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What Does A Dead Garden Look Like

Cultural Geographies

journal article

Death, absence and afterlife in the garden

Cultural Geographies

Published By: Sage Publications, Inc.

Cultural Geographies

https://www. jstor .org/stable/26168565

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Abstract

Abstract This article considers what we might learn about landscape from how certain gardeners respond to death, absence and afterlife. After situating the domestic garden amid recent work on landscapes of memory and absence in geography, the article presents a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. Each draws on encounters with experienced gardeners living in British suburbs. In particular, these movements focus on: commemorabilia, including plants, which offer the possibility to materialize and anchor something of what would otherwise be lost; how absences are teased into awkward presence through conversation and reminiscence; and the importance of the 'people' who continue to produce the garden landscape after their death. Collectively, the practices I describe are an attempt to domesticate – that is, to coconstitute more malleable and familiar relations with – absent presences, and in so doing to seek a comfortable, even if ultimately impossible, alignment between self, past, memory and landscape. I stress that this seeking requires work: practical projects of digging, planting, weeding, of making memory and losing it again. In so doing, the article suggests that the spectral does not always arrive from the outside but is something that can be fabricated. I conclude that we should look to the practicalities of living rather than ideas of life, and to acts of landscaping rather than concepts of landscape, in seeking to ascertain the ways in which absence comes to matter.

Journal Information

cultural geographies is an international journal of peer-reviewed scholarly research on and theoretical interventions into the cultural dimensions of environment, landscape, space, and place. We encourage papers that engage the cultural politics of geographical issues. cultural geographies is particularly committed to the development of methodologically rigorous interpretive approaches that explore how meaning, materiality and/or practice are implicated in the (re)production, maintenance and transformation of cultural worlds as they are materially constituted, represented, imagined, and lived. We do not restrict our remit to any particular methodological or theoretical orientation, but publish both empirically grounded, and theoretically speculative pieces designed to further understanding and debate. We welcome contributions from scholars and practitioners across the arts, humanities, and social and environmental sciences.

Publisher Information

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 900 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company's continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. www.sagepublishing.com

What Does A Dead Garden Look Like

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26168565

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