Homegardens

The term homegardens refers, generally speaking, to small-scale, domestic agricultural plots. They consist of combinations of vegetable, herb, and flower production and can include small fruit orchards, as well as various decorative features. Though seemingly peripheral, homegardens have historically played a central role in food production and availability in regions across the world. At this time, semisubsistence domestic garden plots serve as key components to burgeoning slow, local, urban, and sustainable agriculture movements, as well to food security and food sovereignty initiatives. Homegardens encompass a range of horticultural and agricultural endeavors, ranging from organic, subsistence vegetable plots to biocide-saturated floral borders, from native plant reservoirs to manicured lawns in the desert. They have come to represent the model of sustainability and the crux of ecological awareness and activism; they also continue to represent an artificial, constrained, constraining, and even colonizing relationship with the natural world.

Epitomizing both simple living and consumerism, homegardens embody a host of compelling environmental and social paradoxes. They span the gamut of being innocuous and revolutionary, the most conspicuous site of bourgeois consumption and leisure, and the most fervent site of subsistence-as-resistance production and labor. This tension permeates the history and current environmental interest in homegardens, which are at times considered harbingers of human manipulation, modification, and control of their environment, and at times, spaces of interaction, harmony, and reciprocity between the human and nonhuman worlds. Michael Pollan's Second Nature reflects on this paradox and the intricate interdependence at work in a garden between plants and their growers.

Among its various political ecologies and economies, the household garden also brings forth issues of gender. Similar to domesticity in general, the homegarden has been feminized—and delegitimatized—as the place for quaint, decorative projects and the realm of social reproduction in general. For instance, early archaeological and anthropological accounts of Native American history did not consider their extensive horticulture systems as true agriculture because they were matrilineal “women's work,” and so undervalued the ecological, economic, and cultural importance of this small-scale, agribiodiversity-rich mode of growing: “practices associated with modest-scale production were used in the native Southeast for expansive large-scale ‘garden-agriculture’ in systems for which we lack [Page 243]contemporary parallels” (Scarry and Scarry). Agrarian writers and environmentalists have since worked to counter the secondary status of gardens. (For example, see Gene Logsdon's essay “A Farm is a Large Garden (or a Garden is a Small Farm)”.)

Although homegardens like this one have played a crucial role in world food production and may contribute to soil conservation, biodiversity, and habitat creation, their importance has often been overlooked.

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Feminists—and now environmentalists—have nevertheless noted and lauded the treasury of local ecological and social knowledge at work in subsistence and semisubsistence gardening traditions. In her collection of essays In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens, Alice Walker offers the metaphor of the household garden to describe all the skills, knowledge, and wisdom she and other women have gained from their mothers and grandmothers. This revaluation of the previously marginalized yet highly valuable knowledge embedded within gardening heritages overcomes and helps uproot long-held biases of the “poverty” of subsistence production. Successful gardening is skilled, highly diversified craft work, incorporating scientific knowledge of the local ecosystem as well as artistic expression.

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