Edited by Chanelle Adams and Danielle Wu

Earthly Delights is an invitation to follow us down, down the rabbit’s hole, to a botanical world beyond your control. Imagine a rancorous garden party, where a curious cast of artists, educators, florists, historians, poets, and writers have assembled to ponder the unauthorized biographies we assign to plants. What is the difference between sweat and dew? A spine and a stem? A victory garden and a pandemic plot?

The zine features essays from editors Chanelle Adams and Danielle Wu, as well as contributions from Aru Apaza, Jonathan Cruz, Tammy Nguyen, MADEYOULOOK, Naomi Kawanishi Reis, and TJ Shin. From Brooklyn to Soweto, Paris and Portland, contributors tend to topics such as house plants, city gardens, national archives, and flower shops. At each site, questions of inheritance, self-making, and nation building take root, germinating dual-headed monstrosities comprised of equal parts nightmare and fantasy. What happens when you run away from apocalyptic certainty, only to find yourself at the fiery gates of someone else’s Eden? How do you tell stories through the garden, knowing we bend plants towards political will or recruit them to placate our anxieties?