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Paper short abstract

This paper compares urban gardening in Osaka and underwater aquascaping, showing how caring for plants and creating miniature ecosystems helps mitigate loneliness. These practices offer structure, beauty, and social or contemplative spaces, fostering connection in more-than-human worlds.

Paper long abstract

How do small, everyday rituals of tending to plants create meaningful worlds? In this paper we compare two distinct practices of cultivation: urban gardening in pots on doorsteps; and small-scale underwater gardening, or aquascaping. For many older residents of Osaka, growing vegetables in narrow urban alleyways, in pots lined up along doorsteps, bridges pleasure and necessity, cultivation and self-cultivation in more-than-human networks of care. Taking care of plants can help give a sense of structure to the day, offer the pleasure of observing growth, and create opportunities for sociality. Aquascaping, meanwhile, embodies ideals of harmonious coexistence amidst carefully arranged layouts that often incorporate aesthetically pleasing assemblages of stone, driftwood, sand and soil in order to replicate natural habitats and ecosystems. For practitioners, these miniature worlds figure as calm spaces of refuge in which the attention is inexorably concentrated on a form of interspecies coexistence sustained through relatively constant, ritualised forms of care and attention.