Garden as society: exploring the values embedded in community garden aesthetics

Despite the benefits of ecological complexity, tidy and ecologically simple landscapes are the hegemonic aesthetic norm in many rural and urban settings. In rural agriculture, tidy landscapes of perfectly spaced, weed-free rows are often taken as an indication of farmer skill. Meanwhile, suburban yard owners face cultural pressures to maintain immaculate lawns through intensive lawn care regimens. In both contexts, an aesthetic of tidiness can contribute to dire ecological outcomes. Community gardens have potential to break the mold of tidiness. They are influenced by both agricultural and suburban aesthetic lineages but also by alternative agri-food movements, which place a higher value on sustainable practices, opening possibilities for alternative aesthetic outcomes that support greater ecosystem health. Drawing on a photovoice project and semi-structured interviews with community gardeners in the California central coast, we investigate the values that drive community garden aesthetics. We find that tidiness remains the hegemonic aesthetic, upheld by formal and informal governance mechanisms as well as personal taste. However, an alternative aesthetic, which we term “wildness,” provides a counterpoint to tidiness that can contribute valuable ecological resources to community gardens. Ultimately, however, we find that garden tidiness is not necessarily mutually exclusive with a sustainability orientation and wildness was not always the product of sustainability values.