Mendel's peas form the basis of modern genetic engineering. Mendel, a monk, studied the generational changes of peas carefully and derived from them a rule on how certain characteristics were passed down to the next generation but one.
My father's father and my mother's mother both bore Italian names.
My German grandmother hat Tyrolian ancestors and came from what is today Poland. My Italian grandfather from Veneto fled to France as a young man, and, of modest means, set up a family for whom their vegetable patch was a firm part of everyday life. (...)

The countries in which lemons blossom export tons of fruit throughout the world. From the pips of oranges, grapefruit and pomegranates long since eaten I grew hundreds of little trees for my contribution to the exhibition – I wished to place them in a kitchen-cum-garden that combined inside and outside and made of cans 'from the pizzeria'. Soon, the range of packaging waste also led to the Belgian mushroom industry being incorporated into the project, whereby the plants were already joined by seeds that had blown by. And it was not long before I cought myself planting local apple-seeds. (...)

Cans from my own kitchen stood confidently alongside their larger neighbors from the world of restaurants. In the course of the year, my Italian garden thus grew, temporarily solving a current problem, namely that of recyclable matter.

Christiana Protto, in:
Home Abroad (Cat.)
Ed. HOME ABROAD
Frankfurt am Main, 2000
Translation Jeremy Gaines