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 world.” The species cultivated or protected in gardens reflect an individual's and a culture's decisions about which resources are valuable and deserve labor.

Biophysical relationships are not the only operative forces in garden use and change. A garden that produces needed food or medicine affects a household's future allocation of resources, providing families the ability to use cash resources for out field fertilizer, a child's school supplies, housing improvements, or other needs. Thus, the garden, by allowing households more latitude to allocate resources than nongardening families in similar settings allows a family to affect land-use decisions. Plant productivity, both in gardens and in remote fields, affects the strategies that households adopt for well-being. For example, catastrophic erosion in a field can make garden production more important than previously, engendering higher labor needs and more intensive management schemes.

Demographic and economic factors also affect gardens. As J.F. Eder explains, “continued rapid population growth, coupled with the filling in of many remaining agricultural frontiers, has significantly diminished farm size in many of the world's agricultural systems and this trend is likely to continue.” Thus, garden production, carried out on small plots holds current and future promise for agricultural production. Within commodity production systems gardens serve either to augment cash earning or to lessen the need for the purchase of agricultural products, thereby reducing costs to households. By providing space and resources for diverse activities, gardens optimize the limited land available to rural families, at times being the deciding factor in household success. B.L. Turner and W.T. Sanders explain that “gardens…are spaces for the cultivation of multiple species used for additional or emergency caloric and nutritional needs, medicinals, ornamentals, and other exotic production.” In addition to growing needed crops, gardens create spaces for the education of children, experimentation with plant types and cultivation techniques, and family social activities.

In the developing and developed world, gardens are components of human landscapes. The utilization of space surrounding people reflects political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of societies. These pressures act on gardeners to ensure that each garden varies significantly from others. Spatially, gardens may be located near houses or at more remote locations. Garden areas nearest houses, however, tend to receive the most attention, both in terms of intended care and unintended influence from household members and visitors. Those near [Page 728]house spaces are not only places of production; they are places of occupation as well. People in or near gardens select certain crops over others through use, conscious and unconscious seed dispersal, and the elimination of unwanted plants or those that grow in human activity and footpaths.

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