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Paper short abstract

Drawing from research on hosting Ukrainian refugees in Poland, this paper explores how rural landscapes and nature-oriented practices such as gardening became means for continuity, autonomy, and healing. Earth and plants became symbols of resilience, gratitude, and hope in times of war.

Paper long abstract

Nature – understood both as symbolic landscapes and plant-oriented practices – is not usually the main focus of migration studies. Yet during months of fieldwork among Ukrainian refugees in Poland I observed that, while often taken for granted, nature plays a crucial role in dwelling and home-making for the displaced and their hosts.

This paper asks how Ukrainian refugees and their Polish hosts mobilize “nature” to cope with trauma, rebuild autonomy, reconnect with a sense of home, and express emotions. It also considers how such practices and associations reshape host–guest relations and the meaning of place during war, granting new significance to the ordinary.

The paper draws on findings from the project “Hosting Refugees: Private Hosting of Ukrainian Refugees in Polish Homes” (led by Natalia Bloch, AMU Poland), which investigates everyday hosting practices through multi-sited ethnography. While not designed with a focus on nature, the project reveals that hosting arrangements are also ecological encounters.

Fieldwork in both villages and cities shows a recurring motif of rural continuity: many refugees with countryside backgrounds deliberately chose to settle in Polish villages, valuing familiar environments and the chance to cultivate soil. Gardening provided occupation, restored embodied skills, and supported psychological repair. At the same time, urban contexts exposed different forms of ecological longing and adaptation. Plants also circulated as gifts, leaving enduring traces of hospitality and memory.

These practices generate new relational landscapes in which nature mediates memory, belonging, and healing, bridging migration studies with debates on healing landscapes and the posthuman.