The business card and the garden smuggler

The Dirt introduces us to this business card slash micro-terrain by Tur & Partner, landscape architects. It's a portable garden: impregnated with seeds, in the photosynthetic presence of sunlight and water, the paper eventually sprouts.
Which reminds me of a birthday card my brother once bought: if you buried the card and watered it, small seeds incorporated into the cardstock's fibers would germinate. Which, in turn, makes me wonder if you could use this exact same method to smuggle rare plants out of totalitarian regimes intent on crushing botany within their borders... whether or not such regimes actually exist.
Or future trans-botanical geneticists, fleeing persecution, will hide their greatest seeds inside the pages of fake landscape guides, woven into the actual paper; they then bury their libraries in the soil of distant hillsides, and cloned roses and hybrid flowers soon grow.

(Card also featured at anArchitecture, among other places).

Comments are moderated.

If it's not spam, it will appear here shortly!


Blogger Alexander Trevi said...

Somewhat related: Botanical Guide to BorderXing

November 14, 2006 3:35 PM  
Blogger Alexander Trevi said...

That is, re: "fake landscape guides" and not necessarily to the business card.

November 14, 2006 3:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've heard the DVD cover for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" does the same. It was mocked on FOX "news".

November 14, 2006 5:16 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A squadron of paper airplanes with the seeds of noxious weed species in their fibers. Launched into enemy crops & gardens.

There might also be seed-paper books that require wild fire to germinate, so burning books would spew the seeds up into the air on heat flumes.

Seed-wallpaper for the home interior.

Then there are business cards printed directly on seeds - etched in coconut husks...

November 14, 2006 6:48 PM  
Blogger Geoff Manaugh said...

Indeed - seeds embedded in other seeds, even. Or seeds embedded in bricks: when cities collapse, and buildings disintegrate, prepackaged gardens take shape...

This would be architecture as a garden in the future tense.

November 15, 2006 1:10 AM  
Blogger Y.E. Vulva said...

and then there were the business card birds and insects, genetically developed and introduced to this once thriving ecosystem, to help with the almost fatal decline of the business seed card due to the lack of cross-pollination options...

why does it always have to be business cards?
whatever happened to the situation card or better yet the oblique strategy card - no business just pleasure... with seeds?

November 15, 2006 8:49 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

...embryonic animals embedded in natal bricks? Reminds me of chunks of coal with toads inside, or the horney toad, Ol' Rip.

I guess passenger pigeons have long been avian pleasure cards.

If that landscape arch. micro-terrain card was a 1:1 map, you could just deliver the seed paper map, throw it on site, and watch it sprout. Grow buildings while you're at it. Archiagriculture...

November 15, 2006 11:11 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's a ChiaCard!

November 16, 2006 10:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

My buddy has a company which does the "plantable card" thing. They've got some nice stuff. If you'd like something flatter, check out: Bloomin Promotions.

November 17, 2006 2:03 PM  

Post a Comment