The Planthunter: Writing the World as Garden

This chapter explores one Australian woman’s digital diary, a series of online life writing and photos of thoughts, feelings, actions while living and building and garden by the Hawksbury River, near Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. This deeply personal, yet also extremely public meditation, and communication, on the intimacy of place, allows us to consider what it takes to get deeply acquainted with that place as a white-settler colonial woman gardening on a damaged, and stolen, land. Drawing on feminist philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous’ insistence that ‘all the world is a garden’ (White ink: Interviews on sex, text and politics. Acumen, 2008, p. 150) this chapter re-turns once more to Plumwood’s insistence on making a ‘deep acquaintance’ (Environmental culture: The ecological crisis of reason. Routledge, 2002, p. 231) and the complexities and challenges of living, and storytelling, that deep acquaintance in practice.