Reconciling Past and Present in How Our Garden Grows: A Critical Examination of Power, Peoples and Plants

Hilary Leighton received funding through a Research and Professional Development grant to explore the nature of Euro-western gardens at universities in relationship with decolonization action.

Humans stories are inscribed on the landscape as we impose, construct, extract, describe and experience its various topographies. One of the most fundamental ways that these topographies are affected is through the cultivation and/or tending of land. Gardens, a mode of spatial storytelling, rich with socio-cultural significations, are inextricably intertwined in the history of human settlement. An examination of the narratives that were given priority in ornamental Euro-western gardens at universities as an assertion of settler power is critical to informing the creation of a new, regenerative food garden that reconciles past and present while contributes to the scholarship/action of decolonizing from within.