How can we imagine flourishing futures amid the polycrisis? Kalpana Arias explores how gardens are on the frontlines of resistance and regeneration.

What do gardens mean in the polycrisis? The climate crisis, financial crisis, cost-of-living crisis, pandemics, biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse, resource shortages, Gaza, war, petro-interests and big oil hijacking a liveable future - the crises are multiple, all warped into a 24-hour feed (you can go from an arms factory protest to dying coral reefs in seconds) worming its way into a daily diet of gloom and doom. But another world is possible. Urban greening activists and gardeners are finding possible futures in the soil and breaking down how gardens are a frontline of defence in helping us find poly-solutions to a polycrisis. Does imagining different futures start with decolonising gardens?

Under the sun and clouds, mixing with wind and water, urban gardens future-proof our cities by reducing the heat island effect, mitigating flooding and filtering air pollution. Gardens offer people and nature the possibility of a new future built with microorganisms (and other non-human species) in a cosmic gestation process that is winning the world we want. Seemingly an outlier from culture or politics, the importance of gardens is more than a green space or a balm for an increasingly grey world. Modern gardens are an idea, a social dream that is forever growing and decaying in deep-time planetary processes. More than “nature”, green spaces are a political ground that manifests the problems of the present but also the solutions. Solutions that can be found in soil’s microbial metabolism.

Our planet, made up of tiny clumps of mass and fungal filaments, is a giant stomach, cementing mineral particles out of carbon to form pores and passages for photosynthetic energies, water, oxygen and nutrients to pass and be a part of our digestive system, bloodstream and neurons through planetary metabolism. For example, lichens make up eight percent of the planet’s surface. These lime green or electric yellow superorganisms dissolve and digest rocks with an arsenal of powerful acids breaking down mineral compounds that mutate to flesh. “A portion of the minerals in your body is likely to have passed through a lichen at some point,” notes Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life. These plant imaginaries metabolise the possibility of new worlds. “That’s always the perennial question,” shares Sui Searle, gardener and founder of Radicle, a newsletter on alternative gardening (see page 20). “Do we want to change the world to something better? One of the ways that you can do that is to build a garden.”

But whether you plan to grow dahlias, plant a vegetable garden or create a pollinator patch, gardens have complicated roots, including who gets to garden and what you can grow. From greenhouses and hotbeds to verge blooms modern gardening stems from botanomania, botanical “plant hunting” that attracted theft, tied to the movement of plants and people around the world, part of a colonial planting and displanting enterprise, treating the outdoors as another “artificial” space where nature is told where and how to grow.

“I grew up in my grandmother’s garden, who as an anglophile, grew roses in her Caribbean garden. They didn’t do so well in the heat.” Marchelle Farrell, a Black Caribbean gardener tells me. “My childhood landscape was entirely shaped by colonialism. All of the plants that I grew up among, none of them are native plants to the Caribbean, they would have been brought along the same trade lines that brought ancestors of mine who were enslaved or drawn along the forces of empire to make their way for trade. The plants brought to the island were for food or agriculture.” The politics of this trade pattern in crops like cacao, coffee, and sugar favoured production for export, clearing out Indigenous ecosystems and replacing them with cash crops for markets and profits.

But this overexploitation is not a thing of the past and continues in gardens worldwide - including the global north. “When I moved to the English countryside, I realised this landscape has also been shaped by colonialism. None of the plants that are common in the English garden are native to England. They are all foreign plants brought in on the same ships and trade routes that brought people,” Farrell continues. Common plants, crops, species of trees, shrubs and perennials that are associated with the UK and US considered native were “discovered”, collected, transported, commodified and weaponised as part of the colonial project and their legacies continue to grow in gardens today. The problem is you won’t find any evidence of this on the plant labels at your local garden centres.

Today, agroindustrial trends and horticulture practices continue the same systemic issues lining our soils with ecological junk food and displacing plants with over 13,000 alien plant species transplanted across ecological boundaries. “In the gardening industry you aren’t always working with nature,” says Searle. A common staple of this cultured system are lawns. These innocent patches of greenery require heavy chemical fertilisers, pesticides and resources to maintain its weed-free, green carpet surface. Research by Ibex Earth shows nearly 75% of urban green areas globally are lawns. In the US lawns are the largest irrigated crop (6 times the amount of corn), yet waste 4.5 billion gallons of water per day.

Our plant blindness has given social licensing for these insect food deserts to continue wasting resources as a continued colonial legacy, a symbol of wealth and class - with the amount of energy and resources spent on production, petrochemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides to keep a plant that is cut down before it can seed. Manicured lawns are one of the gardening practices dooming the Earth with the United Nations estimating 40% of the world’s plants are at risk of extinction because of habitat loss. Sui Searle agrees “the system is just trying to sustain itself. Capitalism is being subsidised by people and communities who are being oppressed or extracted from.”

Still, resistance has been rising in urban growing spaces globally as people begin to weed out the privatising and commodification of land for an urban commons where green spaces reflect local communities’ right to the city. “In gardens, a lot of the issues we face around colonialism, racism and the climate crisis are the results of the systems we are in,” says Searle pointing out that Black people and people of colour have always gardened but aren’t centred in conversations. “To uproot the system we need to change the way we approach representation in green spaces by giving our communities the decision-making power to decide what we need and how to build it.” Gardening is more widespread than ever but despite growing popularity, local councils across England are delivering more grey spaces than green - a war zone for plants and communities.

So, how can gardens and plants today help us imagine the collective futures we need? For Ron Finley, a US-based urban gardener and community activist, it’s time to take things into our own hands. “Go out and do something. Change your world. People like to call me the Black guy that grows food on the street, but I’m the guy that’s been able to change people’s lives all over the world because of a simple message that gardens equal freedom.” Globally, local groups and individuals are guerilla gardening - scattering seeds in bare patches, carving out spaces for plants to grow, and changing rights to access and rights to grow policies for communities to thrive. “Gardening is my protest. We’re not asking for permission to build our communities. I’m trying to show people what we can do and make happen by planting some food on the street,” says Finley.

Gardening isn’t just about plants, it’s about giving us a fighting chance. Trumpet-shaped flowers, anthuriums’ waxy appearance and bold spadix, the bulbous blooms of hyacinths, this sci-fi-like green alien invasion is an offshoot of plants potentialities imagining a different world, one without apocalyptic planetary endings. Plants, though they have no brain-like organ, have brainy behaviour through a network of electrical and chemical signalling systems that offer alternative ways to problem solve. In fact, decision-making has been studied in plants, so while gardening is not a silver bullet to the polycrisis, solutions (or imaginaries) won’t be found in machines but in plants.

These plant imaginaries are fundamental to our survival - they are a medium for metabolising hope. “For me, that means flowers, I do grow food for humans but I’m also growing food for non-humans through flowers,” Farrell says. “I try to have as many things in flower at every point of the season even the deepest winter to help our pollinators. The way I garden feels like a subversive act. I’m not trying to make the garden perform, it’s about play, so I don’t tidy my garden, I allow it to stand over winter and let it die back naturally.” Gardens are defiant, existing in continuity and alliance with the world around them. Composed of rhizomatic network functions, the alliance between creepers, crawlers, colonies of microcultures, bacteria and smaller organisms are forming world-making processes - all in a chemical simulation of what happens when we care for nature.

Building a better, healthier, fairer future will require new stories about people and plants. “The stories that I want to show people are: beauty in, beauty out. You put beauty into a space, that’s what you get out,” Finley shares. “Beauty is purposeful just like ugly is purposeful. That’s where design comes in. You can make designs that make people joyous or sick. So, growing a food garden is another way to be free and if you do it collectively, you can grow food for communities and eliminate a lot of health disparity, build safety in your neighbourhood, and so much more. There are dragonflies, butterflies, lizards that I haven’t seen in this area in over 20 plus years just because I put this garden here.”