Getting Back to the Garden: Reflections on Gendered Behaviours in Home Gardening

Abstract

There is growing interest amongst scholars in people’s gardening behaviours related to food production. This development coincides with society’s increased interest in consuming and producing food in sustainable ways. Local food movements, which include urban agriculture and home gardening, have increased in popularity in several countries, especially during the last decade. Academics from a variety of disciplines have been starting to ask questions: Why are people gardening? How is gardening associated with one’s identity? What motivates people to adopt environmental gardening practices? Some researchers suggest that gardening research could benefit from gender analysis. This paper examines some of the literature in this growing field of inquiry and finds current gardening research often lacks critical gender analysis, thus failing to problematize gardening behaviours and attitudes. It maintains that this development is curious in light of compelling evidence that shows differences in the gardening behaviours of men and women. It proposes that along with Bhatti’s and Church’s theory of gardening spaces as mirrors for changing gender relations, Allen’s and Sachs’s feminist theoretical approach to explore the sociocultural domain of women’s relationship to food could be used to conduct gendered gardening research related to food. This discussion concludes that gender analysis is critical to exploring gardening as a research topic and that understanding women’s role in gardening for food production will be especially critical in future research as climate change impacts necessitate different food production and consumption behaviours.