Agriculture & Gardening: Gardening

The garden has been an informing metaphor for geographical thought for sometime and as an affective material object and gardening as a process in the figuring and refiguring of space. It has represented an ideal environment and culture, a rather pre-cultural, pre-human state in a number of world religions, and continues to reappear in contemporary geographical discussions of the sacred. These leitmotifs of human geography are significantly theorized through ideology, discourse, and power, where ‘the garden’ becomes iconic. Signifying identity as well as status, cultural capital and social difference, as well as social/cultural relations, the garden and ways of gardening emerge as expression. A more complex conceptualization of the garden and gardening emerge in debates concerning consumption, commodification, and identity. In recent decades, the garden as artifact has been increasingly transformed to gardening as practice and as significant in developing critical conceptual approaches to a range of ‘new’ cultural geographies. These shifts and developments accompany the increasing geographical interest in process, practice, and performance. The ‘nature’ dimensions relating to, and perhaps informed by, gardens and gardening emerge in new ways in terms of reconceptualizations of nature where significance and meaning may emerge through practice, and in relation to the nonhuman; and debates concerning the ethical and moral in human geography, including shifting symbolism of the garden and of gardening in relation to war and peace. These developments in human geographies have been enmeshed with wider humanities and social science thinking and beyond these, from art theory and social anthropology to environmental debate.

[Lat. hortus=garden], science and art of gardening and of cultivating fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants. Horticulture generally refers to small-scale gardening, and agriculture to the growing of field crops, usually on a large scale, although the distinction is not always precise (for example, market gardening could be classed either way). A horticultural variety of a plant is one produced under cultivation, as distinguished from the botanical species or varieties, which occur in nature. Although many horticultural practices are very ancient (see botany), comparatively recent knowledge of genetics, plant physiology, biochemistry, ecology, plant pathology, entomology, molecular biology, and soils, and the systematic application of such knowledge to practical use (e.g., in plant breeding), has expanded horticulture into an extremely complex science. Agencies such as the various bureaus of the Dept. of Agriculture, the state experimental stations, and the many agricultural colleges; organizations such as the American Horticultural Society and the various state horticultural societies and local granges and garden clubs; and the commercial flower-growing and experimental nurseries (see nursery)—all engage in developing, analyzing, systematizing, and disseminating improved horticultural practices for the benefit of both amateur and professional gardeners.