Potted slant on urban jungles

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To the keen observer, Sydney's inner suburbs are filled with pottedhistories of weedy characters and flourishing romances that haveshaped them and those who live within them.
Now three artists, Tessa Rapaport, Karl Logge and Diego Bonetto,have set out to collect the living stories of Redfern through someof its reclusive and most unassuming residents: its pot plants.
"People are very forthcoming," Bonetto says. "You know: 'This [was]given to me from my ex-husband when we were getting divorced, it'sa happy plant. We divorced, but I still have the happy plant."'
The Hanging Gardens , a living installation set up inside the usually not-so-verdantfoyer of CarriageWorks for this week's Underbelly emerging artsfestival, examines the premise that plants are part of anycommunity - and a way that people form relationships with eachother as well as their environment.
"It's like going to the park with your dog and you have all ofthese dog friends that you just know by the name of their pets,"Bonetto says. "Garden relationships are very similar: 'Ah, you knowthat lady who owns that bougainvillea along the fence …' "
Residents have been invited to lend their beloved botanicals to thetrio for the project, which culminates at the two-day festival thisweekend, providing them with care instructions and a letter ofintroduction that will be displayed alongside each pot plant duringtheir stay at CarriageWorks.
The installation has already collected dozens of plants from acrossthe inner west. Together it is hoped they will form a green pictureof how the area and its residents have grown over time. "They neverseem to die," says a handwritten card attached to a small pot. "I'm83 years old and I've lost much agility that is required to lookafter a garden. Therefore these evergreen succulents provide mewith much pleasure and will do so in the years that I have ahead ofme."
Bonetto says many people form special relationships with plants,using them as a marker to an important time in their lives. One ofthe installation's frangipanis was planted by a mother when she wasfive months' pregnant, for example, while another of the plants, alopsided cactus, turned up at a children's birthday party one yearand never left.
Logge says that potted plants are a way of keeping a connection tothe natural, even in the most urban of environments. "In the innercity the pot plant is one bit of nature you can hang onto," hesays.