Garden as society: exploring the values embedded in community garden aesthetics

Urban Farm DB summary

Using a photovoice project and semi-structured interviews with community gardeners on California's central coast, this study investigates the values that drive community garden aesthetics. It finds that "tidiness" remains the hegemonic aesthetic, upheld by formal and informal governance and personal taste, while an alternative aesthetic the authors term "wildness" offers an ecologically valuable counterpoint—though tidiness and a sustainability orientation are not necessarily mutually exclusive.