Stoned Thinking: The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

PETRIVERSE. Noun.

1. 1). A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.
2. 2). Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in and/or about stone. [Latin petra, rock; Old English vers, from Latin versus a furrow]

The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a xeriscape in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, California, where many residents have taken advantage of a city program that subsidizes the conversion of grass lawns into drought-tolerant landscapes. The garden was conceived in 2009 when Pierre Jardin coined the neologism ‘petriverse’ to denote both a world composed of rocks and words composed of rocks. The site has become known for two distinctive features: it presents constantly changing, eye-catching displays of locally collected stones, and amuses viewers with pithy petricthemed text-messages formed with pebbles. When he started a Petriverse blog, Pierre Jardin christened it with the figuratively and literally fitting tagline “a rock garden where nothing is written in stone.”