Nurturing Heritage in Community Gardens

Community gardens can support future-focused, more-than-human heritage making, preservation and transmission. By drawing on ethnographic work in community gardens in Canberra, Australia's Capital City, this chapter explores how diverse heritage values and emerging futures are grounded in the practices that are nurtured in these sites. With the aim of contributing to the growing body of work that takes an “ecological approach to heritage in the Anthropocene” (Bangstad & Petursdottir 2022, p. 9), everyday, food-based informal economies of participation are shown to be capable of nourishing soil, the well-being of gardeners and broader human and non-human communities. Moving beyond ideas of place and place attachment, the chapter also suggests that these outcomes emerge from cultivation of a sense of ecological belonging, which is a concept that attunes gardeners to multispecies relations that stretch beyond the temporalities and spatialities of contemporary gardening sites. In so doing, this chapter expands the repertoire of participatory heritage practices and sows the seeds for reimagining collective, public gardening endeavours as important forms of sociocultural participation capable of contributing to the creation of more liveable futures