My Identity in the Garden – Self Reflections of Expatriates’ Garden Visits

Abstract

ABSTRACT Botanic and public gardens attract a significant number of people throughout the world who visit these spaces for a wide variety of reasons. Notwithstanding, the study of visitor experiences in such spaces is a much under-researched foci in the fields of museum education and visitor studies. This exploratory study examined the reflective experiences of expatriates, who were foreign exchange students from Japan living in Canada, after a visit to a culturally familiar public space of a traditional Japanese garden. The study reveals the considerable power of such spaces and experiences in terms of these visitors’ reported mental restoration, self-reflection of their own identities, and identification of attributes of their own journeys as foreigners living abroad. These outcomes speak to the capacities of such spaces to be both emotionally transformative and learning experiences of the self for people groups who are uniquely contextually situated in time, place, and life-cycle.