GREEN MIND: Martha McDonald will lead visitors on a song- tour through Bartram's Garden in collaboration with visual artist Katie Holten.

And though there are pastoral winding paths, historic stone farm buildings, tall trees, river trails and wildflowers, it's no secret that delicate audiences find incongruity between a gorgeous 18th-century botanical garden with indigenous native plants all up in the grille of Lindbergh Boulevard, 54th Street and its immediate neighbor, Bartram Village Home housing project.

Get over it.

"It's a tough neighborhood," says Melanie Snyder, Bartram's director of education and public programs. "But there are advocates for the garden that appreciate the sanctuary our green space provides." They understand the rich history in their midst and the Bartrams' contribution to natural science — a truly unique site, geologically, because it's on both a coastal plain and an eastern piedmont, allowing different types of plants to grow in a small area.

The site and the science — these points speak to the ideas behind the Institute of Contemporary Art-sponsored Soft Sites' project coming to Bartram's Garden.

That's because the floating, site-specific exhibition refers to locations where significant physical change due to natural or human cause has taken place. The works highlight that intangibility, not just of location, but "history, desire, identity, culture and time," according to exhibition materials. So ICA and Bartram will host the mobile active aesthetic of William Pope.L's traveling Black Factory performance and the teaming of mezzo-soprano performance artist Martha McDonald and visual artist Katie Holten.

"We love bringing in different audiences that may not otherwise visit the garden," says Snyder.

"The garden is such an oasis of pastoral 18th-century beauty surviving between a noisy, poverty-stricken urban neighborhood on one side and belching oil refineries on the other," says McDonald of her Lament collaboration with New York sculptor Holten. "I'm trying not to do too much. The garden at dusk is the star of the show."

Exploring the symbolic meanings of Bartram's flowers and of plants gone extinct (they either fell out of fashion and were no longer planted or they could no longer survive in the wild), Lament starts at the famed Franklinia tree, which Bartram saved from extinction and now survives solely in cultivation. From there, McDonald tours the flower garden and kitchen garden, riffing on themes that sculptor Holten has crafted, scattering big blue cartoonish seeds based on real ones. "I'll be digging holes and trying to 'plant' these ridiculous seeds that couldn't possibly survive to symbolize loss and futility," says McDonald, whose usual soaring lyrical sensibilities will point toward plants now gone. She wants us to think about how we experience their disappearance as loss. "For instance, yarrow symbolizes sorrow, foxglove means insincerity, king's spear means my regrets follow you to the grave, yellow tulips stand for hopeless love, and the cypress tree stands for death, despair and mourning," she says. She'll lead the audience down a meadow into a clearing in the woods, where she'll sing a haunting, unaccompanied lament — "The Plaint" by Henry Purcell — for the vanishing natural world. "It's pretty potent and sounds really cool outside in the grove of trees," says McDonald of what I'm guessing will sound like keening at an Irish wake.

On the other hand, William Pope.L's Black Factory — an interactive performance on wheels now on national tour — is no funeral. "The Black Factory does not make blackness, it makes opportunity, the chance to imagine the color of a future we want instead of one imposed," says Pope.L of his organized improv and its brand of intimately achieved social work.

The visual/performance/theater artist, whose past works have involved crawling through the streets of major cities, and eating The Wall Street Journal, will stand, shout, poke and provoke when his van hits three sites in Philly: 13th and Cherry (presented by The Fabric Workshop), ICA and Bartram's. Ambiguous in its program but specific in its goals, The Black Factory's mission is to travel the continent, playfully opening up a discussion on the differences within race, community and democracy wherever it parks. "We're rough and banged up, loopy and honest, articulate and vulnerable," says Pope.L.

Sometimes The Black Factory is invited. Sometimes it's guerrilla-style. Pope.L tells a story of one unsuccessful Factory stop — two days ago.

"Baltimore, 98 degrees. We sucked. Our audience — a black family playing baseball, white guys from a detox program playing volleyball — sucked. Though polite, they did not have much time for our brand of social activism with-a-twist."

When his truck arrives for its four-hour stops, Pope.L feeds audiences (literally and figuratively), sings, dances and does anything to forge a radical dialogue. Pope.L wants audiences to bring to the Factory table their items — things that represent blackness, their blackness, in particular — to discuss them. Maybe archive them as part of the Factory's catalogue raisonne.

The gardens of Bartram fit the criteria for a Factory stop because it's "an institution wanting to take it inside and mix with the outside — the folks that live around it," says Pope.L. To that end, the gardens are making the day part of a neighborhood outreach. ""How this will actually work, I don't know," says Pope.L.

Whether it works or not — emotionally, racially, spiritually, aesthetically — The Black Factory is hope in action. "It is a wish that communities can nurture and heal themselves by investing in themselves. It might produce disagreement. But it will also produce engagement."

That's a strange fruit even John Bartram couldn't have grown.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

The Black Factory, Thu., July 27, 1-5 p.m., 13th and Cherry sts. (presented by The Fabric Workshop); Fri., July 28, 1-5 p.m, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-7108; Sat., July 29, 1-5 p.m, Bartram's Garden, 54th St. and Lindbergh Blvd., 215-729-5281. Lament performance, 4:30 p.m., Bartram's Garden. All performances free.