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Short abstract

Having walked and talked with 27 engaged gardeners in southern Sweden, this paper shows how invasive species are negotiated through everyday gardening. While routine control makes organisms situationally killable, repeated failed killing efforts and nonhuman persistence make invasiveness 'stick'.

Long abstract

Domestic gardens are important sites where invasive-species governance meets everyday practices, valuation, control, and removal. Based on walking interviews with 27 engaged gardeners in southern Sweden, this paper examines how official invasive-species classifications are negotiated through situated encounters with plants and invertebrates.

We develop two interacting processes. First, organisms become situationally killable when gardeners judge removal to be legitimate and routine. Where control appears effective, official or colloquial attributions of invasiveness can lose practical salience. Second, when containment or eradication fail and continue to fail, persistence becomes affectively charged through escalated killing efforts, generating sticky invasiveness. Drawing on Haraway’s concept of killability and Ahmed’s account of stickiness, we argue that invasiveness is mediated through repeatedly failed control. The ‘invasive’ is acknowledged and becomes difficult to dislodge when gardeners’ attempts at removing undesirable garden species appear unsuccessful over time. This processual account shows how nonhuman material capacities to return, regrow, reproduce, or spread participate in environmental classification and helps explain why official categories are selectively enacted in domestic settings.

The findings contribute to STS and environmental sociology by linking more-than-human agency to the everyday mediation of biodiversity governance in private spaces. It preserves the ecological reality of invasive impacts while examining how their meanings travel.