Lisa Tucker
University of Puget Sound
Project
Armed with Shovels: Understanding Gardening as a Political Tool
England, Italy, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Brazil
We typically understand gardening as an activity of leisure and pleasure. But what if we could imagine gardening as a tool that reaches beyond our grandmothers’ backyards? All around the world, individuals and communities use gardening to relay different messages of political action. In the global north, gardening is largely used as a message of land reclamation. In the global south, gardening is a means to reconnect with agricultural roots and garden for subsistence. In my Watson year, I seek to understand the full spectrum of gardening from radical to leisure and explore the intersection between governments, city landscape, and gardening.