Paper short abstract:

This paper takes an ethnographic look at how memory inflects culture and communication among American gardeners. It argues that gardeners participate in moral communities based upon shared understandings of what gardens are supposed to be and mean.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes an ethnographic look at how memory inflects culture and communication among American gardeners. It argues that gardeners participate in moral communities based upon shared understandings of what gardens are supposed to be and mean. Gardeners' memories are critical to these shared understandings. My investigation is based upon ongoing fieldwork as both anthropologist and as indigenous practitioner. I ask the question, "why do you garden?" and almost invariably hear stories of parents and grandparents in the garden. These ancestral memories are then juxtaposed to the demands and dissatisfactions of contemporary life, providing Edenic scenarios of beauty, hard work, safetly, and, most importantly, of virtue leading to reward.