Buddleja Forest

This film focuses on Buddleja plants which are in bloom in May and which take over vacant lots and decaying buildings. The soundtrack combines an ambient sound recording from the Botanical gardens with four contrasting interviews. Buddleja Forest documents buddleja plants at three different stages of growth in Dublin over the span of a year. By filming plants that I encountered as part of my daily journeys in the city I have created a document of not only the plants but their habitats, vacant lots, walls and empty buildings mainly but also a part of the Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. The audio recordings are with four practitioners in different disciplines whose specialisation leads them to have a unique perspective on the plant. Anne Varley (herbalist), Alan Mee (architect), John Parnell (botanist) and Jane Stout (botanist) talk about the plants healing properties, role as a signifier of neglect, an urban coloniser and food source for bees respectively. A final voice recording of Harriet Sheehy reading an extract from Walden by Henry David Thoreau 'Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots—now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.'