In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface Plants, Gardens, and Knowledge For the nearly two decades that I lived in Hawai‘i, I couldn’t garden. When we first moved into our house in Hawai‘i, my husband, who came late to his love of gardening, would repeatedly ask my advice on landscaping and planting since I, as a country girl, was supposed to know these things. Somehow I could not bring myself to help him. He would say in response to my seeming indifference: “Why can’t you help me or at least help plan our garden especially when all you do all day is read and write about plants, gardens, and agriculture?” I began to realize that I couldn’t plant precisely because I was reading about plants, gardens, and agriculture. Reading, for instance, Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, John Barrell’s The Darkside of the Landscape, William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa ’s Native Lands and Foreign Desires: Pehea La - E Pono Ai?, and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things had convinced me of the ideological status of gardens and the political implications of having knowledge about plants. I had become so overwhelmed by this recognition of the ideological implications of gardens that I was unable to take pleasure in planning and planting a garden in our backyard. Seemingly simple questions from my husband about what to plant or how to design the garden would become ideological conundrums for me, and I would become immobilized by my thoughts. Once my husband asked me what I thought about building a curving path through our garden. His query reminded me of Pope’s Twickenham garden, his clever use of a small space to create the illusion of greater space, and how the serpentine walkway had helped achieve this. At first the serpentine path seemed a good idea, and then I remembered Pope’s landscaping advice to his Whig magnate friends, and the incredible gardens designed by Kent, Brown, and Repton, all of which were displays of aristocratic power, the power to exert one’s will on the land and the wealth to take large parts of rural land out of agriculture, to level villages, to move peasants off the land, all to create “pleasing” prospects. Unable to divorce the serpentine walk from the class politics implied by the country house garden, I hemmed and hawed. My husband went ahead and built his version of the serpentine walkway (it turned out quite nice). Every May, I would get the urge to plant a vegetable garden. What to plant? I would fantasize about the gardens I planted as a child with my father in New England—corn, squash, pumpkin, and beans. Wanting to recreate those distant pleasures of my childhood and to remember the New England of my youth would become strong reasons for planting corn, squash, and pumpkin. But planting these vegetables in Hawai‘i presented problems that went beyond fruit flies eating the blossoms of most squashes. Though the “torrid zones” with their warm and humid air, frequent but soft rainfall, and vibrant green landscapes suggest fertility and agricultural abundance, tropical and subtropical places are not necessarily sites of unlimited natural abundance. Soils are often dense with clay or barren because too sandy, and often lack that rich, black topsoil necessary for sustained and intensive growth. Plants grow in the tropics, not because of the rich soil, but because humus, the layer of rapidly rotting leaves and fallen blossoms and decomposing dead wood, provides the nutrients plants need to grow. Though the climate is relatively gentle (no frosts or freezes), plants suffer from a range of pests that thrive in these warm and moist regions. Abundant rainfall and warm sunshine are more than balanced out by pests such as slugs, aphids, beetles, nematodes, fungi, and an array of insect-borne viruses and bacteria. To the uninformed eye, the tropic’s greenery is a sign of fecundity, but not all plants grow equally well; a few thrive, become weeds, and threaten others. Introduced species, such as the Christmas berry tree, clog the foothills of O‘ahu, choking out the native hardwood, Koa. Contrary to popular belief, growing plants in the tropics requires effort and knowledge. In addition to the inherent difficulties of cultivating temperate-zone plants in a subtropical climate, I struggled with what to plant in our garden. I worried that, in wanting to plant corn, I was imposing my New England predilections on a Hawaiian landscape...

Share