Landscapes of green domesticity

Abstract

A Story. She is a Gardener. On weekends, she gets up while everyone else is still asleep, and sneaks outside in cut-offs and a tee-shirt, slips into her gardening shoes and putters around the yard. With the demands of full-time study and part-time work, child-rearing and other commitments, they rarely go 'out there' into 'nature' anymore. Before Lew is born, they take off at weekends and head as far as the VW can take them, or just hang out in the Botanic Gardens reading novels and the. weekend papers. Now, they mostly live according to the ferocious dictates oftime - such a scarce resource; leisure an endangered species. She has learned to celebrate smaller parts of 'nature in here', in her urban environment - oikos and domos - ecology and home. So she spends as much time as she can in the garden, pruning this, dividing that, propagating the other, collecting seeds from x and pulling up the spent offerings of something that used to be recognisable as y.