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Gardening as Belonging

Topic owner: Amandi

Cf.

Topics:

  • Gardening

  • Focus the topic on the concept of gardens.

  • Define "garden", is a place of control, collaboration, innovation, exploitation, etc.?

  • Think of benefits and drawbacks.

Cf. garden city, city in a forest vs forest in a city, etc.

  • Can the whole city or the whole planet be a garden?

  • Is gardening ethical in relation to plants and other non-human organisms?

  • Who can gardens help and how?

  • native/exotic gardens

  • official/guerrilla gardens

  • terroir

  • slow food movement

  • gardening as care, politics, feminist practice

  • DYI

Methods

For an overview, you can have a look at large collections of methods, e.g. Sage has a few on qualitative methodologies. This is one:

Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 2001. 5th ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2023.

This is another overview, for general orientation of what people do:

Dowling, Robyn, Kate Lloyd, and Sandra Suchet-Pearson. “Qualitative Methods II: ‘More-than-Human’ Methodologies and/in Praxis.” Progress in Human Geography 41, no. 6 (December 2017): 823–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516664439.

Some other examples to explore:

Lawrence, Anna M. “Listening to Plants: Conversations between Critical Plant Studies and Vegetal Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 46, no. 2 (2021): 629–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325211062167.

Pitt, Hannah. “On Showing and Being Shown Plants - a Guide to Methods for More-than-Human Geography.” Area 47, no. 1 (2015): 48–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12145.

Rodgers, Shannon, Bernd Ploderer, Kellie Vella, and Margot Brereton. “Phenology Probes: Exploring Human-Nature Relations for Designing Sustainable Futures.” Proceedings of the 34th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (New York), OzCHI ’22, 2023, 216–28. https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3572936.

Examples of resulting writing:

Carabelli, Giulia, and Dawn Lyon. “Time with Houseplants: A Sociological Analysis of Temporalities, Affective Entanglements and Practices of Care.” The Sociological Review 73, no. 6 (2025): 1441–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261251335747.

Fredericks, Joel, Marcus Foth, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Andrew Vande Moere, and Martin Tomitsch. “Middle-out Design for More-than-Human Cities: Integrating Human–Animal Relations in Urban Sustainability Planning.” Smart and Sustainable Built Environment, 2026, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1108/SASBE-09-2025-0562.

Turner, Bethaney, Ann Hill, and Jessica Abramovic. “Learning with Compost: Digging down into Food Waste, Urban Soils and Community.” Local Environment 30, no. 7 (2025): 841–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2024.2380853.

Examples

Is it just participatory design or DIY, non-expert, hyper-local or vocational design that is more closely associated with gardens? Gardens can be a form of resistance, cf. guerrilla gardening, but also a form of control and exploitation, cf. colonial gardens, botanical gardens, etc. Gardens can be a form of collaboration and innovation, cf. community gardens, urban farms, etc. Gardens can be a form of play and experimentation, cf. children's gardens, etc.

  • Ritual, religious gardens, e.g. Japanese gardens, Islamic gardens, etc.
  • Moss gardens, e.g. Saihō-ji in Kyoto, Japan.
  • Botanical gardens, e.g. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.
  • Community gardens, e.g. Incredible Edible, UK.
  • Guerrilla gardening, e.g. The Green Guerrilla, New York, USA.
  • Urban farms, e.g. Growing Power, Milwaukee, USA.
  • Children's gardens, e.g. The Children's Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, USA; The Collingwood Children's Farm, Melbourne, Australia; The Children's Garden at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.

References

Bach, Claire E., and Nathan McClintock. “Reclaiming the City One Plot at a Time? DIY Garden Projects, Radical Democracy, and the Politics of Spatial Appropriation.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39, no. 5 (2021): 859–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420974023.

Clément, Gilles. The Planetary Garden: And Other Writings. Translated by Sandra Morris. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Ginn, Franklin. Domestic Wild: Memory, Nature and Gardening in Suburbia. London: Routledge, 2016.

Heyd, Thomas. “Plant Ethics and Botanic Gardens.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, no. 9 (2012): 37–47.

Ilieva, Rositsa T., Nevin Cohen, Maggie Israel, Kathrin Specht, Runrid Fox-Kämper, Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre, Lidia Poniży, et al. “The Socio-Cultural Benefits of Urban Agriculture: A Review of the Literature.” Land 11, no. 5 (2022): 622. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11050622.

Jones, Rebecca. Green Harvest: A History of Organic Farming and Gardening in Australia. Collingwood: CSIRO, 2010.

Raxworthy, Julian. Overgrown: Practices between Landscape Architecture and Gardening. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

Reynolds, Richard. On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening without Boundaries. London: Bloomsbury, 2014.

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