Cultivating the Global Garden

It is a windy day in the Strzelecki Ranges. On a walk with a group of farmers in the southwest Gippsland dairy country of Victoria, Australia, we have progressed along the new plantations and across the pastures to a lookout point atop the highest hill on one of the farms. One hundred and fifty years ago this area was known as the Great South Gippsland Forest. The trees were so dense at the time of White settlement that explorers could barely pass through them. A temperate rain forest of tall trees and deep fern gullies then, today there are only a few remnant tree ferns in deeply carved folds of the cropped hills and an occasional sentinel gum tree on the slopes to indicate where the forest stood. Most of these farmers, never having been in this one’s back paddock before, have not had the opportunity to look out over the countryside from this position. They locate their farms on the plains and hills below. They note the path of the storm winds last month that had felled trees in a clear swath from one hillside farm to the next. They establish, with one another, where their boundary fences lie. They comment on the lines of trees now linking many of their farms to the national park at the top of the water catchment. Each of them, seeing and describing a different aspect of the view, evokes a picture of his farm and management priorities. They are all talking about their significant landscapes.

Investigating ways of seeing agriculture and conservation here in the context of the wider landscape—the land beyond the urban fringe—I draw on the stories and photographs of family farmers who work the difficult terrain of the Strzelecki Ranges.¹ Theirs is a vernacular landscape formed out of everyday farm practice. They work the land into patterns created by their management regimes and maintain a “look” associated with “good” farming culture. These landscapes are part of larger ones, extending through the global. In suggesting why it is important to “see” landscapes in various ways at a number of different levels, my intention is to recast several dyadic pairs—garden and wilderness, conservation and production, borders and patches—for new “gardening” opportunities. The background puzzle here is the future of the wider landscape in an increasingly urbanized world. In other words, how are human beings to reconcile the management of Earth as a resource with the growing numbers of people who live in cities that are not self-sustaining? Thinking through the idea of the global garden may provide some “grounded” sense to this question.

In the European tradition, the cultivation of a fruitful garden is usually cast against the wild, untouched character of wilderness. This tension between “wilderness” and “garden” is crucial in an understanding of the manufacture of agricultural landscape. Its range extends from the local and very specific to the global. Shifting the focal length of landscape images can often upset the sharpness of the distinction, emphasizing links rather than fissures. On-site photography frames the landscape from wherever one stands. Aerial photography connects farms to a bio-region. Satellite photography images the Earth. At this macrolevel an encompassing view emerges to link previously fragmented landforms. Human cultivation can be discerned from amidst the satellite mosaic of “natural” formations and urbanization. Wilderness fades when the world is exposed as interconnected elements comprising a “global garden.”

The image of Earth as a garden harks back, in Western tradition, to the story of Eden. Generations of gardeners, dispersed from Eden into the wilderness and confined to what is often the tyranny of production, have looked to the tribal memory of that Garden with nostalgia. Seemingly, Eden’s lushness and bounty required little, if any, labor. But time and practice transform the tale. The contemporary global garden reflects the expulsion from the first earthly sanctuary and its enclosed, local setting. There is no longer one original garden. Now Earth itself reflects the human propensity to harness the landscape for cultivation and productive harvest. To garden here is to labor; managing the land means...