Growing Communities in a Garden Undone: Worldly Justice, Withinness and Women

Abstract

Where communities are ecological and humans are nature, ways of reimagining and regenerating communities as human and more, offer a timely response to the call of the Anthropocene for worldly justice. We, the authors, as women and mothers, look into time, place and space, harvesting our ‘becoming (undone)’ for the reader, seeded in the botanical world. Creeping and whispering, still and subtle, plant species are ever present in our survival yet often go unnamed and unnoticed, and to date are under-represented in multi-species becoming research. Via Foucault’s shining light upon power, we muse with Barad, Haraway and Grosz—how does growing (with) plant-life, amongst what is ‘said’ and ‘unsaid’, matter (to) the world as it turns? We have been returned to the same sediment after a decade: Our bowed-together life revived in the childhood–motherhood–nature community entanglements of the Anthropocene. Now, this paper, waters plant–human relationalities living beyond the traditional parochial human-to-human role. We accept our humanness in its onerousness and ownership but look to the leaf litter to reacquaint with our multispecies lives in a garden that has, at times, been sacrificed and lost. Our contribution is chlorophyllic. New ideas enfold and energise what constitutes a community. As women woven with botanica and academia, where mothering is a collaboration rather than a raising, we invite the reader to journey with us into the worldly, life-giving relations that garden a community undone.