Plots, plants and paradoxes: contemporary domestic gardens in Aotearoa/New Zealand (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
Garden histories since the mid 1990s have increasingly turned to studies of vernacular gardens as sites of identity formation. More recently, the development of environmental history and specifically urban environmental history has started to show how vernacular gardening in suburban and urban spaces has contributed to changes in urban environments. Relatively little work on home gardening history in this sense has been undertaken in the New Zealand context, while in Australia such work is well underway. This study augments knowledge of home gardening history in New Zealand by focussing on one urban area, Christchurch, known both as the ‘Garden City’ and as ‘one of the most English cities outside of England’. An examination of gardening literature over the period from European colonisation in 1850 to the first visit to the city by a reigning monarch in 1954 highlights changes in gardening tropes rather than particular garden fashions or elements. The four principal tropes of abundan...
The Gardens in Hamilton New Zealand: Part 1. Introduction
A series of critical essays on the Enclosed Gardens at Hamilton, New Zealand. The Enclosed Gardens in Hamilton, New Zealand, are one of the most exciting creations I have seen in Australia and New Zealand. There seems to be nothing quite like it anywhere else. Unlike the Chaumont garden festival or the Chelsea Garden Show, it is concerned with garden history rather than original invention. What concerns me here are questions of imitation and models. As gardens that embody particular national and historical garden styles, these issues invariably come to the fore. And because these gardens are based on particular models they prompt a highly particularised attentiveness that leads to detailed critical analysis that is not possible with most contemporary gardens. In subsequent posts I will look at individual gardens or issues that these gardens suggest.
Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden
2011
In the common public perception, contemporary gardening is understood as suburban, as leisure activity, as television makeover opportunity. Its originary narratives are seen as religious or spiritual (Garden of Eden), military (the clipped lawn, the ha-ha and defensive ditches), aristocratic or monarchical (the stately home, the Royal Horticultural Society). Radical Gardening travels an alternative route, through history and across landscape, linking propagation with propaganda. For everyday garden life is not only patio, barbecue, white picket fence, topiary, herbaceous border.… From window box to veggie box, from political plot to flower power, this book uncovers and celebrates moments, movements, gestures, of a people’s approach to gardens and gardening. It weaves together garden history with the counterculture, stories of individual plants with discussion of government policy, the social history of campaign groups with the pleasure and dirt of hands in the earth.
Tastes in tension: form, function, and meaning in New Zealand’s farmed landscapes
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2001
Landscapes are representations of a range of possible ways of life and people may interpret them in a variety of often conflicting ways. One expression of such tension occurs with respect to landscape tastes is illustrated in the paradox of New Zealand’s organic farming landscapes. While organic practices are environmentally friendly, they do not have landscapes which are tidy and cultivated, and reflect New Zealand’s legacy of a hardworking settler mentality. The landscapes on organic farms are, therefore, interpreted by some as being indicative of laziness and neglect and by others as responsible and environmentally healthy. In order to reveal the motives and values which engender this range of landscape tastes, an ethnographic approach was taken. Through in-depth interviews, this study explores the links between conventional and organic farmers’ landscape tastes and associated values. This investigation is of particular relevance to landscape architecture, in the context of ongoing discussions of the “ecological aesthetic”, a discussion which addresses a perceived dichotomy between aesthetics and ecology. The ways in which people relate to the form of ecologically sound farming practices, thus sheds light on the way form, function and meaning are constructed. This type of study constitutes a foundation for culturally sustainable landscape design.
Reclaiming urban space as resistance : the infrapolitics of gardening
Revue Française d’Études Américaines, pp. 33-49, 2012
Even though half of the world's population now lives in cities, the “right to the city,” which was called for by Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s, is not yet a reality for all. Not only do most urbanites lack the power and ability to shape their living environment, but they are sometimes excluded from the so-called public space altogether. Against this double rejection of their right to the city, some of them have imagined, whether consciously or not, daily acts of resistance by marking their surroundings or subverting their use. Urban gardening, despite its apparent innocuousness, has proved to be a powerful tool for protesting against the urban condition as shaped and defined by the ruling powers, both public and private. Even though the practice is now gaining recognition all over the world, the claiming of urban space—even minimal—through horticulture is still underway.
In the last decade, a large variety of grassroots actors – urban harvesters, guerrilla garden- ers, community growers and landsharers – have been promoting a diversified set of projects that, while interstitial and very often considered “residual”, are nonetheless significantly challenging the mainstream place-making of cities in the Global North, and sometimes changing the face of the neighbourhoods in which they are located. These initiatives unfold in a variety of forms: the spontaneous appropriation and rehabilitation of marginal and neglected spaces at the city periphery, new bilateral agreements for sharing private land, community stewardship of urban greens and parks in well-maintained city centres are just a few of the arrangements through which gardening in both public and private spaces is taking place in various urban settings. While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection aims to investigate and reflect on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives, by questioning and interrogating them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify “the urban”. While as editors of this special issue, we are interested in understanding the potential of urban gardening practices as agents of counter-neoliberal urban transformation, we do not take the progressive political stance as a starting point, but as a working question. We are interested in exploring what ideas about the city and belonging these practices embody and bring forward, how they make use of biological material as a means of political expression, what innovative relations of care, decision-making and politics of place they build, and what weaknesses, contradictions or emancipatory potentials they carry with them. Our aim is to populate the link between political gardening and the politics of space with a range of reflections that, seen in their complexity, constitute the basis for furthering urban politics from the ground up.
Suburban life and the boundaries of nature: resilience and rupture in Australian backyard gardens
Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers, 2006
Despite an academic shift from dualistic to hybrid frameworks of culture/nature relations, separationist paradigms of environmental management have great resilience and vernacular appeal. The conditions under which they are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need more detailed attention because of the urgent environmental challenges of a humanly transformed earth. We draw on research in 265 Australian backyard gardens, focusing on two themes where conceptual and material bounding practices intertwine; spatial boundary-making and native plants. We trace the resilience of separationist approaches in the Australian context to the overlay of indigeneity/ non-indigeneity atop other dualisms, and their rupture to situations of close everyday engagement between people, plants, water and birds. Our ethnographic methods show that gardens are places where both attitudes and practices can change in the process of such engagements. In a world where questions of sustainability are increasingly driven by cities and their residents, these chains of agency help identify areas of hope and transformative potential as well as concern.
Community gardening: cultivating subjectivities, space, and justice
Community gardens have been lauded for being inherently resistant to neoliberalism and criticised for underwriting it. To move beyond this either/or debate, we need to employ more focused lenses and specify both the processes of neoliberalisation at play and the outcomes they can produce. This paper explores the ways in which neoliberal processes of privatisation, state entrepreneurialism, and devolution intersect with community gardens, and the subjectivities that may be cultivated, the spaces that may be created and the types of justice that may be advanced as a result. It argues that certain characteristics and orientations of gardens are more conducive to resisting neoliberalism. These include the cultivation of producer, citizen, and activist subjectivities (over those of consumer, entrepreneur, and volunteer); the elevation of the use value of shared lived space (over a site’s potential exchange value) and the advancement of spatial justice through community access to non-privatised space; and food justice, through non-commodified means of obtaining food. Holding these ends in mind can help ensure that proponents of community gardening sow the seeds of the fruits they most wish to reap.
Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene [TOC + Introduction]
Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene. London: Routledge, 2019
This volume discusses gardens as designed landscapes of mediation between nature and culture, embodying different levels of human control over wilderness , defining specific rules for this confrontation and staging different forms of human dominance. The contributing authors focus on ways of rethinking the garden and its role in contemporary society, using it as a crossover platform between nature, science and technology. Drawing upon their diverse fields of research, including History of Science and Technology, Environmental Studies, Gardens and Landscape Studies, Urban Studies, and Visual and Artistic Studies, the authors unveil various entanglements woven in the past between nature and culture, and probe the potential of alternative epistemologies to escape the predicament of fatalis-tic dystopias that often revolve around the Anthropocene debate. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental and landscape history, the history of science and technology, historical geography, and the environmental humanities.