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‘Gardens are denied their political agency’: Botanist blows the lid off racism and xenophobia in British garden culture
Posted at 7:39 pm on December 19, 2020 by Brett T.
She’s exhausting, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is on the cutting edge of wokeness. It was way back in 2019 when she argued that the reason community gardens fail is that we look at them through a “colonial lens.” Minorities keep trying to start community gardens, but then some white yahoo goes and colonializes the whole thing by planting cauliflower, a white person’s vegetable, instead of yucca.
It was actually the end of November when James Wong wrote a piece for The Guardian on the politics of gardening and the inherent racism in the U.K. gardening scene. “If you believe gardening should be a politics-free zone, you don’t consider it a form of art on a par with music, sculpture or cinema, but instead just a sort of frivolous pursuit of decoration,” he wrote, apparently inspired by an