Sowing Political Seeds: Gardens, Newcomers, and Nationalisms

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

ONLINE: Monday, March 25: 12:30PM–2:00PM EST

Whether they adorn the city centre in the form of a botanical garden, or flourish in neglected urban corners in the form of allotments, gardens are laden with meaning as well as plants. They can be “tools of empire” (Headrick), a way for empires to improve their colonies (Drayton), or spaces of scientific experimentation (Brockway). They can also be sites of integration and exclusion (Lapina; Mack and Scherma Parscher), and of working-class solidarity and creativity (Smith and Weston; Wiles). Typically, scholars treat botanical gardens and garden shows separately from private gardens and allotments; we want to bring these conversations together. A garden, no matter its scale or purpose, is always a blend of caretakers, designers, and the land as “[g]ardening provides new growth at the same time as rooting one in the past. [...] Culture and history are literally sown into new ground.” (Wen Li, Hodgetts, and Ho).

By exploring different types of gardens in four different locations over the last 150 years, our panel will examine the political dimensions of gardens, their plant materials, and the actors involved in setting them up and cultivating them. In which ways have gardens been used to promote a certain (national) identity? How have they related to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, especially in the context of human immigration? How are the plants chosen that will form part of the respective gardens, and what are their ideological, practical, and emotional functions? We will address these and related questions through a contribution on Italian migrants’ gardening practices and agricultural diplomacy in the US from 1880-1920, the establishment of Hebrew University Jerusalem’s botanical garden in the 1920s-1930s, the German Reichsgartenschau (imperial garden show) of 1939, and immigrants’ use of allotment gardens in the Netherlands from 1960 to 1990.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Italianness in the United States between migrants’ informal gardening practices and agricultural diplomacy (1880–1912) - Gilberto Mazzoli, European University Institute, Florence

• Botanical Zionism at the Hebrew University Jerusalem: Planting National Identities between Science and Religion in Mandatory Palestine - Mona Bieling, Geneva Graduate Institute

• Blood and Soil in the Garden: Growing a German Heimat at Stuttgart’s 1939 Reichsgartenschau - Nicky Rehnberg, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

• Picnics, Peppers, Pak Choi: Immigrants in Allotment Gardens in the Netherlands, 1960-1990 - Ailish Lalor, Harvard University

Chair

• Mona Bieling, Geneva Graduate Institute

Discussant

• Kate Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology