Plants in the Garden: Drawing the Underground Life Forms
To study the vegetation in the garden, we have developed and tested a method to draw the underground parts of the plants. This helps us to better understand how a perennial herbaceous plant survives in winter through its organ of resistance and how it reproduces vegetatively. This approach of drawing the plant by hand forms the basis for a further development towards a parametric design language, which we are developing at the chair.
According to the methodology, we first carefully uproot a plant without damaging the roots. We remove the remaining soil from the roots with water and place the plant on a 5 x 5 cm grid sheet to take a photo. The grid sheet gives us the scale of the plant. We then trace the plant from the photo using an iPad or tracing paper - draw the organ of resistance in black, the roots in dark grey, annual parts in grey, new shoots in light grey and dead elements in white. The book Flora indicativa can help in identifying the individual plant parts.
