The other day, I stopped at a yard declared derelict by city council, which stray seed and summer sunshine had transformed into a garden, heaving with unruly buddleia or butterfly bushes, bloom and leaf swaying in an exultant zephyr of birdsong. Enchanted, I took a video, even though the artefact will inevitably disappoint, for being so unlike the represented thing itself. Does a garden have a consciousness? It must be delicate and subtle, like its diet of air, sun, water, and soil chemicals. Scientists say that a small, flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana can hear itself being eaten, triggering a chemical response; I wonder if the garden heard its destruction, when it was bulldozed into a neat brown plot today, that delirium of purple-budded life gone except for its virtual trace, a short video taking up 4.5 MB of digital memory on a mobile phone.





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