Eco-garden-Lab

As a liminal bridge uniting human and nature, the garden is a cultivated, measured spatial and architectural form that has long played a significant role in the social-ecological imagination.  The garden has served in powerful ways to produce good citizens and preferred forms of society.  The metaphor of the “gardening” state is undergirded by the modernist desire for order-making and associated violence.  At times, a singular categorisation of native versus invasive species in the garden space reveals the issues of modern conservation practices.

​

Shifting between domestication and unruliness, control and resistance, the garden is also a “contact zone” that affords pluralised ways of being and knowing. Gardens are living archives of, and continue to be implicated in, colonial occupation and violence, and capitalist dominations.  At the same time, the garden, real or imagined, may bridge together different times, spaces and beliefs, offering refuge, hope and defiance for displaced, and marginal communities.  Experimenting with the form of the garden has enabled artists to imagine alternative modes of being in the city, defying the capitalist logic.  Gardens may coalesce with literary space, co-shaping poetry as a more-than-human gardening practice.

​

More recently, against the backdrop of climate crisis and escalating threats to biodiversity, the garden has been seen as “a barometer of climate change”.  As fragmented urban sites become death zones for other-than-human animals, there has been increasing calls for rewilding urban gardens and beyond as a kind of nature-based solution. Various urban areas begin to be construed as garden-like spaces, from skyrise greeneries to urban farms and spontaneous forms of nature in cities, evoking new questions on how to account for the idea and reality of gardens, with all their potentials and implications.  Wetlands parks further prompt the reconsideration of the terrestrial boundary of the garden.

These multifaceted material-semiotic imaginings demonstrate that re(thinking) the garden can offer deep and crucial insights into the tangled and fraught relations among and between human and other-than-human lives in the era of overlapping crises. We are invited to consider: Might a radical reimagining of the garden and gardening transform the current ways of responding to the climate change devastations? How might we learn to think with plants, attending to the “non-conscious intentionality of vegetal life”?   What happens when we consider gardening practices and related (physical, affective) labour—from digging to seeding and composting—as more-than-human acts?

The Garden Futurity Roundtable Colloquium seeks to foreground the garden as vibrant ecological and aesthetic spaces of theory and praxis, and to provide a platform for scholars and practitioners from various fields of studies to reimagine the garden and gardening. The garden, capaciously defined, provides a fascinating site for cross-pollination of diverse disciplinary perspectives that helps cultivate more-than-human relations. This event is part of a broader humanities, art, and science collaborative initiative, an Eco-garden-Lab, at the Education University of Hong Kong.

How might viewing the garden through a multispecies lens challenge the entrenched social, cultural, technoscientific power relations that shape the hierarchical and instrumentalised relationships among and between humans and other-than-humans?   How might the garden foster the community’s sense of rooting, and promote biodiversity and environmental sustainability in the current conjuncture? What alternative frameworks and approaches may (re)constitute gardens for a more regenerative, and just future for the many beings, without ignoring the ontological and epistemic tensions? More broadly, what politics and poetics may emerge when we foreground more-than-human agencies and their production of meaning?

The Garden Futurity roundtable discussions bring together eco-philosophers, cultural theorists, literary scholars, historians, ecologists, climate change researchers and art practitioners to advance the understanding of these complex issues, and provide new provocations and possible solutions. The virtual dialogue will embrace the messiness, compromises, and possibilities in the multifaceted form of the garden and the more-than-human world. Ultimately, it aims to create a space in this troubled time to experiment with and think through the garden.