Metamorphosis and becoming-with in garden narratives

Gardens are paradigmatic sites of continuous metamorphosis. At first glance, they are spaces that human beings set out to make or improve. But numerous garden narratives document that this is not a straightforward unilateral process. Being living spaces and entities made up of multitudes of life forms, gardens ‘write back’ to their gardeners, transforming them in turn. Because of this, garden writings are useful sites for studying how ideas about change are developing in an age of anthropogenic planetary transformation.
This essay analyses a corpus of garden narratives to show how gardens, gardening and garden writing offer possibilities of a biodiverse ‘becoming with’ (Haraway) that teaches garden writers new faculties and an awareness of non-rational and embodied dynamics in coming to terms with change. Connecting Haraway’s vocabulary of emerging environmental kinship to Lucy Jones’ concept of matrescence and Lozano Nasi’s term transilience, I outline how garden narratives break practical ground and model optimistic and affirmative ways of engaging with current changes in ways that connect human creativity and personal growth to more-than-human lives.