Geographical Review back issue July 2004 – The Gardens Special Issue

The cultural geography of gardens

Introduction by Christie, Maria Elisa
The Geographical Review
July 1, 2004

Excerpts:

Garden spaces are such a common part of people’s everyday experience that they mostly escape scholarly attention. This collection of case studies offers readers a sense of people, places, and gardens based on geographical fieldwork in parts of the world as distinct as Istanbul, Toronto, Sydney, the Peruvian Amazon, and central and northern Mexico.

Whether they are called “dooryard gardens,” “home gardens,” “house-lot gardens,” “backyards,” “community gardens,” or “market gardens,” these spaces of intimate engagement with the land present us with an opportunity to explore important aspects of biodiversity, food sustainability, civil society, the roles of gender and ethnicity in daily life, and how people’s lives are affected by migration. Participating authors ask very different research questions and employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, encouraging other scholars to pursue stimulating new avenues of research.

Gardens and dwelling: people in vernacular gardens
Jul 01, 2004 ; Kimber, Clarissa T. … All the things surrounding us from our infancy persist forever as something common and trivial to our eyes. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1831 Most of the gardens discussed in this special issue of the Geographical Review are common, ordinary gardens around a house, or …

Istanbul’s bostans: a millennium of market gardens
Jul 01, 2004 ; Kaldjian, Paul J. … Bounded by urban noise and bustle, construction and itinerant vendors, concrete and pavement, cars and trucks, multistory apartments and ateliers, litter and dust, the garden of green, neatly subdivided into units of different shades and textures, sits in sharp contrast to the surrounding …

Tending cultural landscapes and food citizenship in Toronto’s community gardens
Jul 01, 2004 ; Baker, Lauren E. … Three community-garden sites in Toronto offer possibilities for understanding how individuals and groups in urban communities are actively producing space and culture through their constructions of place. This article begins with a discussion of the politics of place and the multiple …

Australian backyard gardens and the journey of migration
Jul 01, 2004 ; Head, Lesley … Most Australian gardens are both product and expression of immigrant experience. Although numerous records of Aboriginal gardening practices exist (Jones 1975; Hallam 1989), the gardens of the European colonizers wrought a different scale and intensity of landscape transformation. To …

Home gardens in Amazonian Peru: diversity and exchange of planting material
Jul 01, 2004 ; Ban, Natalie … Home gardens–also known as “backyard gardens,” “dooryard gardens,” and “house gardens”–are characterized by highly diverse cultivated plants (Kumar and Nair 2004) and are regarded as sustainable agricultural production systems for the humid tropics (Kehlenbeck and Maass 2005). Over the …

Kitchenspace, fiestas, and cultural reproduction in Mexican house-lot gardens
Jul 01, 2004 ; Christie, Maria Elisa … The house blessing and communal meal launches the final stages of preparation for the big celebration two weeks from now. Twenty years ago, Dona Silvia of Xochimilco and her husband, Don Miguel, a migrant from an indigenous community in the nearby state of Mexico, signed up to be hosts …

Gardens are us, we are nature: transcending antiquity and modernity
Jul 01, 2004 ; Doolittle, William E. … Il faut cultiver notre jardin. –Voltaire, 1759 The relationship between people and plants is as old as the human species itself, and it is certainly as strong as ever. By extension, the relationship between people and gardens has great antiquity. If one accepts a …

Large excerpts from these Journal stories can be found here.

Complete articles can be found on this paid site or check with your university library to see if they have this issue online or as a hard copy.