More-Than-Human Cocreation in Garden Writings

Abstract

The environmental and cultural polycrisis is a challenge for the imagination, but it also calls for practical redirections in behaviour. This essay complements the conceptual nonhuman turns elicited by the Anthropocene by shining a light on a marginal site of long-standing nonhuman encounters: the garden. Gardens are vibrant spaces where human individuals experience nonhumans as cocreative agents, exemplifying “how to live ecological knowledge” (Morton, T. (2018). Being ecological . Pelican, an imprint of Penguin Books). This essay examines garden life writings from the 1870s to the present. These are relational narratives based on actual lives and spaces which reflect on the many ways in which nonhuman lives encompassing plants and fungi, but also animals, bacteria and myriads of visible and invisible critters impact human feelings, thoughts and behaviours. Gaining momentum from recent insights into plant intelligence, symbiosis, material vibrancy and an ongoing search for ways to embrace kinship, sympoiesis and relationality, garden life writings map a panorama of ways in which nonhuman collaborators engender shifts in perspective. This essay explores a range of examples, making a case for considering a the ‘more-than-human’ as a productive extra spin in the nonhuman turn.