When you see a pothole in the middle of your car’s path, you probably feel inclined to grumble and brace yourself for the inevitable impact. Well, one New Yorker has decided to turn her disdain for rough roads into art.

Elaine Santore, burgeoning guerrilla gardener and executive director of the non-profit Umbrella of the Capital District on Broadway, is filling the potholes in Schenectady, New York, with colorful, small gardens.

Santore decided to start filling problematic potholes after noticing that her neighborhood had accumulated quite a few after the snowy winter. Modern Farmer reports that Santore says she’s not “an avid gardener,” but that she does “like to put things in the ground.” Santore’s pothole flower of choice is the pansy, reports The Daily Gazette.

Santore has received a lot of positive feedback concerning her guerrilla gardening handiwork. When passengers in passing cars see what she’s doing, they often smile and wave. So far, the rogue planter has filled approximately 10 potholes.

While Santore’s neighbors seem to be on board with her gardening tactics, the city isn’t deterring her work, either. In fact, since the guerrilla gardener has started her neighborhood beautification project, the city has begun filling more of the street hazards.

Overall, Santore is quite pleased with everyone’s response to her work. The artist is happy that her positive planting act is creating change. “You could go down and complain at city hall. You could call them up and complain,” Santore says to Modern Farmer. “You could walk around with a picket and protest. There are other reasons to need to do that—much bigger issues. But something like this, this is just a simple no-harm way of getting the point across. And I think it worked because people reacted to it.”

What do you think about Santore’s guerrilla gardening project? Would you ever try to plant in potholes in your city?

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Modern Farmer recently profiled Andy Feehan and Wim Delvoye, two artists best known as the guys who tattoo pigs. Living, breathing, oinking pigs. But it’s not animal cruelty. It’s art!

Feehan, who started tattooing pigs back in the 1970s, explained that his original intention was to bring awareness to the plight of pigs in captivity.

There are currently more than 65 million pigs on factory farms in the U.S. They are intelligent creatures; as intelligent as dogs if not more so. And gestation crates that confine pregnant sows are some of the cruelest measures used in captivity.

“I wanted to extract them permanently from the pig factory,” Feehan said in Artlies magazine in 2000.

Delvoye started tattooing pigs in the 1990s, inspired by Feehan. “He decorated swine with everything from images of daggers to Disney princesses, and has showed live tattooed pigs at exhibitions,” explained Modern Farmer. “Eventually he took the experiment a step further, establishing an ‘art farm’ in Beijing, where pigs were raised exclusively to be tattooed with his artwork. The pigs were killed and their flattened skins sold to customers who display them as works of art. The industrialization of his work became a commentary on art-industry demand.”

I love pigs so much that I haven’t (knowingly) eaten any part of one since I was a teenager. It seems to be the best way to show my love. You know, by not forcing them to suffer before I gnaw on their cooked flesh. I love tattoos, too. My right arm is covered in them. But here’s where Feehan and Delvoye get the combination so terribly, terribly wrong.

“I believe the manner in which I had the pig tattooed was as humane and painless as possible . . . My intention was, in addition to making them art, was to save their lives,” Feehan wrote in an email to Modern Farmer.

But that’s kind of like putting a pig in a cage on Main Street to bring attention to the animal’s suffering; it doesn’t free the pig, it just turns her into a spectacle. And when we sensationalize animals (or humans), we stop relating to them. “It probably just reinforces the prejudice that animals exist for us to use — if not for meat, then for art,” author and animal rights activist Peter Singer explained to Modern Farmer. “It may be better for the pigs he tattoos than the fate that would otherwise have awaited them. Taking these pigs out of meat production will just mean that other pigs are bred to suffer. ‘Art’ is no excuse for failing to show respect and concern for animals.”

We don’t need tattooed pigs to explain their plight or show the similarities between pigs and humans (there are many!). What we could use, however, are more people with tattoos of pigs on their bodies, so that we can always be reminded that we are who we eat—suffering, humiliation and all.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend. And for the organic gardener, it may just be luxury garden tools (and diamonds, too, of course).

 It’s official. Gardening is now as popular in urban settings as, well, overpriced luxury items. It was inevitable that the two eventually collided. You can’t stop progress. Especially when there’s fertilizer involved.

But still. It didn’t make this story in the June issue of Modern Farmer any less confusing. It appears that whether you’re a full-on kale and tomato-producing organic gardener, or just host a casual array of houseplants, there are luxury garden tools and gear just for you. If you also like absurdly expensive things, that is.

While none of the items appear to contain any diamonds—even despite the probability that a diamond-crusted shovel would give any noisy auger a run for its money—some can cost you about the same as a little sparkly piece of bling.

The article reports that West Elm now sells potting soil called “Brooklyn Blend Potting Soil.” They mean Brooklyn, New York, right? Where exactly does the dirt come from? The A train? The soil costs more than twice as much as regular potting soil from Home Depot, probably due to the hours it must take to find real dirt in Brooklyn. I’d actually pay a good amount of money to go on that excursion.

Williams Sonoma got in on the action, too, with a compost sieve that will set you back $195. It’s made from redwood. Should we be surprised that there are no consumer comments on the product’s page? I just imagine a bunch of gardeners with their $2 garden gloves in their wide-open mouths as they stare at the price tag. Any organic gardener or composter knows you can get a good sieve for under $20, or make your own for even less. They’re still suggesting we use it to filter food waste, right?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d proudly display a $345 Hermes hand spade, scraper and garden fork set like the bling it is…behind the glass door of a curio, or the locked one on my safety deposit box. You know, after I used it to plant some really nice tulips. Or, actually, dig for gold…

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Top image: Jill Ettinger

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