Gardens, whether domestic, public or community, are invested with and shaped by national, social and personal narratives and histories. Jane Carroll describes them as ‘liminal’ spaces, at the boundary between inside and outside, public and private, domestic and wild, nature and culture. Gardens are also temporally ambivalent: bringing together stasis and flux; linearity and cyclicality; past and present; doing and being. Gardens can be said to crystallise the complexity of the human relationship with the natural world and with the other-than-human time that it embodies.
Drawing on a range of critical perspectives, particularly those that come from and are influenced by feminist and care ethics, I explore how the garden is written about, recognising the intertwined nature of gardening and writing about gardening. The garden may be presented a place of positive affect and effect that enables resilience and interconnectedness across generation. It may, at the same time, be caught up in and shaped by narratives of domination and control that cross histories and generations. The garden is undoubtedly a place of labour and care that foregrounds our human intergenerationality within a web of spatial and temporal networks. Thinking through our narratives of and relationships with gardens may allow us particular ways to think about our human lifecourse and relationship with the non-human times and spaces with which we interact.