Gardening. Home Gardens and Environmental Stewardship
摘要
Does being a gardener make you an environmentalist? Many people like green outdoor spaces, but how many choose to plant specific trees to provide a corridor for possums across their neighbourhood or a habitat for native birds? The chapter shows how home gardening, an activity generally regarded as an individual interest or hobby, becomes a neighbourhood ecology when people connect it with social practices and shared environmental values. This chapter focuses on contemporary home gardeners on Wangal and Gadigal land in a neighbourhood known today as Haberfield. In the early twentieth century, Haberfield became Sydney’s first planned garden suburb, turned into a destination for migrants from South Europe (mainly from Italy) attracted by the large land blocks in the years after World War II, and is now an affluent middle-class suburb. Haberfield gardens materialise the entanglement of these histories and the transformations in everyday life, politics, design, lifestyles, demographics, and social and cultural practices. The literature on domestic gardens reflects these different aspects. Early research, for instance, examines material practices, emotional landscapes, sustainability, sensory exploration, migrant geographies. More recently, gardens have received attention as sites of everyday multiculturalism and production of hybrid knowledge across cultures, and pluralism of environmental relationships brought about by Indigenous and migrant perspectives. While multiple forms of environmental stewardship appear in this more recent literature, how domestic gardening can become a social practice supporting local ecologies still needs focused attention. Yet, this is one of the critical aspects emerging in our ethnographies. This chapter contains material from extended interviews with gardeners, participant observation during garden competitions and walks, and extensive photo-documentation. It also engages with archival maps and documents recording the activities of the local gardeners’ association. From swapping cuttings to learning from each other, campaigning for local trees, creating habitat for birds, and articulating their understanding of gardening as cultural and transcultural heritage, we follow committed gardeners as they discuss their planty creations in relation to and in favour of their local environment. We show how home gardening attunes people to their local environment, advancing the book’s overall thesis by clearly demonstrating how gardening with environmental intent creates neighbourhood ecologies.