Gardens and Cultural Change

Gardens contain time, culture, and nature. They are powerful symbolic spaces onto which a society can project its ideals, either to conjure or contrive cultural change, rooting them in the flow of natural processes. Five authors explore the variety of relationships between garden making and cultural change in Argentina, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. They show how gardens express popular cultural invention and attempts at political manipulation, as well as provide places of cultural resistance by subjugated people. Issues of identity and ideology; political coercion and resistance apply equally throughout the continent, inviting a renewed attention to gardens as places where cultural identities are forged and contested.