Short abstract

Based on walking interviews 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 of 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; when control appears effective, official or colloquial attributions of invasiveness can lose practical salience. Second, repeated failures of containment or eradication generate sticky invasiveness: persistence becomes affectively charged through frustration, disgust, vigilance, and escalating attempts at control. Drawing on Haraway’s concept of killability and Ahmed’s account of stickiness, we distinguish the moral-practical availability of organisms for killing from the practical success of controlling them. Organisms may therefore remain killable even as repeated return, regrowth, or spread makes invasiveness increasingly salient. This processual account shows how nonhuman material capacities 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.