In the summer of 2023, Sam Francis began keeping a diary about the teasels growing in her garden, closely observing their growth from seedling to maturity and then senescence. The result was a deeply considered and moving testament to the entanglement of plants, people and environment, now published by Hazel Press. Find an extract below.

Preface
To see your wildness

Teasels are unfussy about where they grow. Thriving in grassland and wasteground, they make their home on edgelands, in verges, margins and fields. But here in my garden, I put you there purposefully. I want you there. I want to know you. I want to know of your life.

The word teasel stems from the Old English tǣsl or tǣsel, and relates to the verb ‘to tease’, the Middle English root meaning of which is to pluck, pull, tear, pull apart, comb. Though it is not my wish to tear you apart. Instead, I shall look upon each part of you closely and attempt a kind of visual plucking. I shall comb your hair and attend to you diligently. What it is to be teasely, what it is to be teased, plucked, and attended to as you thrive, grow, and age?

I have a feeling that teasels are canny and capable of all kinds of magical things. Things that cannot be known from simply passing them by in the wild. This is why I want you in my garden. To see your wildness, your tiny things. To witness your incremental cellular changes as you urge into and out of the world. I want to learn what it is to be plant. To be alive, and willed, and waning. To see how you move, how you live, how you dance.

I shall be your witness. Gathering clues about you like a hybrid, a private detective, a scientist, a lover. I am your beholder, your gaper, your gazer. Your plucker, your puller, your teaser.

When summer is over, and you’re parched with sun, I shall snip off your prickly heads one by one and lay you on the chairs in my house like they do at National Trust places, at rest on time-worn chairs that were made for the fleshy bottoms of queens and ladies. In the palace of my terraced house, the proletarian thrones will be all yours. And I shall invite people round for tea and cake who aren’t queens or ladies, to stand and admire your toppled majesty. By then I shall know your secret language.

Will you know that I am there in your margins – as you are in mine?

Are you paying attention? I ask this for my life.

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‘Teasels’ is out now and available here (£12).

Sam Francis is a North Somerset-based artist and edgeland naturalist who seeks to work in dialogue with non-human life forms. Her work explores themes of aloneness and the female body, often set within the landscape. Previous pieces include a project on nettles for East Quay arts centre in Watchet, which was featured on Caught by the River.