Queer Undergrowth: Weeds and Sexuality in the Architecture of the Garden

Abstract

This article considers the queer roles of weeds and undergrowth in the architecture of the garden. With the garden defined as a site where human pleasure is ordered and controlled, undergrowth is interrogated as both architectural agent of queer space and as intimate co-producer of queer sensuality. This argument charts the roles of weeds in the sexual history of the English garden, with a particular focus on the vegetal architecture of eighteenth-century wildernesses, especially at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Lambeth, London. The article produces two speculative modes of interrogating the queer potential of weeds and undergrowth. The first is a schematic outline of the material functions of undergrowth in creating spaces for queer desire, seduction and intimacy. The second is a narrative re-performance of the embodied labor of gardening, as a key site where the conflict of plant and human desires is enacted, and through which queer modes of sensual relation are constituted.