| Spring 2010 |
Editors: Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon
‘Gardens of a Colonial Present’, Jim Drobnick
‘Public Art: The Kitsch and the Subtle’, R.M. Pope
‘Art on Trial’, Erin McLeod
In Greater Perfections (2000), John Dixon Hunt identifies some thirty-two gardens including rose gardens, vegetable gardens, landscape gardens, cloister gardens, bog gardens, therapeutic gardens, container gardens, and corpse gardens. Contributors to PUBLIC 41: Gardens add even more types. In the 24 contributions to this issue, there are the “botanicuratorial” museum gardens discussed by J. Keri Cronin; the school gardens analyzed by Kai Wood Mah; and the special form of allotment garden such as the Alex Wilson Community Garden, animated by Richard Brault. Gina Badger critiques the ‘seed bomb’ by guerilla gardeners; Jill Didur comments on Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers; and there are two new texts from French garden designer Gilles Clément, whose gardens have been influential (and controversial) in the worlds of ecological garden design, landscape theory, and garden studies.
Gina Badger, “Digging, Sowing, Tending, Harvesting (Making War-Fair)”:
“Guerilla gardeners, if we take them at their word, are fighting a war. Allied with social justice activists, they aim to counter state violence with a total mutation of terms. This war is not waged in brute force; there are no civilian casualties and no infrastructure is destroyed. Rather, these gentle guerrillas operate in the name of the public space, in the name of ecology, and their worst offence is tending otherwise forsaken properties without permission.” (123)
$15