Short Abstract

This panel explores the varied shapes of African gardens, and the situated practices of cultivation and knowledge sustaining them. Moving beyond a simple economic/ornamental divide, we consider the multiple, changing, and contested uses and more-than-human socialities specific gardens generate.

Long Abstract

Gardens evoke images of lush foliage and colours, a delimited space sustaining those who care for it. This sustenance may be at once emotional and nutritional, involve the medicinal uses of plants, or be entangled in relations of mutual aid, resistance and survival. Gardens take different shapes in different geographic landscapes and climatic conditions, and bear the imprint of (post)colonial legacies and contemporary inequities. Despite this, gardens - and gardeners - have often taken paths of their own, experimenting with plants and practices of cultivation, adjusting to changing weather patterns and water availability, and innovating new sensory and visual experiences. People take gardens with them as they move, grow gardens to reappropriate blighted landscapes, or cultivate gardens as repositories of im-planted memories. Their knowledge about how to tend and propagate plants, save seeds, sell produce, but also about how to weed, prune, care for, and also destroy plants, speak of the range of historically situated practices of cultivation and knowledge that sustain gardens in Africa today. Moving beyond a simple economic/ornamental divide, this panel considers the multiple, changing, and contested uses and more-than-human socialities specific gardens generate. Across rural and urban settings, past and present, what shapes do African gardens take? Who are their owners and cultivators? What salience and meaning do the plants, soil, and other nonhuman inhabitants of their gardens have for them? We invite papers that explore African lifeworlds and imaginations through the prism that gardens provide.

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