Of Wild, Tangled, and Colorful Gardens: Narrating the More-than-Human Community in Katherine Applegate’s Wishtree

This chapter explores the intricate interplay between human and more-than-human actors in Katherine Applegate’s novel Wishtree. In this context, the novel’s central metaphor—the community as a garden—its understanding of agency as relational and distributive, as well as its more-than-human narrative situation will serve to bring into dialogue the fields of ecocriticism, migration, and more-than-human studies. On the basis of the novel’s deconstruction of artificial boundaries and borders, migration and mobility will be viewed as natural affordances able to challenge established narrative spaces. Emphasizing the ecosystemic situatedness of humans within more-than-human networks, the chapter lastly proposes that cultural technologies, particularly stories and narratives, play a pivotal role in highlighting and reflecting notions of more-than-human kinship patterns, connections, and mutual care across time and space.