Gardens

Gardens are important elements of human–environment relationships. Historically, people have managed gardens for food, medicine, income, and ritual reasons, as they do today. The continuous, and most likely early, existence of gardens attests to their usefulness in multiple environments. Spatially, gardens represent intensive management of social and biophysical areas and provide insight into human knowledge systems and environmental adjustment capabilities. T. Killion defines gardens as the “polycultural mix of cultigens and useful economic species grown on small plots where the cultivator focuses on individual plants and their microhabitats by small inputs of labor on a continuous basis.” C. Kimber claims that gardens are a vegetation type that “is a cultural–biological complex that can tell us much about people as they express themselves in the plant ...