Vulgar. A word that evokes disgust, a lack of sophistication, and moral crudeness. The dated definition rooted in Latin means a characteristic of the common people, the ordinary. It can be implied that throughout the words historical usage, it was meant to dismiss and undermine the common peoples. As a word to describe a practice or ethic around gardening and landscape, vulgar can suggest that the cultivation and beauty of life exists in the perceived “sameness”.

Vulgar: A Garden is an attempt to reconstruct the collective memory of Filipino migration to the San Francisco Bay Area. A series of gardens along a designed trail on San Bruno Mountain physically recount oral and visual histories through subtle gardening interventions that speak to the very idea of “commonness”. These “vulgar” punctuations at various scales reveal local climatological phenomena, native flora, and the symbolism embedded in the surrounding Filipino cultural landscape of Daly City, California.

You can learn more about this project here.