Death, absence and afterlife in the garden

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published online 16 April 2013Cultural GeographiesFranklin Ginn

Death, absence and afterlife in the garden

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Death, absence and afterlife in the garden

Franklin GinnUniversity of Edinburgh, UK

AbstractThis 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.

Keywordsdomestic space, garden, landscape, memory, mourning

‘A garden’, Scottish poet-gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay wrote, ‘being less a place than a world, is a proper work for an exile’.1 The gardeners I will be writing about here dwell in the kind of every-day, suburban places some readers of this journal might glimpse from trains cutting through British cities, or perhaps remember from childhood, or perhaps even await them elsewhere. They are gardens not necessarily made to showcase flowing lines and sweeping vistas, but are mundane task-scapes, replete with watering cans and jobs undone, that move to rhythms of everyday life.2 In this article I want to show, first, how certain gardeners can be considered exiles as they are undone

Corresponding author:Franklin Ginn, University of Edinburgh, Institute of Geography and the Lived Environment, School of GeoSciences, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, UK. Email: [email protected]

483220 CGJ0010.1177/1474474013483220Cultural GeographiesGinn2013

Article



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from their gardens by the absence of loved ones, the darkness of memory and their own creeping mortality. Second, I want to demonstrate several ways in which past landscapes find refuge in gardens of the present. These exiles from the past cling to plants or objects, condense through the senses, or are invited into the garden through memory. This paper thus explores the ways in which domestic landscape can evoke an awareness of fragility, transience and impermanence that demands response.

Making a garden certainly involves practical effort – digging, planting, weeding and watching – and I will stress that responding to and dealing with traces of the past similarly requires work – it is not about luxuriating in the glow of memory, nor shades of melancholy, but about making memory and losing it again. In emphasizing this mundane practicality, one aim is to provide a counterpoint to tropes of discovery, exploration and self-reflection that underlie some evocations of ‘spectral’ landscapes. Rather than stumbling upon something unusual, or encountering some-thing unknown, the gardening practices I describe here are attempts to breed something more malleable and familiar out of absence, and in so doing to seek a more comfortable landscape by bringing together different fragments of past and present.3 Of course, attaining any firm coher-ence between these fragments is impossible, and as Wylie argues ‘displacement and dislocation are, insidiously, right at the very heart of any sense of dwelling’.4 Wylie’s point is that these are pre-requisites to landscape, not additions. In this article, however, I aim less to unearth predicates or contradictions at the heart of landscape, but rather to examine certain practicalities of landscaping.

This article draws on research encounters with experienced gardeners and discusses their prac-tices of dealing with death, absence and afterlives in the garden. Of course, for many garden own-ers, perhaps concerned more with economic management of their outside domestic space, or for those without access to garden space of their own, death and absence may remain unimportant. Moreover, even for the people I discuss here, such spectral concerns are not predominant in how they do gardening; rather, they linger around the edges. Nor were they to the fore of our research encounters: indeed, talking about loss and absent others did not come freely or easily – if at all – to my interviewees or to me. Something was held in reserve by both of us and between us. Here, therefore, I touch on certain awkward moments in gardening.5 This awkwardness and reserve is, in a sense, what is interesting: how certain more-than-human elements and their prosthetics come to matter to gardeners is not an obvious process. To keep faith with this I offer few didactic outputs, no distilled list of take-home points. Instead, I offer a circuit of the garden in four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. By structuring the discussion through four movements, I try to capture something of the practical and emotional work of doing landscape, but to do so loosely. Before turning to this, I begin by situating the domestic garden amid recent work on land-scape in geography.

Landscape and the domestic garden: from co-presence to absence

In an enduring statement on landscape and experience, Tim Ingold wrote that ‘human beings do not, in their movements, inscribe their life histories upon the surface of nature as do writers upon the page; rather, these histories are woven, along with the life-cycles of plants and animals, into the texture of the surface itself’.6 Ingold’s argument was for a phenomenological way of approaching landscape as a relational practice made through interactions between all kinds of actors – not all of them human. Since then, geographers have moved from landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ or a picture encoding cultural politics of heritage and identity to focus on contact, immersion, material



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interactions of forces, skilled bodies and energies: in other word, ‘re-animating landscape’.7 Notable inspirations have included Wylie’s auto-ethnographic reflection on climbing Glastonbury Tor, wherein he showed how the landscape is not passively awaiting meaning or mastery through the eye, but rather animates how we see.8 Another key move was Lorimer’s collaboration with past reindeer herders scattered through the archive, and present herds and herders in the Scottish high-lands.9 The message of this phenomenologically-inflected turn is that, far from merely being a text to be decoded, landscape is to be claimed through material and bodily practices.10

Similarly, the domestic landscape is now seen as a place congealed from many flows, not sim-ply a space cut off from the world.11 Since the 1990s, focus has shifted on to processes of home-making, where ‘home’ is constantly in the process of being made and re-made, which can make it unsettling as well as comforting.12 Like home-making, gardening can be expressive of human emotion, of taste and status, and of wider social relations, such as notions of national belonging, cultural conformity, or boundary maintenance.13 Garden work can also reproduce gendered domes-tic practices, although there is little consistent evidence that men and women approach gardening differently.14 Unlike home-making, however, gardening involves working with living beings: these relations can certainly bring people into close proximity with ‘nature’, but also have the capacity to surprise or upset.15 The practices of gardening certainly have the potential to be enchanting, to engage our sensing bodies – there is abundant evidence that being in close relation to living and dying plants and animals comes to be very important for certain people.16 Gardening, we might say, is an ethos and practice of everyday experiment in making and dwelling in landscape, a binding up of various inclinations, sensations and responses that join the gardener and the world.17

Of late, however, geographers have questioned the ontology of relation and co-presence under-lying such notions of landscape. They have recently been exploring ‘spectral geographies’ that include the ‘just perceptible’, the ‘barely there’ and the ‘nagging presence of absence’ and mem-ory in a variety of spaces.18 Such studies include, among many others, those focused on ruins: Edensor confronting signs of a vanished working-class culture, or the pasts and the human and non-human lives occluded by Manchester stone; DeSilvey, salvaging memory on an abandoned Montana homestead; MacDonald the ruins of a captain of industry.19 In a different register, Della Dora has suggested the traces of past mountain exploration cultures and journeys linger on in the Mediterranean, while others have explored the fraught politics of missing people, Ireland’s ghost estates as well as post-colonial ghosts.20 Geographers of course have a rich tradition in studying landscape and memory, particularly in terms of national memorialization and the politics of mem-ory in and of the public sphere.21 What is different, though, is that these recent ‘spectral geogra-phies’ do not presume presence in landscape and they are more concerned with ‘embodied, visual and spatial practice’, than the ‘contested cultural politics of heritage and identity’.22 Through their focus on memory and absence, geographies of spectral landscapes widen our temporal horizons from ‘geographies of the moment’ to a wider timespace in which the past and the present coexist.23

In a separate vein, geographers have been interested in domestic cultures of memory, or com-memoration, in which small artefacts of past lives or places can serve to congeal memory.24 Through the late 20th century, spaces of the ‘sacred’ have become less formal, more vernacular and more varied, with new rituals emerging, such as roadside shrines, memorial trees, white ‘ghost’ bicycles or mediatized ceremonies for celebrity deaths.25 It is in this context that the garden can be seen as a therapeutic space for dealing with death and with memories of absent people or places. The garden, then, as well as being a place of engagement between nature and culture, is also suf-fused with memory and the absent traces of past lives and past gardens. Derek Jarman’s garden, famously, acted as a living archive of his life and the lives of those he knew in an attempt to ensure




their memory would last into the future.26 Based on the testimonies of many ‘ordinary’ gardeners, Stenner et al. have identified what they call a ‘nostalgic’ mode of being in the garden, in which the resonance of the garden derives from impressions of emotionally-charged living memories of absent friends, family and loved ones (including pets), and through which the garden comes to ‘occupy us’.27 Elsewhere they write of how the garden ‘reverberates’ with memories of past place and past people.28 The circulation of memory is therefore one of a garden’s many appealing fea-tures, and can assume an importance similar to that of plants.29

And yet, Wylie has argued that such descriptions of memory-laden landscapes rely on tropes of presence: unearthing memory, making the invisible visible, salvaging, recovering, luxuriating in ‘the sensuous, mossy, crumbly, rusty feel and smell and taste of memory’.30 On another walk, this time along England’s southwest coast path, Wylie was prompted by a memorial bench to confront the haunted and haunting dimensions of landscape: the bench shows the simultaneous absence of presence and presence of absence: someone (an unnamed dead person) missing is at the heart of his view. Wylie’s point is that this absence is disconcerting – the landscape here is not about involve-ment and immersion, or even ‘affective intensities’, but instead a ‘slipping away’, ‘letting go’, or ‘opening out’. The result of acknowledging the tangible and intangible traces of memory in land-scape is to open out a ‘zone of indiscernibility’.31 He argues that landscape shows the non-coincidence of self and world: that is, landscape and subject may be co-constitutive, but who and what is being constituted is never and can never be clear.

Forms of materialized memory – such as memorial benches – can be seen as what Casey calls ‘commemorabilia’, objects that carry ‘the past forward through the present so as to perdure in the future’.32 Such commemorabilia, Casey argues, cannot be too literal an object, too straightforward a representation of the person; rather, commemoration ‘thrives on indirection’ and ‘remainders’.33 In the garden, memory flows uncertainly from prosthetics such as paths laid by dead fathers, pho-tographs of childhood gardens, or spades handed down through generations. Of particular reso-nance in the garden are plant memorials. Using a plant to memorialize underscores the transience of life, memory and presence, as plants can become detached from the object they memorialize over time, or can themselves die, grow into new shapes, or become nuisances.34 Plant memorials, as we shall see, have a particular instability, even as they work in the garden to give ‘expressive form to the mysteries of time, change, and mortality’.35 Commemorabilia are always partial: some-thing of what is being memorialized remains out of reach, indiscernible, even as something else circulates or rests in the garden. Even as they materialize the absent, commemorabilia paradoxi-cally underscore absence.

If landscape is never fully consonant with itself, if there is always as Wylie suggests an on-going dis-placement in any experience of landscape, then there is a similar displacement inherent in the subject that is experiencing. The human has almost always been thought of in terms of capacity or power – of being able to do something.36 Meditating on this in his re-reading of Ingold’s analysis of Brueghel’s The Harvesters, Harrison calls attention to the way in which a figure sleeping under the tree is out of kilter with the rest of the picture, which is full of people busy creating and recreat-ing the landscape through their labours.37 Using this sleeping figure as motif, Harrison argues against the way that subjectivity has come to be understood as a positive presence or force, positing instead that vulnerability, withdrawal or negativity are the necessary shadow of practice.38 Just as bodies decline and work cannot be done, death comes to the gardener, although often not before it comes for certain of their friends, loved ones or even pets. And yet the human subject can persist ‘beyond the body’ through memorabilia, through spectral presence and through traces. This mir-rors how death studies have moved away from the traditional treatment of grief as a process of putting the deceased ‘to rest’ in order to move on with one’s life. In this model we end up losing



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the person a second time after they die, as they are put away ‘in us’ – their otherness is removed.39 If we fully internalize the other we are no longer faithful to that which we mourn. We are struck by paradox: on one hand to internalize someone in memory erases their autonomy, but on the other hand not to remember them means that we lose them completely. Death studies have recently turned to a ‘continuing bonds’ model, which stresses continued attachment to loved ones after they have died.40 Of course, continued attachment is impossible, as that to which we should continue to be attached no longer exists. The ‘solution’, or rather the more judicious response, for Derrida, is not to transcend or reconcile this tension, but to recognize it, and to retain a sense of the ‘irretriev-ability’ of the lives of others.41 It is, as we shall see, common that absent ‘people’ continue to pro-duce the garden landscape after death, though not in any straightforward way.

In this article, rather than stressing only the enlivening or rooted qualities of memory, I will suggest that garden ‘memory work’ is hedged by a certain unsettling aspect.42 This unsettling aspect reminds the gardener that they are exiles in their own gardens, exiled from the past lives of others and from their own memories. I will examine some of the mundane practices through which they come to terms with this being exiled. In what follows, I draw mainly on the experiences of six gardeners – Veronica, Elsa, Ron, Jan, Brad and his wife Carol – though reference is made to the testimony of others. These people and others (a total of 42), living in inner and outer London sub-urbs, were met by the author in the Spring and Summer of 2009 and 2010. They were all self-identified ‘keen gardeners’, who define their practice as being plant-focused, are resistant or outright hostile to ‘lifestyle’ gardening – gardening done for status or with little regard for plants – and make up somewhere around 20 per cent of the adult population of Britain.43 We are dealing with a particular subset of experienced, committed and thoughtful gardeners. I am therefore not making generalizations about the entirety of British gardening culture, but rather asking what we might learn from particular instances. Furthermore, the gardeners I discuss in this paper are all ‘older’ retired home-owners between 65 and 90 years of age. The body changes through the life-course, just as the body’s capacities to garden do not remain constant. As people get older, the garden can devolve from an enchanting piece of the world to a burden and a source of frustration, a process of home becoming ‘un-homely’.44 Older gardeners also often demonstrate a kind of ‘mourning for loss of identity as gardener, cultivator and home maker as well as a loss of control over [their] environment’.45 While such changes represent the inevitability of bodily decline, resist-ing them – as in the case of those gardeners I discuss here – can be an important means to subvert norms of ‘ageing’.46

Each research encounter consisted first of a garden/life history interview organized not around major life events, but around the gardens people had cared for during their life. The second com-ponent was a walking tour of each interviewee’s garden. In practice, distinctions between these two elements were blurred: alongside ‘talk’, old photographs would be unearthed; sudden detours into front gardens would be made; books would be consulted; the bodily actions of gar-dening would be mimicked or re-enacted. Death haunted all these encounters. Conversations began on the subject of childhood memories: smells of sweet pea filling the hallway; sounds of a father clipping rose bushes; hollyhocks towering overhead. Often, not only were the people and plants being reminisced about dead, but the entire garden landscape no longer existed.47 Nevertheless, they had a palpable presence. The presence of death – usually vague but some-times more poignant and sharply focused – made for difficult research moments. I have chosen the particular stories and people that follow because they were some of the most evocative but yet tangible of my research encounters, and seemed to resonate with the experiences of others. The rest of this paper emerges through four movements: passing, touching, weeding and sitting. I begin by describing Veronica’s memorials.




Passing by the pond

As we were walking up the right hand side of her small garden in Motspur Park, Veronica recounted the story of how she had made her garden pond. A colleague and friend, the head of science at the South London school where she used to teach, helped her plan the pond. Then, by chance, Veronica had seen an advert for a £10 fibreglass pond pinned to her gardening club’s notice board. The same friend then transported the pond to her house on the roof of his car. Given its depth, Veronica and her friend decided not to dig a hole for the pond, but instead to raise it above ground level and sur-round it with bricks. They asked anyone they knew for bricks, gathered them up and built the pond together. This was several years ago, and the pond is now thriving with frogs and newts.

It was good fun, we built it together and he was a good friend of mine. Unfortunately he died about a year afterwards. He had a sudden heart attack. He had got a PhD; he’d gone to King’s, but he’d got his PhD at Exeter, in marine biology. But that’s an abiding memory of him, you know. The pair of us and his then quite small son did it, mixing concrete and fitting it round. He’d come round and he’d sit with a cigar, sit beside the pond saying, ‘What’s in there today?’ It’s a good memory.

The pond simultaneously attests to what once was – Veronica and her (unnamed) friend sitting by the pond – while underlining that he has gone and that they are never going to sit together again. The pond highlights transience. Not only to Veronica, but to me as well: note how Veronica draws a parallel between me and her friend by noting that we both went to the same University. Furthermore, when she was making the pond with her friend, Veronica did not know that he would die within a year. Their mutual labour was not – at the time – about building a memorial or monu-ment to anyone.

Experiencing the death of someone is a life crisis that both instigates and demands acts of memory-making.48 We are confronted with a need to respond to the absence of someone, and this is not done simply cognitively, by creating or nurturing private mental memory, but also through material culture, where prosthetics give the deceased a continuing life, often with a powerful and affecting physical presence.49 Hockey and Hallam’s work points to how various materials are fash-ioned into memory objects; Veronica’s pond can be considered a kind of ‘connective tissue’ that joins the living with the dead and her reminiscence extends this physical connection into a social presence.50

As we were walking back towards the house, Veronica pointed to another important memorial. Veronica told me about how her friend had been a jazz fan, and how this inspired her to plant a rose called That’s Jazz as a memorial.

He was a jazz trombonist and he introduced me to jazz: I had been very much a classical music buff and he said he needed new interest in life. His wife didn’t like jazz, my husband didn’t like jazz and they were both perfectly happy for the pair of us to go off together. And in fact when he died we had the wake here and his jazz friends all turned up and we had a 27-piece jazz band playing in the garden. Brilliant – he would have loved it. But there’s no sort of memorial to him anywhere officially, so I thought ok, found a rose bush, it was That’s Jazz so . . .

Veronica points to an unconventional suburban death ritual – hosting a wake in her garden with a jazz band. In the absence of an official memorial to her friend she planted a rose that both stood in for him and would prompt her to remember him. The pond and That’s Jazz show how people have a social presence beyond: when we die we do not disappear, but turn into ghosts, are incorporated into other forms and states; our bodies are displaced, substituted, given prosthetics.51 Memorials are



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a kind of supplement to the deceased, an attempt to extend their social presence. Yet, the memorial does not wholly capture or accurately represent Veronica’s friend or his life: it fails (the rose will die). This failure, Casey argues, is essential for acts of commemorative reminiscence.52 The problem is that the memorial is supplementing something that is not there. While the pond and That’s Jazz make connections to Veronica’s friend, they also simultaneously underscore that this ‘connection’ cannot really exist, for her friend now only exists for Veronica through her memory.

Touching the bamboo

According to Bachelard, ‘childhood lasts all through life’ and it returns to animate broad sections of adult life.53 The ‘flickers and hints of what we experienced in childhood’, writes Philo, ‘continue to be activated through life, and our past takes substance again’ − memories of childhood are often an important source of identity, particularly for older people.54 Bachelard, Philo suggests, is on to something when he talks about how we can, through reverie, connect back to our childhood geog-raphies. In this section, guided by Elsa, I want to explore how certain gardens can work to make us strange to ourselves.55 I asked Elsa about her memories of growing up in South Tyrol, Italy; she talked at some length about fruit trees, her mother pruning, her father picking apples.

In Figure 1 we see Elsa touching the bamboo. Elsa grew bamboo because it reminded her of childhood (she had also planted an olive tree because her husband liked to be reminded of growing up in Algeria). Her parents liked unusual plants, including bamboo, which they gathered during their travels.

The bamboo, I like the bamboo; that’s something that clearly is from childhood and growing up. My dad used to love bamboo; he managed to get from somebody these bamboos which grow thick and tall, very, very tall, and he used sticks and I managed to bring a cutting from Italy, which is that one over there. That is specifically brought from my place where I grew up because I love bamboo; I don’t know why, maybe because my dad loved bamboos.

There is an abundant literature on the reproduction of agricultural and gardening cultures by migrants; broadly, the introduction of garden plants from elsewhere is seen as a reaction to feeling displaced from somewhere, a way to make ‘here’ feel like ‘there’.56 More empirically grounded work shows this to be a much more nuanced process, with immigrants adapting piecemeal to new gardening cultures, willfully mixing the aesthetic, practical and identity functions of gardening cultures from their country of ‘origin’ and their new country of residence.57

Might we see Elsa’s bamboo as an attempt to make ‘there’ like ‘here’ within an overall garden-ing culture that mixes British and non-British ideas? Noting of course that bamboo here stands for Elsa’s garden specifically, not the wider landscape of South Tyrol. While I would not entirely dis-agree with this formulation, I don’t think it fully captures what Elsa is doing. Look again at why Elsa grows bamboo. There is a desire to make a little bit of her garden more like somewhere else, but is it not more about making now like then, trying to physically connect her to her father and her childhood garden? That desire for childhood re-connection is present, but her account is much hazier than that. She believes she gets her love of the bamboo because her father planted a species that grew thick and tall, but she then rescinds all this by saying ‘I don’t know why, perhaps because my dad loved bamboo’. I pressed Elsa further on why she grew plants that reminded her of the past:

I think you try and recreate certain things from your past, that’s what I find [myself] instinctively doing I think; certain looks or a certain feel about the place you want to recreate that somehow. And then you add




in new things as your life is obviously not going to be the same as when you grew up. I don’t think, you know, when I go back home, it’s not really some sort of nostalgic hanging-on to or trying to re-create: it’s just an automatic thing that you just do, that you somehow remember. Either consciously or sub-consciously you remember your parents doing something and you just do it as well. Or maybe you try to remember what they used to do.

Elsa is saying that her garden and gardening is part of who she is, even if the language remains vague. She is not a rational, calculating being trying to recreate various scenes from her past or from distant places. She says she works by instinct: she does not go back to South Tyrol and make a list of things she misses that she wants to plant in her garden. She is not sure. She is not really ‘choosing’ to grow the bamboo. The tenor of her response about the bamboo is one of undecid-ability: she does not know for sure why she does what she does.

However, Elsa does not indulge in reverie: her memories prompt practical outputs – new plants – that require more than idle contemplation. In addition, summoning forth something from the distant past is not, Elsa tells us, a nostalgic looking backward, it is more an act of

Figure 1. Elsa touching the bamboo.



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present-ing the past, using it as a resource for some present end or purpose. The bamboo does not really grow as tall or as thick as the bamboo of her childhood memory: she says that new things are ‘not going to be the same as when you grew up’. By adding new things from her past she is adding novelty to her present: this creates a ‘strange geography’ that hovers between the then and now.58 Therefore, in the end, Elsa is not really entirely sure why she touches the bam-boo, or what she is touching when she does so: her past, a memory, her father’s skill, a cross-border plant migrant? When she touches the bamboo, Elsa is a stranger to herself. The recognition that we can never know ourselves but are fragmented subjects was Freud’s wound to primary narcissism; the circulation of childhood memories in the garden works in this way to remind the gardener of their fragmented subjectivity, of ‘oneself as another’.59 For the gar-deners I met, this sense of strangeness is a perennial feature of their gardening experience, but one that is dealt with through practical reminiscence that is not about classifying or organizing pasts, but about letting them mingle and circulate.60

Weeding the bindweed

Ron lost his wife a few years before I interviewed him. Ron mentioned his wife in passing several times, but we never really discussed her directly. During our research encounters some people volunteered information about the death of friends and family, but it was usually only when it had direct bearing on something else they were telling me. For me to have asked for many details about deceased loved ones would have transgressed the bounds of the interview we both subscribed to at the beginning of the research encounter. Later, looking over the interview transcript, it was never-theless clear that Ron’s wife’s absence was very important. As we strolled through his back garden in the May drizzle, Ron pointed out the memorial bed for his wife (another example similar to That’s Jazz). A bit later, having finished our walk round, we stood back and looked at the garden and I asked him how long he spends in his garden on a typical Spring day. He replied:

I spent the last three days tidying up. I like gardening I always have done. My wife used to help me out with the weeding; she pulled out the bindweed. I can’t keep it down [he can’t keep the bindweed under control]. Down there I’ve got a suckling plum coming up and I shall put that somewhere, beautiful yellow plum.

First, this illustrates how Ron’s garden is animated by an absent presence – his wife who no longer pulls up the bindweed. The brevity of the statement also hints at why its importance was not appar-ent to me during the interview itself. No sooner has Ron mentioned his wife that he moves on to talking about the suckling plum. His wife used to pull out the bindweed, but now he must do so.

Hockey and Draper remark how closely the ‘intimate practicalities of shopping, socialising, cooking and cleaning were bound up with the emotional transition of bereavement’.61 Unfinished chores, practices or spaces left behind that stand as traces of people that may be at first upsetting, are still a kind of ‘connective tissue’ between the living and the dead.62 Sharing garden labour can mean things are done in particular ways; when someone dies this can allow bereaved spouses to behave differently. Indeed, Hockey et al. found that spouses often had mixed feelings about the death of their partner, as it freed them to act in new ways but made them – at least at first – feel guilty for doing so.63

Death has changed Ron’s garden: someone who weeded, weeds no longer; the bindweed a creeping reminder of her absence. As we sat on the bench in her garden, Sheila was aware that her garden was not as it used to be. After a lifetime of gardening, spanning from her first memory of




holding a worm as a small child to meeting me, every plant held some association for Sheila, some link to a past event or person; as she put it, ‘it’s nice, because they’re all memories, you see’. But she was aware of these memories dissolving, as she began to forget plant names: ‘all the names that I know are beginning to go out of my head’. Sheila was in her 90s and the garden was becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Here are Wendy and Larry reflecting on Wendy’s father, as they looked at old photographs with me:

Wendy: That was the one, the long garden, with the ponds. Here’s one with my father with two of his grandchildren − that is, our son and my sister’s son − still gardening.

Larry: I don’t suppose he was any older than we are now; we’re still gardening.Wendy: He went on, he went on until that was the end.

He went on until that was the end. The question of garden ‘downsizing’ as a response to chang-ing bodily capacities presents itself to gardeners as they get older: what to do when their own bod-ies could no longer maintain their gardens?64 At the end of many interviews I would ask, ‘How do you think the garden will change as you get older?’ Only a few people talked openly about what would happen to their garden after they died: most spoke of lowering beds, increasing ground cover or the troubles of finding a reliable gardener to do the heavy work. Clearly, considerable anxiety attaches to this question, given the degree to which identity and subjectivity is tied to the garden for these keen gardeners. For Wendy and Larry the issue presses in − Larry remarks that they are now the same age as Wendy’s father would have been at the time the photograph was taken. Here is Jan reflecting on her deteriorating eyesight, responding to my question about what would happen to her garden as she gets older:

Jan: Being aware of light: I’ve had some problems with my eyesight so I’m very conscious of − if you like − the visual appeal of the garden and the fact that that may not always be available to me. For instance, dark blue is something I don’t see so well now as I used to. I’ve got a lovely Monk’s hood out there, and that colour is harder for me to see in its true glory. Kind of conscious of mortality, and things dying. Yep. My own mortality, yep.

Franklin: What will happen to the garden as you get older?Jan: Well something I do think about is what will happen when I die. Because this is a very high-

maintenance garden, it’s not something you can just sort of do the odd 10 minutes now and again. If it was left even for a few months it would become a jungle I think. There’s very few weeds actually, I had it all double dug when I moved in and I think that was a good invest-ment. I mean there’s bind weed next door, unfortunately that comes through the fence.

Franklin: So how would it make you feel, do you think, if the garden got overgrown?Jan: Well I mean I won’t be here. I try not to let it worry me. My son isn’t interested at all in

gardening; whether he’d come and live here I don’t know.

Being a good gardener demands a lot of your time. Not everyone appreciates this: Jan’s son does not get it, for example. But the labour invested into plants pays back through enchantment: in this case Jan’s lovely Monk’s hood. But the Monk’s hood’s colour is dimming as she gets older. Jan is not that old, but this dimming and the ever-lurking weeds that she can only keep at bay remind Jan of her mortality. This does not prompt any great lament, in fact Jan tries not to let it worry her. Rather than the ‘ageing body’ being what happens at a particular time in the ‘life course’, as a special event or transition, an awareness of mortality is an irreducible part of living. If, as Harrison has suggested, ‘vulnerability’ is a necessary supplement to bodily, practice-oriented geographies,



Ginn 11

then our own bodies, as well as the way the dead and the spectral animate the garden, remind us that we are vulnerable: ‘we all live with … vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot pre-empt’.65 This vulnerability, of which death is a decisive if not final arbiter and Jan’s fading colour-perception is another example, is with us all the time: by saying that she tries not to let death, mortality and weeds worry her, Jan is in a way admitting that they do.66 Learning to domesticate vulnerability – and death – is something that Jan does through gardening.

Sitting

The question of how the dead are invited into or exorcised from domestic gardens is a profoundly practical one. It is not a consideration necessarily relegated to encroaching old age, nor is it some great mystery, nor merely a philosophical question. Traces of the dead – comfortable or disconcert-ing, accidental or organized – need not be intimate to be animating; the unknown dead haunt the garden too. Of course, while many gardeners might simply ignore such questions, or simply remain unaware of them, others – those I am discussing here – attempt to deal with the afterlives of others in ways that are both faithful and transformative.

The following story is told by Brad, who lives in Motspur Park in southwest London. Brad’s wife, Carol, was vacuuming inside when I arrived, but she joined our discussion after half an hour or so. When they got married, Brad and Carol lived in several flats before they made on offer on their current house, which was in an inter-war suburban development that was by then mature. Around 1964, after the offer had been accepted but before they moved in, Brad began to tell me:

My wife went to work and there was a woman there who was a psychic (she [his wife] used to take headaches). And she came and stood behind my wife and she said, ‘There’s an old man standing next to you.’ She said, ‘You’ve been looking at his house’, and she described this old man – small, with a stick, bent over – and she said, ‘You’ve been looking at his house. There’s masses of rose bushes all over the garden, front and back; he wants to help you get it, and he knows you’ll look after it for him.’ So that was a bit spooky. I came to look at this place for the first time on my own, and sure enough things that this woman said matched up, especially the roses, you know.

When he came to look at the house, Brad saw that the garden ‘matched’ the description given to his wife. He described the garden as ‘very old-fashioned’. It featured a red brick ‘throne’, a rotting shed and a great many pillars lined up and down the back garden. Brad continued:

I found out from the neighbours he was a tremendously keen gardener when he was younger, and he had a pergola over here with roses and everything going across. But that was years ago, there was nothing on top, and I couldn’t break these bloody pillars, so we arranged them on top there, on the rockery.

Brad is here inheriting a history, to use Haraway’s term, of inter-war suburbia.67 He has been bequeathed a garden style and layout from a bygone era, which he decides to clear out to the best of his ability, although bits of the pillars are still present in his garden, as are the original concrete seat posts. No one has the power to eliminate the traces of the past completely, but rather they meet them with a range of differing responses. The story went on. Brad described how he had found a pile of old Daily Mail newspapers from 1937 and a picture of a ‘lozenge-shaped’ WWI tank caught his eye: the image’s caption read, ‘My proudest moment of my life was when I was made a lieuten-ant in the field of the royal tank regiment, First World War, signed E. Muritt, Kingston’. E. Muritt was Brad’s former neighbour:




So a couple of months later I was back home and E. Murritt was out in the garden. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I hear you got a house now.’ I said, ‘That’s right, yeah’. ‘Oh, that’s interesting, New Malden?’ I said, ‘Motspur Park.’ ‘Yes, know Motspur Park, I used to have a great friend there.’ I said, ‘Did you?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you remember I was in the post office, so was he. We used to meet at the little crossing every morning on our bikes and cycle off to work together. Lovely guy, he was.’ So I’m starting to put this − things happening in my mind. He said, ‘Yeah he lived just over the crossing couple of roads away.’ I learned that this chap had been in the post office, so I said, ‘I bet he lived in Estella Avenue.’ I thought I said, ‘I suppose his name was Charlie Strugnal.’ He said, ‘How do you know that!?’ I said, ‘I got his house.’ That was a strange coincidence: little bit spooky. We tried to retain the basic pattern of his garden.

Brad finds out from his ‘lovely neighbours at the time’ that the description given by the psychic was accurate. Serendipitously, there is a name in the old newspaper clippings that he recognizes. Over another fence-top conversation, this time with his mother’s neighbour, he discovers the name of the former owner of the house, Charlie Strugnal. The fact that the neighbours were lovely ‘at the time’, but now Brad’s neighbours (on both sides) are a constant irritation, echoes a popular narrative of the decline of suburbia, as the utopian promise of the garden suburb has been lost.68 Whether or not the man appeared to Carol’s psychic is irrelevant: it has clearly become part of their joint story-ing of their garden, a way for them to organize and make sense of the past. We can see how memory work is not just a vertical movement between Brad’s past and present, but is also an inter-subjective talking out the past, recounting it (to me during interview, to others on different occasions; it was a well-rehearsed tale) as a way to re-vivify his present garden.

The story also makes the question of Brad’s response to the garden more difficult, since he is socially connected to, even if he is not acquainted with, the dead gentleman in question. Brad knocked down the red brick ‘throne’, removed the pillars as best he could – ‘these were all old-fashioned ideas’, after all – filled in the borders and widened the lawn for his children. No memo-rialization here, certainly. But there is still some desire to do as the man’s ‘ghost’ requests, to look after his garden: thus ‘we have tried to retain the basic pattern of his garden’. The intimate co-relations between plants, place and a person is something Brad and Carol have a desire to respect: thus, they have lived with some of the remainders of Charlie Strugnal for nearly 50 years.

Brad and Carol do not memorialize Charlie Strugnal, but their garden is a kind of mourning for the suburban past and past lives. The question of how we deal with the traces of the dead is about justice, and requires some form of responsibility beyond the living present, to the ‘ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead’.69 As Derrida put it, ‘to live, by definition, is not something one learns. Not from oneself, it is not learned from life, taught by life. Only from the other and by death... Learning to live can happen only between life and death. Neither in death nor life alone’.70 Derrida’s concern is with the supplementary character of death, with death not as the opposite of life, but as something at the heart of living, as a ‘very condition of thinking and desire’.71 For Brad and other gardeners, death is not just some predicate at the heart of life; rather, the ways they respond to dead people are part of the practical work of living (just as responding to inherited landscapes is part of the work of landscaping).72 Brad stories his garden and his memories as a matter of doing justice to the old man who is no longer there and who he never knew: not to forget him, but to respond.

Conclusion

The gardening work I have discussed here offered ways for specific gardeners to respond to the deaths of others and to parts of their lives, such as childhood, that would otherwise have remained



Ginn 13

in the ‘dark interiority’ of their memories.73 Their responses involved materializing and anchor-ing something of what would otherwise be absent in commemorabilia or plants, and teasing those things out through conversation and reminiscence. In this article we passed by the pond, an accidental memorial to Veronica’s unnamed, cigar-smoking friend. Elsa’s ‘eternal childhood’ made her a stranger to herself as she touched the bamboo. The absence of Ron’s wife to weed out the bindweed marked the difference that death makes, but that absence was not seen as simply an ‘end’ or an ‘outside’ to the garden, but as important to its continued existence. For Ron, death made his garden something different, something more valuable: an expression of love lost. Brad’s story showed the impossible desire to be faithful to the suburban dead. These responses allowed these gardeners to domesticate a sense of the irretrievability of the past and deceased others, inviting them to live on – but in new ways. This gives their garden landscapes a strange temporality: what is far away in the past is brought near, while what is present seems an echo of what is far away. One simple conclusion, then, is that the putative ‘outsides’ of gardening – absence, death and afterlife – are an important and often overlooked terrain in which people try to garden well.

Even if each of the four movements described here made the gardener something of an exile in their own garden, I would not wish to suggest that such things were foremost in the minds or actions of the gardeners I met. Far from it: they lingered at the edge of our encounters; they were awkward topics and made for stilted conversation. Because gardens, those most ‘contradictory’ of spaces, can hold together competing ideas and experiences of landscape, I could have perhaps transmuted them into a story solely concerned with vitality and presence that would have por-trayed the garden as ‘lively’ multiple landscape.74 But instead I have attempted to work beyond the grain of my interviewees’ testimonies, to examine what those difficult stilted moments – in which I was unsure if I should offer condolences for a life lost many years ago or to be lost in the future, or retreat to objectivity – might momentarily, fleetingly, make tangible. In this I have argued that the impossible desire to domesticate the dead is of profound practical importance for these gardeners, but is not a central question; it is one that is usually approached obliquely, and glimpsed out of the corner of the eye while passing, touching or weeding. Through this article I have emphasized that these gardening practices first require work, and that, second, they show how the spectral does not simply await our discovery or excavation, nor is it always a ghost or something that necessarily arrives from the ‘outside’, but rather can be made through the work of gardening. This suggests we should look to the practicalities of living rather than ideas of life, and to the work of landscaping rather than concepts of landscape, in seeking to ascertain the ways in which absence comes to matter.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due for helpful comments from the audience at the Institute for Historical Research seminar series on ‘Studies of Home’ in June 2012, and to Alison Blunt for inviting me to present a previous version of this paper at that meeting. My gratitude also goes to the organisers and audience at the ‘Topographies of Britain’ conference in Basel, 2012. Many thanks to all the gardeners who shared their passion and experience with me, to three generous reviewers who improved this paper enormously, and to Nick Soulsby, Kerry Holden, David Demeritt and group crit readers at Edinburgh who all helped the paper along the way.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.




Notes

1 I. Hamilton Finlay, ‘Detached Sentences on Exile’, in A. Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay Selections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 188; I am aware of the vast literature on exile, trauma and return, as well as arguments about originary exile as a condition of subjectivity - here I use it in the colloquial and more simplistically evocative sense in which it was employed by Hamilton Finlay.

2 On vernacular gardens see C. Kimber, ‘Gardens and Dwelling: People in Vernacular Gardens’, Geo-graphical Review, 94(3), 2004, pp. 263−83; in a British context see D. O’Brien, Gardening: Philosophy for Everyone: Cultivating Wisdom (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); J. Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening (London: Pimlico, 2005); M. Bhatti and A. Church, ‘Cultivating Natures: Homes and Gar-dens in Late Modernity’, Sociology, 35(2), 2001, pp. 365–83.

3 On the voyage into unknown territory see O. Jones, ‘Geography, Memory and Non-Representational Geographies’, Geography Compass, 5(12), 2011, pp. 875–85.

4 J. Wylie, ‘Dwelling and Displacement: Tim Robinson and the Questions of Landscape’, cultural geog-raphies, 19(3), 2012, pp. 365–83, p. 367.

5 For some very different ‘awkward moments’ see R. Hitchings, ‘How Awkward Encounters Could Influ-ence the Future Form of Many Gardens’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 32(3), 2007, pp. 363−76.

6 T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 198.

7 M. Rose and J. Wylie, ‘Animating Landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 475–9.

8 J. Wylie, ‘An Essay on Ascending Glastonbury Tor’, Geoforum, 33, 2002, pp. 441–54; J. Wylie, ‘A Single Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South-west Coast Path’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(2), 2005, pp. 234–47.

9 H. Lorimer, ‘Herding Memories of Humans and Animals’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 497–518.

10 M. Rose, ‘Dwelling as Marking and Claiming’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(5), 2012, pp. 757–71.

11 K. Brickell, ‘“Mapping” and “Doing” Critical Geographies of Home’, Progress in Human Geography, 36(2), 2012, pp. 225–44.

12 A. Blunt and R. Dowling, Home (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 13 L. Head and P. Muir, ‘Suburban Life and the Boundaries of Nature: Resilience and Rupture in Australian

Backyard Gardens’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31(4), 2006, pp. 505–24; L. Askew and P. McGuirk, ‘Watering the Suburbs: Distinction, Conformity and the Suburban Garden’, Australian Geographer, 35(1), 2004, pp. 17–37; N. Blomley, ‘Un-Real Estate: Proprietary Space and Public Gardening’, Antipode, 2, 2004, pp. 614–41.

14 L. Taylor, A Taste for Gardening (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 15 R. Hitchings, ‘People, Plants and Performance: On Actor-network Theory and the Material Pleasures

of the Private Garden’, Social and Cultural Geography, 4(1), 2003, pp. 99–113; O’Brien, Gardening: Philosophy for Everyone.

16 Bhatti and Church, ‘Cultivating Natures’. 17 See M. Rose, ‘Gathering “Dreams of Presence”: A Project for the Cultural Landscape’, Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp. 537–54. 18 J. Maddern and P. Adey, ‘Editorial: Spectro-Geographies’, cultural geographies, 15, 2008, pp. 291–5, p.

292. 19 For a review see C. DeSilvey and T. Edensor, ‘Reckoning with Ruins’, Progress in Human Geography,

doi 10.1177/0309132512462271; T. Edensor, ‘Mundane Hauntings: Commuting Through the Phantas-magoric Working-class Spaces of Manchester, England’, cultural geographies, 15, 2008, pp. 313–33; C. DeSilvey, ‘Salvage Memory: Constellating Material Histories on a Hardscrabble Homestead’, cul-tural geographies, 14, 2007, pp. 401–24; F. MacDonald, ‘The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, forthcoming; see also D. Swanton, ‘Afterimages of Steel: Dort-



Ginn 15

mund’, Space and Culture, 15(4), 2012, pp. 264−82, and essays in O. Jones and J. Garde-Hansen, Edi-tors, Geography and Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Inspiration has been drawn from Iain Sinclair’s work on London and its haunted orbital rings and vanished second-hand bookstores (see the film Patience (After Sebald): A Walk Through the Rings of Saturn (Director Grant Gee, 2012), in which Sinclair bemoans the popularity of ruin-hunting and jokes that today he would probably have to walk all 25 orbital motorways of Shanghai to get published), Sebald’s meanderings around East Anglia, and ‘new nature writers’ such as Robert MacFarlane or Kathleen Jamie.

20 Just some of the topics considered in a session on Absences convened at the 2012 RGS/IBG Annual Conference in Edinburgh; V. della Dora, ‘Mountains and Memory: Embodied Visions of Ancient Peaks in the Nineteenth-Century Aegean’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33, 2008, pp. 217–32.

21 N. Johnson, ‘Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and Nationalism’, in J. Agnew (ed.), Political Geog-raphy (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 177–86; K. Olwig, ‘Representation and Alienation in the Political Landscape’, cultural geographies, 12, 2005, pp. 19–40; S. Legg, ‘Reviewing Geographies of Memory/Forgetting’, Environment and Planning A, 39, 2007, pp. 456–66.

22 della Dora, ‘Mountains and Memory’, p. 217. 23 R. Dodgshon, ‘In What Way is the World Really Flat? Debates over Geographies of the Moment’, Envi-

ronment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 2008, pp. 300–14. 24 See L. Hockey and E. Hallam, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001); A. Maddrell

and J. Sidaway, Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance (Aldershot: Ash-gate, 2010); A. Blunt, ‘Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-American Homemaking at McClusieganj’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21, 2003, pp. 717–38.

25 Maddrell and Sidaway, Deathscapes; A. Maddrell, ‘A Place for Grief and Belief: The Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland’, Social and Cultural Geography, 10(6), 2009, pp. 675–93.

26 See C. Mortimore-Sandilands, ‘Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies’, in C. Mortimer-Sandilands and B. Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 331–58.

27 P. Stenner, A. Church and M. Bhatti, ‘Human-Landscape Relations and the Occupation of Space: Experiencing and Expressing Domestic Gardens’, Environment and Planning A, 44(7), 2012, pp. 1712–27.

28 M. Bhatti, A. Church, A. Claremont and P. Stenner, ‘“I Love Being in the Garden”: Enchanting Encoun-ters in Everyday Life’, Social and Cultural Geography, 10(1), 2009, pp. 61–76.

29 T. Richardson, ‘Psychotopia’, in T. Richardson and N. Kingsbury (eds), Vista: The Culture and Politics of Gardens (London: Frances Lincoln, 2005), pp. 131–60.

30 J. Wylie, ‘Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(3), 2009, pp. 275–89.

31 Wylie, ‘Landscape’. 32 E. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 2000), p. 256. 33 Casey, Remembering, p. 220. 34 P. Cloke and E. Pawson, ‘Memorial Trees and Treescape Memories’, Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space, 26, 2008, pp. 107–22. 35 C. Howett, ‘Gardens are Good Places for Dying’, in M. Francis and R. Hestor (eds), The Meaning of

Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 252–9, p. 257. 36 J. Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); J. Derrida, ‘The Animal That

Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, Critical Inquiry, 28(2), 2002, pp. 369–418. 37 P. Harrison, ‘In the Absence of Practice’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 27(6), 2009,

pp. 987–1009. 38 Harrison, ‘In the Absence of Practice’; P. Harrison, ‘Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and

Living on After the End of the World’, Environment and Planning A, 40, 2008, pp. 425–45. 39 J. Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Standord University Press, 1993).




40 C. Young and D. Light, ‘Corpses, Dead Body Politics and Agency in Human Geography: Following the Corpse of Dr Petru Groza’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 2013, pp. 135–48.

41 Derrida, Aporias. 42 I take the notion of memory work from A. Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination

(London: Verso, 1995). 43 Mintel, Gardening Review UK (London: Mintel, 2009); H. Gross and N. Lane, ‘Landscapes of the Lifes-

pan: Exploring Accounts of Own Gardens and Gardening’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 27, 2007, pp. 225–41.

44 M. Bhatti, ‘“When I’m in the Garden I Can Create My Own Paradise”: Homes and Gardens in Later Life’, The Sociological Review, 54(2), 2006, pp. 318–41; Gross and Lane, ‘Landscapes’; G. Mowl, R. Pain and C. Talbot, ‘The Ageing Body and the Homespace’, Area, 32, 2000, pp. 189–97.

45 Gross and Lane, ‘Landscapes’, p. 236. 46 A. Grenier, ‘Crossing Age and Generational Boundaries: Exploring Intergenerational Research Encoun-

ters’, Journal of Social Issues, 63, 2007, pp. 713–27; C. Milligan, A. Gatrell and A. Bingley, ‘Cultivating Health: Therapeutic Landscapes and Older People in Northern England’, Social Science & Medicine 58, 2004, pp. 1781–93.

47 I do not go so far as to call the garden a ‘deathscape’. Maddrell and Sidaway define deathscapes as ‘places associated with the dead and for the dead . . . [that] intersect and interact with other moments and topographies, including those of sovereignty . . . memory . . . and work, life and beauty’ (Maddrell and Sidaway, Deathscapes, pp. 4–5). I would not wish to label the garden as a place of death, even one intersected by other times and spaces, for that is to privilege one part of the gardens multiple resonances over others (although one which in this article I suggest has been insufficiently acknowledged, and have thus privileged, but would not claim it to be dominant).

48 Hockey and Hallam, Death, Memory and Material Culture.49 Hockey and Hallam, Death, Memory and Material Culture. 50 Hockey and Hallam, Death, Memory and Material Culture, p. 138. 51 J. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,

1995). 52 Casey, Remembering. 53 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos (Boston, MA: Beacon

Press, 1969), p. 20. 54 C. Philo, ‘“To Go Back up the Side Hill”: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood’, 1(1),

2003, pp. 7–23, p. 12; O. Jones and C. Cunningham, ‘The Expanded Worlds of Middle Childhood’, in E. Teather (ed.), Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 27–42.

55 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 56 I. Brook, ‘Making Here Like There: Place Attachment, Displacement and the Urge to Garden’, Ethics,

Place and Environment, 6(3), 2003, pp. 227–34. 57 L. Head, P. Muir and E. Hampel, ‘Australian Backyard Gardens and the Journey of Migration’, The

Geographical Review, 94(3), 2004, pp. 326–47. 58 O. Jones, ‘An Ecology of Emotion, Memory, Self and Landscape’, in J. Hockey, B. Penhale, and D. Sibley

(eds), Emotional Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 219–30. 59 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another. 60 As seen in many of the essays in the classic collection, M. Francis and R. Hestor (eds), The Meaning of

Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 61 J. Hockey and J. Draper, ‘Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity (Dis)Embodiment and the Life

Course’, Body and Society, 11, 2005, pp. 41–7, p. 136. 62 J. Hockey, B. Penhale and D. Sibley, ‘Landscapes of Loss: Spaces of Memory, Times of Bereavement’,

Ageing and Society, 21, 2001, pp. 739–57.



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63 J. Hockey, B. Penhale and D. Sibley, ‘Environments of Memory: Home Space, Later Life and Grief’, in J. Davidson et al. (eds) Emotional Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

64 Bhatti, ‘When I’m in the Garden’; Gross and Lane, ‘Landscapes’. 65 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. 29, cited in

Harrison, ‘Corporeal Remains’, p. 426. 66 Butler, Precarious Life. 67 D. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 68 Or changed into a much more conservation promise of freedom, argues Barker in Freedoms of Suburbia

(London: Frances Lincoln, 2010). 69 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xviii. 70 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. xvii. 71 N. Royle, Jacques Derrida (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), p. 7. 72 Butler, Precarious Life. 73 Casey, Remembering, p. 166. 74 M. Foucault, ‘Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16(1), 1986, pp. 22–7; S. Hinchliffe, ‘Working with Multiples:

A Non Representational Approach to Environmental Issues’, in B. Anderson and P. Harrison (eds), Tak-ing-Place: Non-representational Theories and Geography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 303–20.

Author biography

Franklin Ginn is a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His research and writing focuses on more-than-human geographies, in particular on memory and gardening. Previous work has included botanical, zoological and, in his doctoral thesis, suburban garden naturecultures. His current inter-ests concern planetary gardening in the guises of geo-engineering and environmental apocalypse.



Documents

Death, absence and afterlife in the garden