities of the coast. The road back then was rough and adventurous; this was in the 80s, before the expanded national network had paved over towns, landscapes and cultures, and before cars became self-contained entertainment capsules. Back then, when you visited someone who lived four hours away you were embarking on a journey, not a destination. You had no choice but to pay attention: you felt every bump, lived every moment, as the rough roads commanded your full immersion into the present.

The reward was not the arrival, but the journey itself: observing the landscape and culture gradually shift as you moved through different parts of the country, driving in and out of villages and wildly changing ecosystems, as opposed to taking sudden exits from a video game. Pit stops and lunch breaks forced us to slow down and breathe fresh air before returning to the steel cage, and road signage was so incredibly bad back then that, you had to keep a mental map in your head of the entire journey: signposting every turn, every roadside business, every tree. The world back then wasn’t a virtual reality: it kept inviting you to get to know it, touch it, feel it, like a faded road sign where you have to guess the missing letters before you can even proceed. Reality used to require investigation, now it is not even a reality anymore.

The downside of course to these long trips was a 5-year-old back-seat driver: “are we there yet” became my signature conversation starter, as I competed for the Guinness record of repetitions with my number one rival: the worn-out mix tape of new wave hits that constantly played in the background. Just like the bumps on the road, we knew all the places where that tape was damaged, and held our breath each time the car stereo skipped over them for fear of it chewing up the tape. It did gobble it up eventually, but only after we had memorized every verse to death.

One of my aunts lived much further outside the village, out in the sticks in the middle of nowhere on a huge farm where she kept chickens, goats, a donkey, and probably many other plants and animals I can’t even remember. Every time we made a surprise visit she was overjoyed, but I could tell that she wasn’t desperate for human contact. When you have an entire farm full of plants and animals to keep you company, it is incredibly difficult to feel lonely. My father would usually have a coffee with my aunt in the house while me and my sister roamed the farm through its winding paths, that offered surprises at each turn. At the end of the visit my aunt would load us with presents: from homemade cake to fresh eggs, and plants, lots of plants. She was a passionate gardener.

40 years later, and long after both my aunt and father had passed, I discovered one of her plant gifts, still alive in a neglected garden border of our summer house.

It was a primula that had somehow endured the harsh heat and drought of the mediterranean coastal summer. Over the decades the tiny plant had multiplied on the spot into a hard, solid mass of roots the size of an extra-large pizza. It wasn’t flowering anymore, but it was alive. I knew very little about primulas back then, a plant most people ignore because of its diminutive size and finicky growing requirements. Common varieties sold in shops are over-hybridized cultivars that often don’t get to live past one season, unlike this one. What I did know was that primulas are mostly alpine forest dwellers that prefer shaded, moist places under the canopy of trees. The fact that this one had survived for decades in these suboptimal conditions intrigued me to say the least. I brought two root cuttings to my garden in 2019, both of which failed to thrive: they had been planted in too much shade for their own good.

But they both survived, holding on to a couple of leaves each. The next year I moved them to a slightly brighter, yet still shady spot at the bottom of the rock garden. They rewarded me with a lush flush of flowers in early February in the most audacious shade of hot fuchsia pink. This was the day I fell in love with primulas. In the years that followed, I kept dividing the two original plants every autumn, and today my garden boasts the most spectacular display of primulas that lasts from early February to late March. They bring color to the garden at a time in the year when there is barely anything else in bloom, and this is in fact how primulas got their name: they are the first flowers of spring, emerging in late winter.

Since then, I’ve grown a few other types of primulas but never with the same success. None of them came even close to having the charm, vigor, drought resilience and heat tolerance of this one. Eager to know where this primula had come from, after an extensive search I narrowed it down to a specific variant of Primula vulgaris: a subspecies called rubra, which means “red”. Although Primula vulgaris is quite a common primula form found all over Europe, the rubra variety is an adaptation to the harsh mediterranean summer. While other primulas risk certain death in the summer drought, rubra has a host of remarkable evolutionary adaptations that make it virtually indestructible: its root system is deeper, stronger and more extensive, allowing the plant to draw moisture from further down the soil during dry periods. Its leaves are thick, leathery and covered with a waxy layer that prevents scorching at high temperatures, while the stomata openings on the leaves close more efficiently in the summer, preventing evaporation. The plant flowers earlier than all other primulas, taking advantage of the shorter wet season of the mediterranean and avoiding the risk of running into the summer heat during its reproductive stage. By late spring, it has already entered a deep dormancy. Although the plant looks like a regular, normal primula, it is tough as nails. The leaves are so leathery that the slugs in my garden refuse to attack them, something I cannot say for my other primulas. Its growth period is so long and vigorous that, sometimes I can divide the same plant in autumn, and then again in the spring. This is how within just a few years I have created an entire meadow of wild primulas.

The geographical habitat of this native primula is strictly southern European: it ranges from southern Italy to the Western Balkans and into Central Greece, which is why it is highly likely that my aunt collected the primula herself on one of her walks. A tough woman, collecting a tough plant. Before industrial civilization there used to be tough humans, and even tougher plants. But they don’t make them like that anymore. Our modern existence is increasingly as perishable as our technologies. Like the mix tape, they get chewed up and quickly replaced by the next “innovation”, in the same way humans are being replaced by AI. But Primula vulgaris rubra is still here. She is as wild, free and indestructible as my beloved aunt. Her legacy, the legacy of real humans lives on, at the foot of my rock garden.

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I must have been 8 years old when my father and I kneeled on the dirt and tore open a small, clear plastic bag with a cheap, generic drawing of a white rose printed on it. Inside, there was a dried-up brown/black wooden stick, slightly longer than a pencil. “This is a rose” he said, then pointing up towards the first-floor balcony of the ugly cement apartment block we had just moved into, he said: “it’s gonna climb up there one day”.

I looked at him with complete disbelief, then I looked up at the balcony. Then I looked back up at him again, this time with the faith and trust of a child. If my father said that this dried up stick was a rose, and that it would do all that, maybe he’s right.

The year was 1982. I remember us digging the hole together and planting the stick in the ground. The soil, if you could call it that, was a mix of crushed brick, leftover cement, asbestos and pulverised shards of the local granite rock that must have been dynamited numerous times during the building’s construction. As for the planting site itself, it was in a dark, deeply shaded corner secluded from light throughout the day, in all directions but East by three-storey-high apartment blocks. This was no place to plant a rose. But it was damp, and quiet. And miraculously, the damn thing sprouted.

I have almost no memories from the garden from the 38 years that followed. I never went down there, even though it was right outside my bedroom window. The common problem with communal gardens is that they become neglected exactly because no one has 100% complete ownership of them. They become an unloved, “no-man’s land” full of miscellaneous zombie plants vegetating through neglect and rejection by the very people who brought them there.

The truth is that when I was young, I always found this garden a deeply depressing place, exactly because every time I looked at it, all I saw was abandonment. I never checked into the dark corner down there to see whether the rose was growing, or if it was even alive, partly because I feared that if I looked, I would simply confirm its death. I guess I had already given up on it. It was an ugly dark corner down there, besides, invasive plants like Vinca major and Hedera helix brought back from a mountain trip soon took over the area, turning it into a jungle. There was even a wild plum tree that had grown right where the rose was, so it was difficult to make anything out in this mess. But sure enough, the rose was still there.

I left the country in 1992 for 30 years, for study and work. According to my mother, at some point the rose did make it up to our balcony, but it was cut back because “it was a threat to the paint”. My father passed away in 2012. The rose remained but, knowing that it wasn’t allowed to climb up to the balcony, it started talking to the plum tree. Together they formed an alliance and decided to support each other in this otherwise dreary, dark corner. It turns out that plum trees can perform quite well in the shade. Likewise, some roses, especially climbing roses like this one, are also highly shade tolerant. In the wild, they are meant to climb onto trees and grow upwards, eventually emerging through the canopy and into the light. They are incredibly resilient plants that can live for centuries.

Around 6 years ago, and after a gruelling career in marketing that had left me lost, alienated and almost brain dead, I started spending more time back here at home before moving back permanently, to switch gears into writing and gardening. The plum tree and rose were still here. They had grown old together, their crusty old trunks entwined at the base into a beautiful sculpture that told a tale of hardship, resilience, patience, partnership, community, and courage, so much courage. I started taking care of the rose, 44 years late, and encouraging it back to the balcony. It didn’t take long before the first cane latched onto the balcony again, decades after it had been banished. Having access to more light up here, it now rewards us with the most beautiful, picture-perfect scented roses throughout the year. They are the type of rose you see on old greeting cards: white with a buttery centre, perfectly shaped and flawless, each and every one of them. The plant may produce thousands of them each year, but it takes meticulous care to ensure that every single one is perfect. I don’t know how it does it.

It is an ongoing challenge for me taking care of this rose, because it has grown so large. The majority of its trunk disappears into the plum tree where it splits into two main parts: one that climbs up and through the canopy, and one that traverses the tree and emerges through the other side, where I’m trying to encourage it onto an arbour. A third section, the most recent growth, climbs up to the balcony, and this is the most vigorously growing part. All in all, the rose now takes up an area equal to a city block. Most of its canes are beyond reach and I would need a crane to be able to get up there for an annual pruning and cleaning service. I can only clear the dead branches I can reach from below, and this helps to maintain its vigour.

When my father’s condition suddenly worsened, I was abroad. I delayed coming to visit him because work was busy and I only made it to the hospital when he was already on life support. He saw me walk into the ER room but he couldn’t talk as his breathing was hooked up onto a machine. I couldn’t talk either, there was too much going through my head to even utter a word. I was vocally paralysed, probably at the most important time in my life when I needed to say something, anything. I failed. He passed away a few days later - we got a call from the ER in the middle of the night.

My relationship with the rose had been as dysfunctional as my relationship with my father. I know that he loved me, but we never managed to connect. That moment when we planted the rose was in fact one of the very few times we had ever done something together. The reason I never checked on the rose all these years was not because I had forgotten about it. It was because I had been feeling bitter about my relationship with my father, and it was too painful to be reminded of what that relationship could have flourished into. I was afraid to explore my own feelings of anger, neglect and emotional vulnerability that the rose had become a symbol of. Perhaps if I had sorted my feelings on time, I would have seen our mutual mistakes, and I would have been able to find the words to say goodbye to my father in the ER room.

Although the rose symbolised a relationship that never managed to thrive, the rose itself did, eventually. Deprived of the care it needed when it was young, it went its own way, disappearing into the plum tree where it finally found the love and support it never had. One day when I was pruning it, I got really badly stung by one of its thorns. A vibrant, wine-red drop of blood appeared on my skin, soon growing into a moody dark purple blob that ran down my finger. I looked up into the tangled mess of branches I had been trying to clear and suddenly realised why roses have thorns: they are there not just for protection, but to latch on to other branches and the bark of trees they need to climb. Roses are not villains but relationship builders. They create complex latices by interlocking their thorns and can eventually ascend huge heights with no other support than their own, interlocking branches. They befriend plum trees, walls and balconies, and can ascend for decades before they reach the sunlight. Most of all, they will try again, and again, even after multiple rejections. They will never give up.

We may hate roses when they prick us, but every thorn is actually an invitation to reconnect. This rose is teaching me the lessons life failed to teach me. Like beautiful roses, we cannot expect our connections to be thornless. We should expect to be hurt if we want to thrive. And what we mistake for a thorn is sometimes a desperate call for help. My father may be gone, and this rose may have taken 44 years to reach the sun, but I’m here now, and so is the rose, and the more I become reacquainted with it the more I realise that the rose and I have been leading parallel lives, facing the same obstacles. The rose has become my friend, my therapist.

The plum tree is pretty old now and has taken quite a dangerous tilt, due to the shape it took as it tried to reach the sun. It is quite possible that the next big storm could tip it over. Some of the tenants on the block want to have it cut down as it is a structural threat to the building. Of course, this would also mean that the rose would die with it: their two trunks are so intertwined, it would be very difficult to separate them. But I pray every day, and I cherish every day, every rose. Every time I bleed I know it is because I once left you. But I’m here now, and I’m ready to bleed even more until you take me back. And this time I’m not letting you go, not until the last day you live.

When most everything in the natural world is gone, when there are no more roses, no more trees, who will be there to remind us not to give up? Who will be there to teach us courage?

The oldest rose known is a wild dog rose (Rosa canina) growing on the wall of Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany, commonly called the “Thousand-Year Rose”. This rose bush is believed to be at least ~700 years old, with legends tying it to around 815 AD, soon after the cathedral was founded. It survived centuries of history including destruction of the cathedral in World War II — the roots endured and it regrew after bombing, showing remarkable resilience.

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Thousands of years ago, when humans started creating the first breeding lines of plants and animals, they had no idea that by doing so they had begun a long process of gradual decimation of the genetic pool that was so critical to the survival of these life forms. By limiting DNA variation often down to a single genotype, the desecration of the genetic heritage of organisms through this unnatural selection was equivalent to tearing out a single page from a book and throwing the rest of it in the fire. Whether it was cows that made more milk or tomatoes that ripened slowly, the breeding of organisms for the sole purpose of commercial exploitation did much more than what it had promised on the tin: selecting for a single, very specific genotype, at the detriment of overall fitness and functionality. We tend to think of genetic engineering as something that started in the 90s, but humans began sabotaging evolution thousands of years ago, before cloning was even invented.

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When I first started gardening, I made one of the most common beginner errors: mistakenly thinking that gardening was all about taking care of plants. It seemed like a perfectly logical assumption at the time, one which however would prove no less than catastrophic just a few months on, as I watched the plant death toll climb. My garden became a conveyor belt of healthy plants going in, corpses coming out. This was hardly a garden, but some type of boot camp for plants that was so unsurvivable, it was as if it had been designed by ICE to exterminate them.

Apart from emotionally distressing, this was embarrassing to say the least. I was a plant biologist with a master’s degree “from America” for crying out loud, having studied in one of the top 10 academic programs in the world. Stubbornly refusing to see what was happening, I convinced myself that it was neither my fault nor that of the plants: I had simply inherited a cursed garden. There was just something about this particular garden that made every plant, except roses and oleanders, die a slow, mysterious and very public death while me and other tenants looked on, as new plant arrivals went through a single season starting green before gradually turning brown, then black. It would take a few more deaths, and then quite a few more after that, before I finally fell off my high horse and started paying attention.

My mistake? Failing to recognize that gardening is not about taking care of plants, but taking care of the soil. Because when you take care of the soil, you are taking care of an entire ecosystem that cuts across kingdoms and classes: from bacteria, yeasts, fungi, reptiles and insects and up to the higher orders of plants and animals, the soil is where it all begins, and where it all ends. By taking care of the soil, you are creating a welcoming place for your plants: one where there is a good cycling of nutrients, a host of partnerships with fungi and beneficial insects they can take advantage of, and even pollinators who will safeguard the next generation of plants. The secret to a good garden is very simple: it’s all in the dirt.

But of course, what would a plant biologist like me know about all this anyway? I had spent three years in grad school working on a thesis locked up in a biotech laboratory, not an outdoor setting. I had grown my specimens in big environmental control chambers plugged into a socket on the wall, where genetically-modified “frankenplants” were monitored and grown under strict soil, temperature and light conditions. This was hardly a garden, but a monoculture where fungi, insects and even bacteria were banned from existence, and where these frankenplants were subjected to artificial light, sterilized water, and a fake photoperiod to trick them into thinking they were outside, in whatever month of the year you had selected in the control panel settings. One day, humans will be grown in these things. They won’t even know what “outside” means, because they would have never seen it. In many ways, we are there already.

My re-education into plant biology was slow and brutal, because I had to unlearn everything my sterilised degree had taught me. I had to stop focusing on plants and concentrate on the ecosystem instead: start seeing the forest, not the trees. Six years on, I can safely say that, although I am now successfully hosting almost 200 native and non-native plant species, about 75% of my time and labour in this big garden is invested not in taking care of plants, but taking care of the soil. December is one of my absolute favourite months of the year because I get to play in the dirt: gathering fallen leaves, cuttings, fruit, bark, anything I can compost and re-introduce into the soil. It is a beautiful coincidence that this task comes at the end of the year, a time when most of us are tidying up our own mental gardens: taking stock of the past 12 months and trying to make sense of our life and the world. We decide on what was good, what wasn’t, what to keep, what to compost, what to upcycle and reuse. In a collapsing climate and environment, composting is my big consolation because even if the world may no longer make sense, returning these nutrients to the soil does: some life form somewhere will find use for them, and I will have played a part in it. A caterpillar may spend its entire winter sheltered under a fallen leaf, before it becomes a butterfly. Human civilisation may be collapsing but nature continually resets itself as it always has, for thousands, millions of cycles.

By making myself part of this process I am resetting myself as well. Any full-time gardener knows that composting is not a task, but a deeply symbolic ritual. New life always depends on the decomposition of the previous one. The dark spaces under bushes and into the damp corners of the garden are not cemeteries, but the busiest places in the ecosystem where life and death cross paths. It is here, in this moist darkness, where life reorganises itself and begins, anew.

Composting is not only for leaf mulch. Anything organic can be composted. There was a time when I would dump prunings in the trash, not knowing what to do with them. Now they end up in compost piles placed strategically across the garden where they slowly decompose, while at the same time providing a habitat for insects and reptiles. As nutrients return to the soil, the organic biomass of the garden increases year by year which means better plants, which means even more biomass for the following year. This plant purgatory has come a long way into slowly becoming a plant sanctuary. I dream of the day when there will be no need for gardens, because humans will be gone and nature will become the gardener again, as it always had been. We’ve given this gardening job a try, and we failed. Better hand in our resignation from our head gardening position, pronto.

Civilisations and ecosystems are virtually indistinguishable from each other at times of existential stress: the same laws of scarcity and competition which decimate an ecosystem’s food chain are behind the collapse of a human currency chain. In any interconnected system, whether this is a human society or an ecosystem, the weight of collapse bears down across the board until it finds the weakest link that will unravel the entire structure. Eventually no one escapes the bloodbath, and those who think they have avoided extinction won’t enjoy that moment for too long: they soon face the dire odds of survival in a world of diminished resources.

Many extinctions in an ecosystem in fact occur much later than the main event, as a consequence of the disappearance of support systems in a fragmented web of life. In a collapsing ecosystem cannibalism and desperation replace abundance and cooperation, and the same goes for any collapsing human society: the aftermath of a major disruption of energy networks, food, physical infrastructure and medical supplies is chaos and barbarism. Gaza may seem like an isolated case of civilisational collapse, but it is merely one of the interconnected hotspots comprising a global, systemic breakdown that has been thousands of years in the making. The natural ecosystem and human civilisation together form one, ailing interconnected system that has been breaking down ever since we entered the Anthropocene centuries ago. We are not heading for a collapse. We are experiencing the ongoing aftermath of an ecological and climate collapse that started many generations ago, masked by temporary recoveries that conceal an otherwise steady, underlying long-term trend of deterioration in biodiversity, climate, pollution, resource availability and just about anything we call “Earth”.

Historically speaking, at some point a recovery takes place, but this is where any similarities between ecosystems and human civilisations end. The actual mode of recovery differs vastly between the two: while ecosystems take several hundred years to recover, collapsed human economies inflate and collapse again dozens of times over the same period. In the case of a burned down forest, what we witness is a slow, yet sustained, recovery. In the case of a collapsed human society, what follows is a series of short-lived, Ponzi soap bubbles that burst one right after the other seconds after their virgin flight into the hot, dry, summer air. Just like soap bubbles, human economies always spread themselves too thin. As water evaporates from the surface of the bubble and the soap film gets thinner, all the warnings are there. Despite this, the burst is sudden and catastrophic every single time. The most important difference between an ecosystem recovery and a human civilisation recovery is that, while the former eventually achieves a steady state, the latter always overshoots.

In a burned down forest recovery begins from the very basics, starting at the molecular and single-celled organism level. There are no predators or big trees that would place huge demands on the system at this stage, but there are plenty of microorganisms in the soil that can easily pick up where they left from. There are seeds that resisted the heat of the inferno. There are small plants and bulbs whose intact roots contain the energy needed to stage a comeback. And there is all that ash, the molecular remains of huge trees that have now become bioavailable nutrients. Most of all, there is no more canopy: light can reach the bottom of the forest now so that everyone can benefit, not just the big trees. It is here, on this scorched earth where small seedlings, previously unable to germinate under the shade of big trees, can begin the recovery process.

A burned down forest is a disaster scene, but it is also a place of tremendous opportunity where all predators are gone, and nutrients and sunlight are freely available to all. In time, as small plants colonise the area and work with the microorganisms to build the soil back up, trees and predators gradually move back in. This is a process that takes hundreds of years before the forest reaches maturity. At maturity, the predators and prey, the big trees and smaller plants, have come to a negotiation and reached a balance with each other.

The key aspect of the forest’s recovery is that it begins with small organisms and only gradually moves to larger ones. It is a pyramid-shaped recovery because it emphasizes the lower part of the building first, the foundations, composed of all the small organisms that form the majority of bioavailable biomass which is crucial to the ecosystem. Without small organisms the ecosystem is too weak to support large plants and predators, just like billionaires are nothing without their consumer base. Only if the base of the pyramid is strong, and completed first, can the ecosystem be built to last.

In human economies, a collapse is always followed by the overproliferation of economic parasites. Rather than regrowing from the bottom, human economies re-grow from the top, via stimulus packages and tax breaks for the rich. While the recovery of a forest is pyramid-shaped, human recovery is either rectangular, or even worse, an inverse pyramid. We always re-design our societies like a new version of a Jenga tower: they are built to collapse.

The lessons from a burned down forest couldn’t be any clearer. The economy, and any recovery, should always be owned by the people, not oligarchs and autocrats. We need societies that are built from the bottom up, not top down. Only this way can they be more resilient.

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It was a balmy November morning when Mr Mosquito stretched his long legs for the very first time, and started to crawl out of his egg like a Houdini. He quickly swam to the surface, focused his big, dark eyes, and took a good look around him: “Wow, it’s the world!”, he shouted to himself, as his wings suddenly started fluttering, quickly lifting him up tens of metres into the sky. He could see the whole neighbourhood stretching before him: the little puddle, the trees, the Shell gas station with its mesmerising bright lights next to the busy highway. He had his whole life ahead of him. The world was his oyster.

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Today I discovered that one of my Cyclamen coum plants in the upper woodland garden had produced offspring: tiny one-leaf seedlings fighting for space and light under the canopy of a 45 year-old evergreen Jasminum mesnyi that complements their intense fuchsia colour with its narcissus-yellow blooms. Both plants bloom in the middle of February, a most drab moment in winter for most gardens, but not for mine. Wild primulas, early fragrant narcissus and many other winter bloomers make February one of the most colourful months of the year in my shade garden. Who could ever have imagined.

Transplanting these tiny, helpless cyclamen seedlings reminded me of why I garden: it teaches me patience. These seedlings won’t grow into flowering plants until at least two years from now, a time no modern consumer feels is worth waiting for. We want everything right now: food, money, relationships. Very few of us think that good things are worth the wait, and that they in fact take time and patience, because our necrocapitalist system conditioned us to want, purchase, consume and deplete on an impulsive, “right now” basis. Garden centres are filled with genetically modified, single-use cyclamens that are grossly oversized, overbred to the point where they have become sterile, and a nightmare for sustainability. In my garden I have three varieties of cyclamen, all of which are wild-type, perennial species that multiply over the years.

But most of all, my plants are not sacrificial lambs brought into the garden to die. I don’t follow the fast-fashion approach to gardening. I like my plants to like me as much as I like them. Only if they naturalise, that is, decide to raise their offspring in my garden, do I know that they are happy enough to stay. And this takes work on my part. It takes me an average of about 3 to 4 years to understand what each one of the 150 or so species I host in this garden needs. This is what patience feels like: to not give up, and to live in the present, because if you don’t nurture the present, there will certainly be no future.

The biggest misconception about patience is that it worships the future, when in fact, it forces you to invest in the present, and to worship the present as if this is your very last day on Earth. Plants are teaching me this beautiful lesson every day.

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125 million years ago an exceptionally long, baking hot summer began to sweep through the Celestial Mountain in the Tien Shan alpine range spanning modern-day Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China. The scorching conditions on the desiccated slopes of the mountain left little room for survival for the great majority of organisms, and the freezing winters that followed were no less brutal: subzero temperatures and thick snow brought life to a virtual standstill for a good part of the year, and a great number of organisms, especially plants, were driven to extinction. The slopes of these mountains were no place for ordinary life. This was one of the most inhospitable, uninhabitable places on Earth. The summer here didn’t end in August. It carried on into autumn, only to be abruptly interrupted by plunging temperatures and blistering cold winds that signalled the beginning of long, freezing winters. The only conditions hospitable to life appeared during a brief period in the spring, before it became too hot again. This mountain was a death trap, a place where natural selection revealed its ugly face and showed little mercy.

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Science has become a tool for validating existing dogmas rather than querying them out of existence. As universities bend the knee to their oligarch sponsors, we are depriving ourselves of the one quality we used to take pride in: the ability to think, search, discover. Educational institutions long ago became sterile, inward-looking businesses more concerned with their financial bottom line than the search for knowledge. I’ve been calling them sandwich shops: you go in, select your sandwich, eat it, shit it, then walk out the same person you were before, only more cognitively constipated and several tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I should know, having attained three university degrees that felt like I was being prepared to go to the moon and never come back. But that was only the beginning. Next slavery level unlocked: corporate adulthood. You now find yourself desperate for an entry level job, and you’ll do anything for any employer however environmentally corrupt and knee-bending to the regime they may be. Before you know it, an AI that has no student debt, no rent, expenses, salary or morals, has beat you to it. They didn’t even have to write a fucking CV.

The demise of research, science and any type of ethical work is yet another sign of a species in decline, but it should be no surprise given that humans have completely removed themselves from the university of nature: the source of all inspiration, observation, and billions of years’ worth of knowledge. We live in a world where the business of education now operates on corruption levels similar to the Sicilian Mafia, and a single pumpkin is smarter than a boardroom full of Harvard economists.

Yes, a pumpkin. This year I’ve been asked by my fellow tenants to grow pumpkins in our shared garden. They brought me a handful of seeds they kept from a delicious pumpkin they ate, out of which I’ve germinated two plants. I’m not a vegetable gardener, but I’m a plant biologist with a master’s degree from one of the world’s best plant biology programs. And the pumpkin plant, cucurbita pepo, is beginning to fascinate me. Not only as a plant, but as an economics teacher. Pumpkins are experts in energy and sustainability, having developed a plethora of ingenious resource management mechanisms that should be the envy of economists, sociologists and political scientists alike.

The first such mechanism that drew my attention is cucurbita’s reproductive system, which consists of both male and female flowers on the same plant. Pumpkins ensure that reproduction is not a “wine me, dine me”, expensive affair. Their female flowers are very energy-intensive for the plant to produce, because they come with an enlarged ovary. To save on resources the plant will therefore produce female flowers only if it is absolutely sure it has enough water and sunlight. It keeps a close eye on its available energy and carefully controls how many female flowers it produces, so that it doesn’t end up with too many gestating pumpkins. By carefully controlling the ratio of female to male flowers, the pumpkin effectively practices birth control. This ensures that however many “children” fruit it makes, they will all be healthy and strong. If at any stage the pumpkin feels there are too many fertilised female flowers for its energy budget, it begins a random process of abortion. This happens early enough in pumpkin development, so early in fact that, it may go unnoticed. But it is there as an extra measure to prevent reproductive overshoot. Were this to happen, the plant would become exhausted and none of its pumpkins would mature. It would mean extinction.

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For years I have marvelled at the sight of flame-red tulips returning faithfully each March right at the edge of the sea cliff my hideous block of flats is built on. Who planted these tulips here? I’ve asked my neighbours and tried to trace the history of the place, but never got anywhere with my investigation. A mysterious colony of tall red tulips, a huge group numbering a good 100 or so, grows perilously close to the water’s edge yet is able to multiply and return each year despite being mercilessly exposed to the unforgiving salty spray of the North Aegean. For a coastal location that is hardly favourable to tulip cultivation, seeing these tulips emerge each year is quite a sight to behold. But it also presents a tantalising mystery: I live in hardiness zone 8b, which lies just outside the liveable temperature range for the vast majority of hybridized, garden-variety tulips like this one. What is this tulip doing here, outside of its habitable zone?

The magic tulip patch is cleverly hidden right under a 2,500 year-old Ancient Greek fortress wall that trails the cliff’s edge, which is the only visible remnant of the old Athenian colony of Antisara. But unless passers-by have a good reason to look down from the wall, they will surely miss the magnificent scarlet tulip blossoms rising up against the horizon of the chilly early-spring Aegean. The unique spectacle, which only lasts about three weeks, is as safe as ever from being discovered, and I know because no one in the neighbourhood has ever noticed the tulips but me. Humans today never look around when they walk, let alone pause to escape their brain. They only know how to travel from point A to point Z, missing everything in between. While the vast majority of modern humans suffer from complete “plant blindness”, to me this is indicative of a much more serious condition: the death of the conscious self - that is, the inability to be aware of, process, and immerse oneself in reality.

Another big reason why the tulip patch has survived is that it is protected from trespassers by the biggest thug: nasty prickly pear cactus, scientific name Opuntia, an invasive plant that has devastated all of the Mediterranean ever since Christopher Columbus brought it back from the Americas to Spain in the late 15^th century. Its tiny thorn needles are so thin they are invisible to the naked eye, and can stay with you for weeks: lingering in your skin and on your clothes from where they launch continuous fresh attacks to make sure you are so traumatized from the ordeal that you promise yourself to never, ever again dare get more than 1 foot close to a prickly pear cactus (so I’ve heard from someone vividly describing their experience).

The “soil” the tulips grow on is also very interesting. It consists of unused cement powder, sharp broken ceramic tiles, plastic piping, garbage and all kinds of left-over construction materials people threw over the cliff when they were done building their homes decades ago. This toxic debris pile that adorns the bottom of the 2,500 year-old ancient Greek wall has over time been filled in and layered by falling leaves and other organic material, so it eventually became a perfect habitat for flower bulbs: lots of nutrition, and impeccable drainage.

As a final discouragement towards any trespassers who may entertain the thought of leaping over the wall and cutting a tulip to take home and stick in a vase, the unstable ground the tulip patch rests on is set on a 45-degree incline that very quickly leads to a 15 metre-deep murderous death drop right to the bottom of the cliff. There, a solid bank of sun-kissed, ocean-licked corrugated grey granite rock eagerly awaits to split brains open any time of the day: an exciting departure from its monotonous existence, while simultaneously awarding Greece its own version of the Edelweiss fable. Disappointingly for the victims-to-be, the sea lies a further 5 metres ahead from the rocks.

Suffering from a bad case of tulip mania since early childhood, I set myself the mission to find out what this mystery tulip was that can thrive in my climate. It’s just too warm for most tulips where I live, and thanks to the climate crisis I trust that the hardiness zone maps on the web are probably already outdated. As the planet heats up, my real hardiness zone by now is probably not 8b, but easily a solid 9.

On top of that, modern tulips have gone through so much genetic alteration by humans to look good on the outside that, they’ve been robbed of much of their reproductive capability, vigour and disease resistance. Like humans, commercially-grown tulips are so domesticated that they can no longer survive outside of the tightly controlled, pre-programmed growing conditions of industrial-sized farms. Weakened to the point where they’ve become extremely susceptible to pests and diseases compared to their wild ancestors, modern tulips have closely followed the fate of their human creators: they have been bred to look pretty for long enough to be sold and put in a vase for a few days, but not to survive in the wilderness.

You see, it’s not about them anymore. The tulip farm doesn’t care about the tulips themselves, in much the same way that the human farm of capitalism doesn’t care about humans. It just cares about making them look sellable and profitable. The role of capitalism is to make products out of living beings whether these are tulips, cows, or humans. The better the product looks and the faster it dies, the closer it is to perfection: a consumable that is highly desirable yet completely ephemeral: you will need to replace it again, and again, and again.

This is why commercial tulip bulb growers only grow tulips that last for just one season. If they really wanted to, they could have created tulips that are both visually appealing and healthy. These tulips would live in people’s gardens for many years and have no need for fertilisers and pesticides, just like their wild ancestors. But this would drive the tulip farm to bankruptcy.

Both tulips and humans are victims of extreme domestication. They are becoming so genetically weak that they can only thrive and produce new offspring within the artificial conditions created and controlled by the capitalist farm. They depend on the farm for all their water, food, artificial feed, fungicides, chemicals and all kinds of “healthcare” necessary to keep them alive in the toxic system they’ve been bred in. One of my biology professors in college one time asked the class a question: “what do you think is the biggest threat to natural selection and human evolution?”. Not one student in an entire amphitheatre raised their hand. The answer came from the teacher: “Medicine”. The more engineered, artificial and life-supported human life becomes the more we fade away as a species, much like commercial tulip cultivars.

Like all gardeners, I’ve had my share of disappointments attempting to grow industrially bred tulips in my garden only to find that they are so far from a natural tulip that they fail to adapt to the unpredictable conditions of a garden exposed to the elements. We have messed up their genes too much.

Except for this mystery tulip, I guess. A few hours of internet searching and the mystery begins to unravel, but as it does, it throws new twists and enigmas. Genetic analyses show that this tulip, which is found growing wild in multiple locations in Greece, Turkey, Italy and Southern France, is not related to any known wild species, yet is not part of a known hybridized tulip lineage either: there are no records of its creation through a specific breeding program. This is unusual, as all human-created tulips have extensive breeding records proudly attributed to a place and the human who played God as they crossed different tulips to create them. The oldest record of the tulip I can find is in 1822, by the Italian botanist who first found it already growing in the wild and gave it his name: Giuseppe Raddi.

I trawl the web for more information, but there’s nothing. Everything stops in 1822, a good two hundred years after Tulip Mania had already collapsed the Dutch economy. Even though this time period is well within historical breeding records, there is no archive of the tulip’s creation. Most websites list the tulip as “unclassifiable”: meaning it cannot be accepted as a wild species because it simply isn’t, but neither as a human-made cultivar because human-made cultivars are so genetically weakened they can’t possibly survive in the wild. They’ll be lucky at best if they manage to reproduce outside the tulip farm for more than a few generations, often producing progeny that are even weaker than their parents.

At least this is what scientists thought until recently, when more mysterious cases of “unclassifiable” tulips began to emerge, particularly in France. It is now believed that these “unclassifiable” tulips that include my own Tulipa raddii, are the descendants of brave “rebel hybrid tulips” that managed the unthinkable: they dared to escape the tulip farms hundreds of years ago and somehow survived in the wild despite all the breeding they had been subjected to. Not only that, but they thrived and became the only known large-flowered tulips to be able to grow comfortably above hardiness zone 8.

It is believed that hundreds of years ago, and probably even before the main period of Tulip Mania, the rebel tulips took whatever mangled genes they had left in them and set out into the cruel, unpredictable yet free world: the ecosystem. Somehow, perhaps by cross-breeding with wild tulips or through mutation, they became fully “naturalised” - a biology term which refers to an organism that can reproduce in a new environment but more crucially, produce genetically stable progeny: the children look like their parents, much like in a normal species. The hybrid tulips had overcome centuries of human genetic mutilation and become a new species all to themselves.

This is such an astonishing feat for a complex organism that scientists still don’t know how exactly the tulips did it. Tulipa raddii and its fellow runaways have for now been given their own classification by biologists, given their unique history: they belong in a new class of tulips called “neotulips”: tulips that humans tried to genetically play with so they can turn them into products for sale, but who resisted, fought back, and won their independence. The fact sheet for Tulipa raddii comes with the following underwhelming message:

2017 New taxon: Newly added neophyte. The so-called "neo-tulips" are relict populations of plants introduced centuries ago that have developed into independent clans. They are considered neophytes but have a high cultural-historical value.

“Relict”. Hmmm. That’s a new word for me. I look it up on Google: “a thing which has survived from an earlier period”. The AI definition adds another dimension: “Relict refers to something that remains or is left behind, often as a remnant or survivor of something larger or more extensive that has mostly disappeared”

So there you have it. A pithy statement in a fact sheet which ensures that the tulips are classified as “neophytes” i.e. an unrecognised, “stray”, introduced organism, yet one that is fully deserving of its place in the world only by virtue of being a cultural fossil of humanity’s tulip experiments. That’s all, just some human supremacist drivel dressed up in scientific jargon.

I mean, what could I possibly expect from a scientist? A poem tribute to the courageous tulips who rebelled? Perhaps a realisation of the perilous state humans are in, having farmed the crap out of ourselves within this capitalist dystopia? How many more relict species do we need to discover before we realise that we are one step away from farming ourselves to extinction?

The tulips did it. They proved it is all possible. Perhaps it was a single tulip that left on its own, accidentally discarded in the farm’s trash. Maybe it was a tulip bulb that fell out of a sack of bulbs on a carriage when it went over a bump in the road. Maybe it was a tulip seed that was carried by a bird, hidden amongst its feathers until it safely landed in a different country. Our only hope of continuing to exist is if we rebel against the farm, if we somehow break down the doors and exit out into the light.

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Hey! Listen to my brand new interview for the brilliant Post Growth Australia, a podcast I highly recommend. The interviewers have really taken the implications of my book Beyond The Petri Dish to another level.