This is a winogradsky column that lives in my house. The artist Sneha Solanki created it, with foraged materials from the woodland where I work. Stream water, egg shells, ancient soil, pine needles, fragments of iron leftover from the former mineworks….the right balance of nutrients.
Winogradsky columns are a self-organising ecosystem of microbes. You add layers of different microbes found in organic and human made material. You seal the jar, and leave it.
It starts as a murky brown jar. Over months, years and decades it feeds itself and organises into different layers of organic material that can sustain itself permanently. Its colours will turn vivid pink, orange, green.
It’s a microcosm sustainable planet.
