Creative writing as a means of reimagining gardens

Abstract

ABSTRACT Gardens enact memories of our lives, tell of cultural traditions, create and reproduce narratives and contain the memory of the land on which they are constructed. Gardens in fiction work to reflect and construct ecological imaginaries that value certain kinds of nature/culture relationships which gardens themselves enact. However, fiction might also be employed to reimagine the relationships between humans and non-human others. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of research that led to developing new environmental imaginaries through fiction. I take Hamilton Gardens as a site for research-creation, employing a critical walking methodology for arts-based practice. I undertook three walks, informed by a posthumanist perspective, that engaged in ecocritical analysis and ethnographic reflections of selected garden narratives. These methods allowed me to examine the relationships between memories, narrative geographies and gardens in order to develop my own ‘environmental imaginary’ of gardens. The value of this approach is that it allows geographic knowledges of gardens to be situated and embodied. This knowledge can question dominant garden imaginaries that reproduce bias towards temperate gardens and Global North gardening practices and can produce narratives that tell marginalised stories of gardens.