Attending to Ecological Temporalities Through Phenology

Situating phenology within humanities discourse can open up ways of sensing environmental change locally, and in doing so bring nonhuman temporalities into felt experience. As a science of species’ seasonal behaviours, phenology can be understood as a practice already attuned to nonhuman temporalities, tracking the timing of these behaviours over time. More-than-human temporalities are complex, entangled, and increasingly disrupted by human activities, yet these changes often remain difficult to perceive in everyday life, calling for modes of engagement that can make them perceptible beyond scientific contexts. Taking a design research approach, this paper explores how phenological concepts can be reworked through an exploratory workshop in a garden space, where participants used phenology-inspired lenses to sense more-than-human timings and developed recording protocols for observations of temporal interconnections. By connecting phenology with the ‘arts of noticing’ as complementary practices of attention, this approach can broaden how we sense and understand environmental time.