A couple of thoughts to add to the existing heap of material on gardens etc:
At a recent conference in Edinburgh on the work of Scottish polymath
Patrick Geddes there was much talk of his work on gardens, and local
Geddesian activists showed some current work on reviving Geddes' urban
garden schemes in terms of local permaculture projects. These are right in
the Old Town of Edinburgh and were being talked of in terms of both an
alternative heritage in the city and a potential future political practice.
There are also attempts to restore some of the symbolic gardens Geddes laid
out at his Scots College in Montpellier in the 1920s.
.... the fact that there seemed to be no problem there in seeing gardening
as 'radical' may of course relate to these being communal rather that
private spaces . I have a sense that issues of private or public space are
running through a lot of the discussion as to whether gardening is
'critical' or not ..... presumably there is nothing inherently critical
though about being private or public .....
perhaps it could be argued that gardening, in being a practice whereby we
work out relationships to non-human matter, is like many environmental
concerns in its ability to cut across political categories. I've been doing
work on earlier practices of organic farming, philosophies of composting
(.......) etc and one of the many interesting dimensions is that
politically such things are all over the place, linking to anything from
communist campaigns for land redistribution to far right schemes for going
back to genetic roots (PLUG: see forthcoming book: Landscape and
Englishness: END OF PLUG). It's perhaps the political instability and
irreducibility of such ostensibly everyday and stable practices that makes
them of interest for a forum like this one.
David Matless
Dept of Geog
University of Nottingham
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