Novara Media ACFM Microdose: Gardening
18 snips
Aug 31, 2025 The discussion dives into the intriguing duality of gardens as both sanctuaries and enclosures, revealing their historical significance and personal impacts. Listeners explore the symbol of luxury represented by the pineapple and the frenzy of tulip mania, connecting these to societal changes. The hosts highlight gardening's therapeutic benefits, particularly within cultural traditions. Allotments emerge as both a right and a form of protest, while visions of gardens in socialist frameworks inspire thoughts about community and sustainability.
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Lockdown Revealed Gardening's Social Faultlines
- Lockdown sparked a major surge in new gardeners, revealing gardening as a potential activity people pursue when freed from work obligations.
- The pandemic also exposed deep inequalities tied to private garden access and intensified scrutiny of country-house wealth sources.
Gardens Are Built On Enclosure
- The Garden of Eden and the word paradise trace to walled gardens, linking enclosure and the idea of heaven.
- The English words garden and yard derive from an old term meaning fence or enclosure, highlighting control over land.
Landscape Gardening As Status And Concealment
- 18th-century landscape gardening reshaped British countryside aesthetics to signal landed status while masking dispossession.
- Those recreated landscapes depended on enclosures, displacement, slavery and colonial wealth.
