First Meeting 19/10/2023
Gardening In/Against the Anthropocene’s inaugural reading group meeting on the 19th October was supported by the Helsinki Environmental Humanities Month Grant, together with the Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of St Andrews. The reading group adopted a hybrid format due to a Storm Alert issued by the Met Office.
The meeting took place amidst the tumultuous arrival of Storm Babet, ushering in exceptional rainfall and strong wind across eastern Scotland, including St Andrews. It was unfavourable weather for gardening, but providing a fitting backdrop for contemplating the epoch of the Anthropocene. While climatology tends to strictly differentiate itself from meteorology, weather extremes intricately weave them together, channelling our anxieties and aspirations in the age of global climate change. This intrinsic interweaving is too reflected in one of the selected readings for the current gathering, a Guardian piece penned by anthropologist Catriona Sandilands who posits that home gardens serve as ‘a barometer of climate change’ and the act of domestic gardening as the front of navigating ‘the complicated relationships that are the difficult world in which we are living in’.
Our discussion revolved around various ideas and material practices of gardening, which reflected and, at times, reconfigured the relationships between the human and the nature, or perhaps more precisely, of humanity as an integral part of the nature. Guided by questions raised by Natasha Myers in the article, ‘From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene’,
- What is a given garden designed for?
- What interbeing relations does a garden propagate?
our conversation ranged from the etymological origins of the word ‘garden’ (Dong) to gardening practices like food forests in Canada that radicalised gardens’ enclosureness (Minke), from pandemic home gardens (Xinyi) to the paradoxes inherent in contemporary mass farming practices in the era of globalisation (Ben). The tensions between leisure and labour, foraging and farming, control and care were manifested and configured through these practices and conceptions. We were left with a few questions to contemplate over in the coming sessions:
- When does a vegetable garden cease to be a garden and become a farm?
- Do words with a similar meaning to ‘garden’ in other languages, such as Japanese, carry the connotation of enclosure as well?
- If we remove the concepts of borders and boundaries from our conception of gardens, how does it redefine our approach to gardening?
Organised by
Attended by
- Benjamin Ong (School of Geography & Sustainable Development)
- Minke Hijmans (School of History)
- Xinyi Zhou (Museum and Heritage Studies)
Supported by
- Helsinki Environmental Humanities Month
- Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of St Andrews