Nick ROSE, Sustain: The Australian Food Network, Australia
Kelly DONATI, William Angliss Institute, Australia
Like many countries globally, panicked shoppers cleared out supermarkets and gardening nurseries when Australia entered its first lockdown in March 2020. Along with toilet paper, pasta and flour, people turned their minds to seeds and seedlings with food gardening taking on a new and more urgent meaning. This paper draws on a national survey of over 9,000 food gardeners across Australia, many of whom reported that they spent much more time in the garden during lockdown. Many of those respondents privileged enough to be temporarily freed from the rush of commuting or to receive government support while their workplaces were closed described how new rhythms contributed to their sense of wellbeing. In becoming lost in the rhythms of the garden, a new temporality – what we call garden time – unfolded according to a different logic, taking on less instrumentalized qualities. The survey findings offer insights into not only how “clock time”, or capitalist temporalities, erode health and wellbeing but also how ecological, mental and physical health become ontologically connected through multispecies temporalities of the edible vegetation and the practice of caring for plant communities. While the food garden features edible plants, it flourishes when the richness of its multispecies assemblages is cared for and nurtured. This paper explores how gardeners experience the temporalities of plant care as profoundly healing during the lockdown but also in the broader context of post-traumatic stress disorders, mental illness, bereavement and other losses. We attend to the ways in which the “healing” temporalities of plant care develop more relational framings of wellbeing and ontological belonging, productively disrupting biomedical understandings of illness and recovery that privilege anthropocentric temporalities and subjectivities. During this time of ongoing crisis, new ways of imagining health and wellbeing as a relational state of interbeing are critically urgent.
Mots clés : pandemic gardening|Australia|lockdown|garden time|clock time
A105206KD