Becoming Naturalized to Place: California's Feral Cabbages by Alex Arzt

Half letter booklet, 40 pages, Riso printed, stapled

1st printing: September 2022
2nd printing: July 2023

Becoming Naturalized to Place explores human-plant relationships, deep mapping, and the physical and emotional relationship to land in a time of ongoing ecological destruction. The essay stems out of Alex Arzt’s long term engagement with the feral cabbages of California’s coast both in the wild and in her former rented lot in East Oakland where the soil is both highly fertile and polluted. Feral cabbages offer a model for survival through discovering their ecological niches, forming cooperative communities, and creating multispecies partnerships, including with humans. They are connectors to our plant communities, an avenue for creating a sense of belonging to a place, and a potential source of resilient, nutritious food.