“As a liminal bridge uniting human and nature, the garden is a cultivated, measured spatial and architectural form that has long played a significant role in the social-ecological imagination. The garden has served in powerful ways to produce good citizens and preferred forms of society. The metaphor of the “gardening” state is undergirded by the modernist desire for order-making and associated violence. At times, a singular categorisation of native versus invasive species in the garden space reveals the issues of modern conservation practices.

Shifting between domestication and unruliness, control and resistance, the garden is also a “contact zone” that affords pluralised ways of being and knowing. Gardens are living archives of, and continue to be implicated in, colonial occupation and violence, and capitalist dominations. At the same time, the garden, real or imagined, may bridge together different times, spaces and beliefs, offering refuge, hope and defiance for displaced, and marginal communities. Experimenting with the form of the garden has enabled artists to imagine alternative modes of being in the city, defying the capitalist logic. Gardens may coalesce with literary space, co-shaping poetry as a more-than-human gardening practice.” (Garden futurity Symposium, 2024)*

With these in mind, the crew of “storying-the-urban” visited gardens of various scale and socio-ecological significance in Hong Kong, from highly designed garden space to gardens managed by collectives in dense area of the city. As we move between these green patches, we notice how they each may enact and widen possibilities of human-environment relations.

* See some of our thinking on the garden as part of the project "Eco-garden-lab".

Chia—a collective garden in Yau Ma Tei

A garden in Sai Kung