The Garden

The Garden asks how expanded forms of gardening, whether that be gardening as research-creation, ‘feral’ art practice, fostering new communities, addressing mental health, and, or resistance to capital all interact with the ever-challenging effects of climate change. Here the ‘garden’ may be considered to engender the co-production of care, activating communities alike in their struggle to address the intersectional challenges of the present and build new futures. In what ways can gardening shed its Western bias and become the basis of creative engagement and evaluation to insert meaning into the experience of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing, 2017)? Can gardening become an agent of action, capable of negotiating the overwhelming sense of anxiety and paralysis that emerges from a confrontation with the collapse of planetary systems?

This issue of Drain is also inspired by the queer activist, filmmaker, and artist Derek Jarman and his concept of ‘modern nature’. Partly articulated in his garden project at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, UK, a coastal site adjacent to a nuclear facility, ‘modern nature’ pushes boundaries and collaborative status between gardening as rewilding nature, time, and contamination (Jarman 1991; Laing 2020). Jarman’s concepts intersect with narratives of care, of bodies in despair, grief, but also of the possibilities of entangled futures. As such, we welcome a range of intersecting queer, feminist, post-colonial, and Indigenous perspectives to explore the ethical and ontological concerns raised through vibrant material and symbolic exchanges that operate at the site of the garden. Can such a collision of territories in which we confront the cultural separation of human and more-than-human dwellings allow for an exploration of the distorted and abused connections that have shaped our experiences of ‘modern nature’?