Abundance. Resilience. Reconnection.
with Adina Moise at the Seeds House Garden
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Hourse 13:00 – 18:00
Intrarea Poianei 6, Domnești commune, Ilfov county
From spring to autumn, four different gardens located in close proximity to Bucharest engage in an exchange of practices and experiences in cultivating and relating, as part of the project Cultivators of Life. Starting with a spring session of exchanging seeds and documenting the sowing and growing processes, in summer and autumn each gardener opens their space to a public, invited to observe, learn and engage with the knowledge of plants and their network of relationality. Each event is choreographed following the gardens’ particular conditions and contexts, as well as each gardener’s own sensibility, expertise and experiences. The process and events are documented by three young harvesters through different media: writing (Irina Bobei), illustration (Maria Doni), and video (Gabriela Cozma).
The final garden event will take place at the Seeds House Garden in Domnești, tended by Adina Moise and the team behind the Bank Seeds / Seeds House project since 2021, of the association Romania in Tranzitie. The purpose of the garden, located on a 1500 square meter land, is to ground the activity of the Bank, to safeguard and then cultivate, document and multiply the Romanian traditional seeds, as well as other rare seeds from Balkan region. The garden uses technics that come from permaculture, biodynamic and regenerative agriculture, with more than 500 varieties of heirloom, non-hybrid seeds, multiplied and shared for cultivating in other gardens. In the A frame house, the seeds are dried, or, during the gardening season, it hosts volunteers registered through the WWOF program.
“Now I invite you to a garden, it is NOT just any garden, it is a garden with a purpose, where old and rare seed varieties multiply, in peaceful cohabitation, according to principles friendly to People and Earth. A small site almost off-grid, near Bucharest, where a handful of people try to change the future of the world through what they do today. A return to simplicity, supported by innovation, where they make fertile soil and multiply ancient seeds, in a garden. Precious seeds were collected in the Seed Bank, received from Someone's aunt, grandmother or great-grandfather, cultivated and then dried in natural conditions and stored in safe bottles, to be passed on to future cultivators. The body, tired from physical labor, but somehow refreshed, the mind, calm, emptied of the daily derision, the soul, returned to its place, fulfilled by a work as old as time immemorial. The Cultivated Earth. Possibly the Ancestor of each one of us knew these rhythms, labors, riches with sacredness.
A crunchy and juicy grape, a mouthful of tea made from freshly picked aromatic herbs, moments of peace in a hammock, or of labor under the still burning midday sun... Seed pods hanging to dry in the cottage, the smell of baked eggplants or pancakes spread through the garden, the cawing of geese from the neighbors. Pauses, conversations, silences, the sound of the train from time to time...
Masanobu Fukuoka, one of the forerunners of permaculture, said that "the essential purpose of agriculture is not the growth of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of the human being".
Now I invite you to a garden...” – Adina Moise
Adina Moise is a psychologist, trainer, community facilitator, initiator of the Free Seeds (2014), founder of the Seed Bank / Seeds House (2019), project manager and associate in the Romania in Tranzitie NGO. Gardener, lover of simplicity, Nature and Humans.
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by Tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
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The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
