{"id":47518,"date":"2021-11-15T02:02:04","date_gmt":"2021-11-15T07:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=47518"},"modified":"2021-11-16T14:57:20","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T19:57:20","slug":"the-wild-edges-of-our-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2021\/11\/15\/the-wild-edges-of-our-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wild Edges of Our Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"
The garden has deep roots in human beings\u2019 evolving sociocultural imaginary. We have created and been around gardens for thousands of years\u2014and the nature of<\/span> and within<\/span> these gardens shift and change depending on needs, ideas, and priorities. Gardens\u2014like the works in this volume\u2014form part of the stories we tell about ourselves. <\/blockquote><\/figure>\n

One morning before school, my father hurriedly interrupted my sister and me at the breakfast table, with a look of mischief in his eye, and an instruction to follow him, quickly and quietly, into the garden.1<\/sup> It was a relatively chilly morning, at least by the standards of generally sunny and temperate Johannesburg. Our morning routines were usually quite rushed, so my father\u2019s slow and deliberate steps from the front door to the far side of the house, us following in eager anticipation and confusion, disrupted the rhythm of the weekday mundane. Our house was located in a relatively newish suburb, somewhat on the periphery of this ever-expanding city. We had wild veld2<\/sup> growing on neighbouring undeveloped plots and on the roadsides. It was not uncommon to see snakes and meerkats on our walks around the adjacent koppies,3<\/sup> and hadedas were frequent visitors on our suburban lawn. Lizards sunning themselves on rocks and the odd translucent gecko on our bedroom ceiling (not to mention other critters like rain spiders who would seek respite indoors after a thunder shower) were not unusual curiosities. But these were paltry sightings in comparison with what was waiting for us under the exposed, creosoted eaves of our clay-tiled roof.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Tip-toeing, we caught up to my father: one finger placed on his mouth, with his other hand pointed to the under-hang. The square root of his gesture invited our gaze to follow it upwards, but it took some time for our eyes to adjust to the jarring chiaroscuro: the dimness of the roof under-hang set against the brightness of the early morning highveld sky. Eventually, the silhouette of a medium-sized furry creature came into focus. Slowly, spots started to develop, and I began to make out dark eyes and a black nose encircled by a pinch of white snout. A bushy striped tail accentuated its curled body, which was nestled quite comfortably in the rather awkward right angle made by the wall stud and the wooden strut of the eave. Its eyes were steadily trained on us: a genet! It was both exquisite and ordinary, reminding us of the wild edges of our city. It was both the first and last genet to visit our house\u2014at least to our knowledge\u2014but the memory, almost three decades later, is still angular and distinct.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It seemed unusual then, to come upon a genet in our suburban garden\u2014even though they are relatively common to the region. Our wonder that morning might sound especially strange to readers outside South Africa. It\u2019s a well-worn trope that locals poke fun at foreigners who think that lions and giraffes freely roam the streets (they don\u2019t). Growing up in Johannesburg meant that our exposure to wild animals had been reserved for trips to the zoo and game drives in the bush (the latter, far outside city limits). In fact, our city upbringing was a source of constant mirth in the family: at a tender age, my sister, upon witnessing our Italian grandmother gathering fresh tomatoes from her vegetable garden, commented on the strangeness of this enterprise. Her<\/em> mother\u2019s tomatoes came packaged in a box from the grocer (as though the provenance of both sets of tomatoes were materially different). The store produced the tomatoes, did it not, so why did Nonna need to toil in the garden to get hers?<\/p>\n

Following that morning with the genet, anything now seemed possible. The city was alive with possibility. For weeks afterwards, I would pay careful attention to the margins of our garden and home. I\u2019d find my eyes flitting to the nooks and crannies of the roof, and when playing outside, any movement seemed to promise a break from suburban monotony. During the school-run, my eyes would be trained on the roadside, scanning the edges of brush, as though willing another surprise into existence. I am not entirely sure what I was hoping to see: a mongoose scampering between traffic? A duiker slipping between the trees? Perhaps, if I was lucky, a porcupine hobbling over a rocky outcrop near the golf course? Unfortunately for me, these ideations remained mere flights of fancy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Eventually, my attuned gaze began to soften, and I stopped searching the wild borders of our city. Yet, just when the excitement of that one school morning threatened to fade away, and slip off the corners of my memory, a tortoise surfaced in our back yard. This was even more impressive than the genet\u2019s arrival. How did it get there!? After all, it takes a rather agile creature to negotiate a six-foot perimeter wall topped with barbed wire! It remains a cheerful mystery to this day.<\/p>\n

I hope you can forgive this foray into personal anecdotes, but the theme of this year\u2019s The Nature of Cities flash fiction competition\u2014\u201cthe city in a wild garden\u201d\u2014summoned these childhood memories, where lines between city, garden, and wilderness were momentarily blurred. The memory of the genet and the tortoise work to remind me that cities should<\/em> not, and are<\/em> not, divorced from the surrounding natural world. Cities are part of ecosystems. A harmful history of anthropocentrism is largely to blame for thinking of cities and nature as antinomies. \u201cThe city in a wild garden\u201d invites a radical reimagining of the city. Instead of maintaining so-called neat boundaries between city and nature, here the city\u2014 through this theme\u2014situates urban space within<\/em> nature, hybridising the urban and destabilizing the scope and dimensions of what we have come to think of as city<\/em> space. It is trenchant, too, that the garden is imagined as a wild space\u2014not a manicured or heavily cultivated zone of human interference. It thus normalizes the wild garden as a feature of city space\u2014not something relegated to the country or undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city. The notion of a garden as wild actively subverts the etymology of the word \u201cgarden,\u201d which originally signalled an \u201cenclosure\u201d or that which was \u201cfenced-in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Entrants were asked to write short stories with a target length of 750-words or less, set in the present or future (either near or distant), and inspired by this phrase, \u201ccity in a wild garden.\u201d In keeping with The Nature of Cities\u2019 focus on greener cities for the benefit of both people and nature, the stories themselves needed to feature the following three components: cities, nature, and people. As part of the brief, writers were asked to imagine cities \u201cin which nature and people co-exist, cities in which the relationships between the human-made and the natural are imagined differently.\u201d The competition\u2019s entry guidelines were otherwise quite expansive and invited stories from a range of genres from science fiction to magical realism, inviting narratives that contemplated food security, climate change, wild nature, love stories, and utopian visions of green cities. The call received over 1000 submissions, from an impressive array of countries (101 in total). Two rounds of adjudication then commenced. The first round (consisting of almost one hundred judges) whittled the number of stories down to 150 submissions. This longlist was then forwarded to an executive committee of thirteen jurists, who ultimately settled on six prize-winning stories and a total of forty-nine entries (from twenty countries) which are collected in this book.<\/p>\n

The collection, City in a Wild Garden,<\/em> boasts a diverse array of gardens and types of gardeners. We find:<\/p>\n

kitchen gardens and vegetable gardens;
\nunkempt, wild, and overgrown gardens;
\nsuburban gardens and neighbourhood gardens;
\nbalcony gardens, vertical gardens, and rooftop gardens;
\nBotanical gardens, animalled city-gardens;
\npeople turning into gardens;
\nwatchful gardens;
\nurban guerilla gardens;
\n\u2026 and war-torn gardens.<\/p>\n

There are gardeners, old and young;
\nradical gardeners;
\nand potential gardeners (equipped with seed banks);
\nclimate-change\u2013combating gardeners;
\npeople who plant gardens to remember;
\nand gardeners who are both plant and planter.<\/p>\n

Ari Honarvar, from San Diego, penned the winning entry, \u201cThe Pomegranate Tree,\u201d which follows a nine-year-old child in Pakistan, who helps her father finish smoking the last drags of cigarette in a drone-attack\u2013ravaged garden. The titular tree bears no fruit as a result of the toxic debris caused by exploding ordnances. When the little girl thoughtlessly crushes an ant with a rock, her father allegorizes the garden\u2019s ant colony as a means of developing her empathy for other living things. This poignantly throws into stark relief the inhumanity of the war being waged around them.<\/p>\n

In second place, we had two prize winners. The first story, Rahul Kanvinde\u2019s (Mumbai), \u201cMonkey Business\u201d is set in Delhi and presents an amusing postcolonial adaptation of the \u201cdog ate my homework\u201d ruse but now with the added benefit of promoting environmental justice: a bureaucrat plants bananas strategically across offices in a government building so that a monkey takes off with an important government file, which (not so accidentally) helps to thwart a deforestation plan. The other second-place prize was won by Bostonian, Jonathan Bronico with a story entitled, \u201cPlua Koroa.\u201d Bronico\u2019s narrative celebrates traditional ecological knowledge: a mother uses plants for medicinal purposes, presenting an effective critique of the narrative\u2019s Panamanian decree that forbids the cutting and foraging of wild plants.<\/p>\n

Tied for third-place prizes were Heidi Ball for \u201cPomegranate Heights\u201d (a charming love story about food security and fecund balcony gardens), C.Y. Ballard\u2019s \u201cThe City Incarnata\u201d (which imagines a dryad, who, through urban-wide rhizomes, pollinates her city), and Fernanda Castro\u2019s haunting \u201cPassing Season\u201d (where every year skyscraper walls disappear and migratory birds pass through, unfettered by glass and concrete; yet, with this \u201cpassing season\u201d, a grandmother and child observe the event together for the very last time).<\/p>\n

Gardens in the collection are polysemic and teeming with potential. The multiplicity and variety of gardens on display rub away at the obdurate edges of brutalist skyscrapers, and call for reflection amidst humans\u2019 capacity for both destruction and renewal. Many hands shape these narrative gardens. These can be complicated and heterogenous spaces; this rings true for this collection, and for us, as readers, who see this in our lived experiences of reified, physical gardens. Gordon Campbell writes in Garden History: A Very Short Introduction4<\/sup> that \u201cgardens are living creations that never stand still\u201d and likens them to the flux doctrine, articulated through Heraclitus\u2019s River: \u201cone cannot step into the same river twice; the same might be said of gardens\u201d (4).<\/p>\n

Gardens are thus extremely variegated in form and function. The humble vegetable garden satisfies alimentary requirements, whereas, the allotment garden provides an excuse to be outside, enjoy the fresh air, and get some exercise. Remembrance gardens are places for reflection and memorialisation. Urban guerilla gardening challenges the types of locations we think suitable for gardens, and softens rough edges of unused and neglected spaces with new life. The act of gardening is therapeutic, centering\u2014a meditative task that trains eye and hand into careful and productive partnerships to seed the earth and nurture the sprouting growth of young seedlings and saplings. In tony suburbs, gardens can be a narcissistic industry, where the aesthetic economy of landscape architecture signals wealth and privilege. Yet, other gardens, like communal gardens, can refute pecuniary excess, and instead welcome city residents from all walks of life to gather together through the act of planting. Rooftop gardens (for instance, acros Fukuoka in Japan), hanging and vertical gardens (which call to mind the residential towers of Bosco Verticale in Milan), and greenways (probably most famously, the Highline in New York) have presented different architectural opportunities to green the city\u2014rehabilitating industrial and commercial wastelands, by reintroducing organic life into the fissures of concrete, brick, and stone.<\/p>\n

The garden has deep roots in human beings\u2019 evolving sociocultural imaginary. We have created and been around gardens for thousands of years\u2014and the nature of<\/em> and within<\/em> these gardens shift and change depending on needs, ideas, and priorities. Gardens\u2014like the works in this volume\u2014form part of the stories we tell about ourselves. They feature in poetry, paintings, and literature. The garden, as an idea, underlies the buttressing narratives of ancient human culture and society: whether existing in the terrain of belief (the Garden of Eden in the Abrahamic tradition), history and myth (the Hanging Gardens of Babylon), or even allegory\u2014as in the case in Shakespeare\u2019s Richard II.<\/em>5<\/sup><\/p>\n

The gardeners, in Act 3, Scene IV of the Bard\u2019s history play, compare kingdom to garden, remarking that<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0\u2026 O, what pity is it
\nThat he had not so trimm\u2019d and dress\u2019d his land
\nAs we this garden! We at time of year
\nDo wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
\nLest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
\nWith too much riches it confound itself:
\nHad he done so to great and growing men,
\nThey might have lived to bear and he to taste
\nTheir fruits of duty: superfluous branches
\nWe lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
\nHad he done so, himself had borne the crown,
\nWhich waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.5<\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

They liken the king\u2019s neglect of his realm to an untended, unpruned garden. This metaphor of the cultivated garden as representative of order, respectability, and fruitfulness ties in with the Renaissance notion of the garden as the apotheosis of human mastery over nature\u2014 imposing order over the non-human world. Gardening, from this vantage point, lent coherence to nature, mirroring the Great Chain of Being\u2014the hierarchical construct that was believed to order all matter on Earth, placing humans atop all other earthly creatures. This would then later contrast with the appreciation of a wilder natural topography observable in the poetry and paintings of the Romantic period: works which eschewed industrial regularity and rather celebrated softer, wilder landscapes (see William Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cI Wandered Lonely as a Cloud\u201d or John Constable\u2019s The Hay Wain<\/em>). The Romantics sited uncultivated vistas as the liberating sources of creativity, pleasure, and virtue. Gardens have been famously lauded and metaphorized by the likes of Chaucer (his partially translated, \u201cThe Romaunt of the Rose\u201d), Barrett Browning (\u201cBeloved, thou has brought me many flowers\u201d), Tennyson (\u201cCome into the Garden, Maud\u201d), Dickinson (\u201cNew feet within my garden go\u201d), Lowell (\u201cBehind a Wall\u201d), Frost (\u201cLodged\u201d) and Auden (\u201cTheir Lonely Betters\u201d). More recently, anthropocentric views of nature have been challenged, and different representational modes and epistemes have been promoted.<\/p>\n

Moving away from representations and allegories, gardens as physical and geopolitical realities have changed significantly over time. The position of the garden, where and how it takes up space, and whose hands tend it are all deeply political and ideological concerns. Grand, manicured gardens of the landed gentry of Europe telegraphed status and humans\u2019 ability to subdue and order nature into pleasing patterns. Gentlemen gardeners designed, whilst those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic order tended. Colonial gardens became hallmarks of the landscapes of home\u2014so-called imported \u201csocio-natures\u201d6<\/sup>\u2014but brought with them invasive species that, in many cases, suffocated indigenous variants and erased Indigenous peoples\u2019 methods of land husbandry. Flora and fauna (and even colonized people) were extracted from the colonies and displayed at Kew Gardens and the British Museum as well as at zoos and various international exhibitions (consider for a moment the fact that Ota Benga\u2014a Mbuti, or Congo pygmy, was displayed at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and<\/em> at the Bronx Zoo). Colonial taxonomies extended dangerously beyond colonial landscapes and ultimately \u201cinstituted a hierarchy of human species through this episteme of difference, contributing to biologically determinist discourses of race, gender, and nature.\u201d7<\/sup> In My Garden (Book)<\/em>: Jamaica Kincaid writes about her own gardening and its attendant pleasures, whilst also exploring the nefarious impact of colonial gardens and plant collecting on world culture.8<\/sup><\/p>\n

Only relatively recently have ecologists and scholars started to embrace traditional ecological knowledge (tek) as an approach by which to reverse extractivist industries\u2019 impact on the land. Indeed, Indigenous ecological engineering methods are being promoted over the entropic social metabolisms of industrial economies (with their reliance on non-renewable energies) in favour of fostering more sustainable ecosystems. Indigenous knowledge systems are increasingly being seen as the antidote to Western cultures\u2019 view of society as separate and distinct from ecosystems; instead, \u201cindigenous cultures routinely see themselves as embedded within ecosystems.\u201d9<\/sup>\u00a0 This ties into the explosion of the post-1980s movement of sustainable gardening: planting gardens that are soil sustaining, food producing, bio-diversifying, climate regulating, flood protecting, and erosion mitigating.<\/p>\n

Significantly, the act of planting\u2014which summons the activities and eco-political ethos of Wangari Maathai\u2019s The Green Belt Movement in Kenya\u2014is a transgenerational act. It is an act through which we think of and plan for tomorrow. A seed planted today does not proffer an immediate result. It is an investment in the soil that will yield flowering, fruiting, or shade months or many years hence. In an age of climate change and environmental degradation, gardening can be a radical political act. It is a challenge against what Rob Nixon10<\/sup> has called the slow, incremental violence of environmental crisis. This type of violence, according to Nixon, has historically not received adequate media attention, or focused sufficient political will, as it lacks the spectacular sensationalism of more immediate national or international threats (i.e., war, terrorism, infectious diseases). What the world learned through Maathai\u2019s ecological activism, is that gardening\u2014or planting in a more general sense\u2014is an affirming and enfranchising strategy of agents of environmentalism of the poor. It is a way in which to build food security and autonomy amidst the deleterious activities of hostile states and private companies that threaten livelihoods. Collective gardening is a form of social mobilization that infuses environmental emergencies with urgent visibility, working to redefine the types of violence societies should cooperatively be galvanising against: environmental collapse. Through a group\u2019s activities as planters, the spectacle-driven attention span can be recast, to focus instead on what can be achieved through the communal \u201clong dur\u00e9e<\/em> of patient growth\u201d to produce yields \u201cfor sustainable collective gain\u201d (135).<\/p>\n

In the city, gardens can be a staging ground for this fundamental reimagining of human-nature relationships. This can be a restorative process, as in Ros Collins\u2019s \u201cRaison d\u2019\u00eatre,\u201d where a guerilla gardener finds solace and healing through gardening. Our eyes must become attuned to the extraordinary beauty and rejuvenating splendour of nature\u2019s wildness. It is through the realm of art that we can safely play out the different possibilities of what sustainable urban futures can look like. This collection presents a geographically diverse contribution to this reimagining\u2014some present warnings to us, whilst others offer up messages of hope. Let us look to the \u201cwild edges of our garden\u201d to see what we might find there (a genet or a tortoise, perhaps?). As the last line of Gitanjali Maria\u2019s story, \u201cFireflies and Butterflies,\u201d advises:<\/p>\n

After all, you need a little wildness in the city to see nature\u2019s beautiful things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We hope you enjoy reading this book.<\/p>\n

Kirby Mani\u00e0<\/strong>
\nVancouver, Canada<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. The title of this introduction has been borrowed from a line in Roli Mahajan\u2019s story, \u201cEssence of an Existence,\u201d which also appears in this book.<\/li>\n
  2. Afrikaans for open grassland.<\/li>\n
  3. Afrikaans for small hills.<\/li>\n
  4. Campbell, Gordon. Garden History: A Very Short Introduction. <\/em>Oxford University Press, 2019.<\/li>\n
  5. Shakespeare, William. \u201cThe Life and Death of King Richard the Second.\u201d William Shakespeare Complete Works,<\/em> edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, Macmillan, 2007, p.870.<\/li>\n
  6. Swyngedouw, Erik. \u201cModernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo,<\/em> and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890\u20131930.\u201d Annals of the Association of American Geographers, <\/em>vol. 89, no. 3, 1999, pp.443\u2013465.<\/li>\n
  7. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment.<\/em> Oxford University Press, 2011, loc. 334.<\/li>\n
  8. Martin, Jay, et al. \u201cTraditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK): Ideas, inspiration, and designs for ecological engineering.\u201d Ecological Engineering,<\/em> 36, 2010, p. 839.<\/li>\n
  9. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. <\/em>Harvard University Press, 2011.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

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    One morning before school, my father hurriedly interrupted my sister and me at the breakfast table, with a look of mischief in his eye, and an instruction to follow him, quickly and quietly, into the garden.1 It was a relatively chilly morning, at least by the standards of generally sunny and temperate Johannesburg. Our morning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1023,"featured_media":47530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273,1103,298,951,1029],"tags":[81,44,47,25,34,1012,38,23,27,100],"coauthors":[1355],"class_list":["post-47518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-north-america","category-essay-people-and-communitites","category-poetry-fiction","category-stories","tag-africa","tag-art","tag-asia","tag-europe","tag-experiencing-nature","tag-fiction","tag-gardens","tag-north-america","tag-south-america","tag-wildlife-people-interactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1023"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47518"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=47518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}