Spatial Patterning in the Dooryard Gardens of Puerto Rico

Abstract

Tr HE dooryard garden, an obvious landscape feature in the Caribbean, can be treated as a vegetation type, that is, it has physiognomic character and floristic composition.1 However, the garden is more than a vegetation type; it is a cultural-biological complex that can tell us much about people as they express themselves in the plant world. Each dooryard garden is the identifiable result, subject to examination, of thousands of decisions about plants which a person makes in his own near space. The dooryard garden is a respectable index of the man-plant relationship within a culture and thus has significance for cross-cultural studies.2