Public (E-Journal, York University)

Crichlow, Warren

Embodying Black Experience | Representing Segregation

Contributors

Badger, Gina

English

Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting (Making War-Fair)

Mah, Kai Wood

Young Gardeners: On Gardens as Spaces of Experiental Pedagogy

Failler, Angela

Can Names Implicate Us? The memorial-art of Rebecca Belmore and Janis Cole

Despard, Erin

Gagnon, Monika Kin

Introduction
Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon
In his introduction to garden theory, Greater Peifections (:4000), John Dixon Hunt outlines a field ofstudy which is both impossibly broad and, he argues, necessarily specialized. As a starting point,he notes that the garden finds its etymological roots in words denoting' enclosure' in many lan-
guages. On the basis of this rather minimal defining feature, he generates a vexing range of
garden types. Amongst some thirty-two gardens cited by Hunt, are such diverse species as rose
gardens, vegetable gardens, landscape gardens, cloister gardens, bog gardens, therapeutic gardens,
container gardens, and corpse gardens. Contributors to Public: Gardens add even further variants
to Hunt's typology, referencing many garden forms in historical and contemporary contexts. For
example, there are the "botanicuratorial" museum gardens described and analyzed from an eco-
critical perspective by J. Keri Cronin; the numerous forms of school garden analyzed by Kai Mah
from the perspective of John Dewey's pedagogical philosophy (whose experimental school at the
University of Chicago incorporated a garden as early as 1896); and finally the very special form of
allotment garden which is the Alex Wilson Community Garden, whose inception is animated here
by one of its creators, Richard Brault. -
Such diversity speaks to the generativity of the garden form. As Lesley Johnstone, former artistic
director of the International Garden Festival in Grand- Metis, Quebec, asserts, gardens represent
"an ideal place for experimentation and innovation" (:4007, 7). Not only is there a great deal of
flexibility in what can be considered a garden, gardens in general are inherently "approachable"
compared to other art forms. Also, "[bJecause they are places conceived to be used, because they
are outside and thus subject to the variables of weather and nature, because they implicate visitors'
bodies as well as their minds, gardens offer particularly intense aesthetic experiences" (9). A good
example of how such potential is exploited is found in Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell's
Dymaxion Sleep. Created for the :40°9 festival and featured in this issue, it is at once a sensual
olfactory garden, a play structure, and inspired quotation of Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic
dome. The hydroponic community garden known as Flood, created by the artists' collective, Haha,
and discussed here by Heather Davis, similarly demonstrates, though in a very different context,
how a garden can facilitate new forms of collective agency and expression. Both kinds of gardens
experiment not only with design and artistic practice, but also with processes of perception,
participation and social relations.
The openness implied in this potential for experimentation, however, exists in a somewhat
paradoxical relationship to the garden's etymology and the qualities for which it has more tradi-
tionally been valued: that is, of providing a space of seclusion set apart from the world and offering
opportunities for reflection, relaxation and disinterested aesthetic appreciation. While such qual-
ities are important to the overall cultural significance and ubiquity of gardens, there is already a
7
great deal of garden scholarship, which has elaborated on them. We are more interested in exploring
engagements that challenge the garden's apparent separation from politics. As earlier works in
garden history have demonstrated, if a garden encloses, it also excludes (Pugh 1988, Harris ~oo3).
Many contributions to Public: Gardens thus ask: what might the implications of bringing formerly
excluded elements, or the garden's'other' within the scope of its study? Wilderness, the uncontrol-
lable, even the unattractive-what do these philosophical and aesthetic species bring to the garden's
ecology?
Working along these lines of inquiry, several contributors draw attention to the boundaries
and edges of gardens, and the ways that these serve to both exclude and privilege certain qualities
or characteristics. For example, Jill Didur's essay explores the colonial history of planthunting
expeditions in the Himalayan mountain ranges of Nepal, through the chronicles of Jamaica
Kincaid'sAmong Flowers, and demonstrates how this history influences the contemporary desig-
nation of plants as 'gardenworthy' or not. Taking a more concrete approach, Susan Herrington's
photo essay of extraordinary hedges in Vancouver reflects on the significance of using plant life to
demarcate boundaries between public and private spaces. Finally, Lisa Uddin's analysis of
attempts to anthropomorphize and choreograph the sex lives of pandas at the Smithsonian's
National Zoo, demonstrates how garden elements helped to create a setting in which heterosexual
norms could be reproduced and naturalized for the public.
Other contributors focus on how the garden's boundaries can be stretched to promote social
and political interventions. Broken City Lab's 'removable gardens', for example, attempt to
inspire residents of Windsor, Ontario, to creatively intervene in the city, and to actively imagine
its transformation. Working in a similar direction, the contributors to the "Mobile Gardens" port-
folio present interventions that are at once whimsical and practical in their response to changing
urban environments. Meanwhile Gina Badger's critique of the use of the 'seed bomb' by guerilla
gardeners argues that in order to become more radically political, such garden-making must do
more than simply beautify. We are also very pleased in this context to present two new texts from
garden designer Gilles Clement, whose gardens always have an explicit political program, and
whose writing on gardens has been influential (and controversial) in the worlds of ecological gar-
den design, landscape theory, and garden studies. Clement has a history of working with plants
often rejected by other designers for being weedy or invasive, but whose habits of growth and
movement around the garden help to make it a more dynamic place, and solicit a different kind of
attention from visitors. The garden described in this issue (and theorized in part by Clement's
notion of 'symbiotic man'), features stinging nettle-a plant that is usually shunned due to its
capacity to sting and irritate human skin, but which in this context produces other effects: the
cleansing of a polluted environment, and the creation of an opportunity for community empower-
ment and education.
Other artists featured in this issue have stepped outside the garden's boundaries to investigate
and support the life and beauty of those elements that have escaped its control. For example, Oliver
Kellhammer's found garden of flourishing weeds and indigenous flora, Concrete Island, offers an
ecology for local insects and birds to co-inhabit in unexpected ways, while Mike MacDonald's
long-time commitment to creating butterfly habitats, has led to the planting of naturalistic, abun-
dantly beautiful gardens across Canada. The Wayward Plants Registry rescues abandoned plants
that have, in a sense, been ejected from the garden, and attempts to reintegrate them into
8 INTRODUCTION
healthy human-plant relations. Finally, Aviva Rahmani's Trigger Point Garden, which is part artwork,
part ecological restoration, seeks to bring wildlife back into the garden, and to find an opportunity
there for mutual healing.
The reprinting of literary writings on gardens by poet, Lisa Robertson, by novelist, Sandra
Cisneros, by nineteenth-century writer, Catharine Parr Traill, and French Situationist founder,
Guy Debord, animate even more varied approaches to imagining what makes a garden.
A survey of the texts and works collected here confirms the necessity of the almost impossibly
open-ended definition provided as a starting point by Hunt. Building on this openness, Public:
Gardens highlights the garden as an ideal site for experimentation and innovation. It seeks to give
life to a wide-ranging conversation, one informed as much as possible by concerns beyond the
garden's boundaries. In so doing, we hope to show that gardens need not be limited to landscapes
of leisure or mere ornament but rather, belong equally in the realms of art, ethics, and polities.
References
Harris, Dianne. ~oo3. The Nature ofAutholitJ' Villa CuLture, Landscape and Representation in Eighteenth-CentUlY Lombardy.
University Park Pennsylvannia State University Press.
Hunt. John Dixon. ~ooo. Greater Pe1jections, The Practice of Garden Theory. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Johnstone, Lesley, ed. ~oo7' Hybrids, Reshaping the Contempormy Garden in Metis, Vancouver, blueimprint.
Pugh, Simon. 1988. Garden, Nature. Language. Manchester, Manchester University Press.
9


Introduction

Matthews, Sara

Tracing the Human: Memory and the Visual Frame in The Hero Book

Florence, Jenny

Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannu Collection

Didur, Jill

"Gardenworthy": Rerouting colonial botany in Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

Paolantonio, Mario Di

Rose, Chloë Brushwood

Not a member yet

Embodying Black Experience | Representing Segregation

Contributors

Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting (Making War-Fair)

Young Gardeners: On Gardens as Spaces of Experiental Pedagogy

Can Names Implicate Us? The memorial-art of Rebecca Belmore and Janis Cole

Introduction

Tracing the Human: Memory and the Visual Frame in The Hero Book

Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannu Collection

"Gardenworthy": Rerouting colonial botany in Jamaica Kincaid's Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya

Introduction

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