Rhetorical : Greening Composition

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

Of the University of Cincinnati

In partial fulfillment of the

Requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English and Comparative Literature

of the College of Arts and Sciences

by

Carla Sarr

June 2017

Master of Science in Teaching and Secondary Education, The New School

Committee Chair: Laura R. Micciche

Abstract

Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition argues that the rhetorical understanding of landscapes offers a material site and a metaphor by which to broaden our understanding of rhetoric and composition, as well as increasing the rhetorical archive and opportunities for scholarship. An emphasis on material place in composition is of particular value as sustainability issues are among the toughest challenges college students will face in the years to come. Reading landscapes is an interpretive act central to meaningful social action.

The dissertation argues that existing work in rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy has set the stage for an ecological turn in composition.

Linking ecocomposition, sustainability, cultural geography, and literacy pedagogies,

I trace the origins of my belief that the next manifestation of composition pedagogy is material, embodied, place-based, and firmly planted in the literal issues resulting from climate change. I draw upon historical , landscapes composed by the homeless, community, commercial, and guerilla gardens to demonstrate the rhetorical capacity of landscapes in detail. Building from the argument that gardens can perform a rhetorical function, I spotlight who seek to move the readers of their texts to social action. Finally, I explore how the study of place can contribute to the pedagogy of composition.

ii

© Copyright 2017

iii Acknowledgements

During the first year of my graduate study I invited Jason Palmeri, who was a stranger to me except through his writing, to dinner. During that meal he said the words “rhetorical gardening” and my dissertation was born. Before that pivotal event, Laura Micciche’s course, Theories of Composing, had wooed me to the study of rhetoric and composition at the University of Cincinnati, where she, Russel Durst,

Jim Ridolfo, and Chris Carter have unfailingly supported me in the years since.

Others in the English Department, particularly my friend Michelle Holley, have inspired my teaching and kindly admired my .

I credit the warmth of the rhet/comp faculty at U.C. for the tight-knit group of graduate students who contributed enormously to my successful completion of the

PhD. I particularly want to thank Janine Morris, who has been an official and unofficial mentor from my first day to my last. Others, including Hannah Rule, Kelly

Blewett, Christina LaVecchia, Rich Schivener and Ian Golding have been a scholarly inspiration and a solid band of cheerleaders.

I would be remiss to omit the trusting and generous role the undergraduates in my 1001, 2089 and 1012 courses have played in my graduate study. Their participation in my evolving efforts to teach composition, their writings, their conversation, and their course evaluations have helped keep me imaginative and grounded.

I am grateful to Cindy Onore, who has been my generous reader on two occasions, twenty years apart.

iv Gardening was the inspiration for this project, and the garden has remained a constant companion to my scholarly tasks.

Without Andrea Wulf, Robert Pogue Harrison, Thomas Rickert, Margaret

Morton and Diana Balmori, and, last but not least, Lorraine Johnson, I could not have completed this project. Many other scholars and writers contributed their wonderful ideas, and I am grateful to all of them.

Thanks to my parents, Elaine Sullivan and Bob Sarr, who taught me that if you really want to do something, it’s not impractical, and my sister, Debra Sarr, who always, always, responds to my text messages. Particular, loving thanks to Holbrook

Sample, who literally supported me through graduate school, and took me to eat at

Salazar as often as I wanted to go.

v Rhetorical Gardening: Greening Composition

Table of Contents

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iv

Preface 1

Introduction 7 Composition, Rhetoric, and Gardening

Chapter One 27 Literal

Chapter Two 64 Rhetorical Gardens: , Power, and Politics

Chapter Three 102 Activist Gardens: Resistance by Pansies and Kale

Chapter Four 136 Greening Composition: Rhetoric and the Study of Place

Conclusion 167 From Gardens to Cities: Teaching Students to Compose the Future

Bibliography 184

vi Preface

Narrating a dissertation process should offer a writer structure. Start at the beginning. Instead, this narrative became an exploration of how my struggle with structure interacts with my methods of teaching and my relationship to gardening.

My first hurdle was choosing when and where a dissertation begins. It could be in the woods behind my childhood home where one of my favorite companions was a tree. On the front step of my grandparents’ fishing cabin, where I realized the neighbors did not see my grandmother’s landscape as I did. In the mid-nineties, perhaps, when I wrote a thesis about the need for public schools to adopt systems theory. Or in Montessori training, ten years later, when my final paper compared the classroom to a garden. On the other hand I remember a moment of clarity after my comprehensive exams when my dissertation project solidified abruptly.

During the last three years, as I explored the parallels between forms of composing, I have analyzed myself as a type of for the first time. Before this period, I was merely an organic gardener, or a novice gardener: a hobbyist.

Now I see how the way my brain takes in and uses information is particularly suited to gardening, and not especially suited to writing. A fact that has value to me as a teacher of writing.

I’m sure, in retrospect, that I have been teaching from my disadvantages as a writer, but I’ve done so unconsciously. What the dissertation has permitted me to do is see the origin of the tensions that exist between how I want to teach composition and how it is often taught. These tensions moved me to form influential alliances – with Jane Tompkins; Donald Murray and Thomas Newkirk; Mina Shaughnessy. These figures are the ancestors to my text. My manner of writing it, however, is best described by the garden.

Gardeners, in general, are passionate about revision, and at ease with the indefinite postponement of large-scale gratification. Gardeners are excited by moments, and by small pieces: the brief bloom of a flower; the peak day of ripe raspberries; a praying mantis. The whole is expected to be an imperfect, evolving, lifelong project. In the garden, I spend a lot of time looking: at views, at combinations of color and foliage, at the pairing of plants with one another in terms of access to space, light, and water. When it’s too hot to be outside, or too cold, I look from the windows to study and rearrange. Patterns reveal themselves to me slowly, in increments; I respond to information better than I plan.

I write that way. For the dissertation, I spent a year typing notes into documents labeled by chapter. The ideas converged into groups; I saw the arc, from kairos to ethos. And then I puttered, looking at how vocabulary from different fields overlapped, moving things around, and looking for the patterns that pleased me.

The last stage is the one when I know where to impose myself, when it’s time to add the layer of my ideas and connections.

Considering gardens rhetorically has given me, among other insights, a way to think about the role time plays in composition courses and how the role of time shapes our other decisions and understandings, such as the importance of structure and the preference for completed texts.

I am bothered, every semester, by the certainty that my courses privilege those students who arrived as the strongest writers, who came to me with the most

2 standardized strengths. Those students, however, do not necessarily have the most to offer rhetorically. No matter how I adjust my assignments, grading, and framing of courses, the pattern recurs.

This may be why both the dissertation and this narrative have insisted, through many revisions, on being about the relationship between gardens and teaching, when they could have been more strictly about the rhetorical quality of places. It is more clear to me that gardens are rhetorical than it is clear how to make composition an environment in which students create pieces and moments that feel relevant to their whole lives.

In trying to make my rhetorical gardens not only persuasive as rhetorical players but also as a new frame for the teaching of composition, I found my 4th chapter an unexpectedly far-reaching and unwieldy task. I was both working out for myself how the rhetorical activity in gardens might be applied to the work of the classroom, and, in theory, trying to do so in a way that was accessible and appealing to the great variety of individuals who teach composition. And yet I have only gone so far as to teach one course with a research emphasis on place. I cut almost everything I wrote about that course because it was simply too sparse for evidence.

It’s possible that teaching hijacked that chapter, to the detriment of what I might have said, in an alternate version, about women’s gardens, or rooftop gardens, or how painters and other artists contribute to the conversation about rhetorical landscape.

Yet, I had to wrestle with teaching, because over the course of almost 20 years, nothing I’ve done or seen or read has been able to convince me that we

3 actually teach writing. I agree with David Smit in his view that we learn ways of writing in their distinct contexts. Unlike Smit, I don’t think this means the end of

Composition. I think students need a site for – if nothing else – unlearning what high school taught them about rhetoric and writing. I’m interested in how to build courses that make explicit how differently each person brings rhetorical contributions. I’m confident that we become better writers and readers through a shared and thoughtful study of composition and communication. This distinction is delicate, and controversial, and could have been an entire chapter or a giant piece of my literature review all by itself.

The way patterns emerge for me can be described by a relationship between the second, third, and fourth chapter. I drafted the chapters out of order, following, in gardener fashion, the task that felt most compelling. When I revised the chapters, though, to the version you have seen, I did so chronologically. At the time I was working on chapter 3, I struggled with the feeling that it was missing some essential part of its skeleton. Only when I reread the whole dissertation last week did I realize that chapter 2 is organized mostly by gardens I got to know through multiple texts. Well- theorized, famous gardens. And though I begin chapter 3 with such a garden, for the most part the sites in that chapter are sketches, offered from one point of view. It came to me last week that the scarcity of information about these gardens is consistent with many other forms of activism, that the gardens I chose were exactly the ghosts, fragments, and traces that Riedner writes about. There was a way to write about activism in the sites I chose for the chapter, in the contrast between those gardens and Versailles. And just as the scale and impermanence of

4 those activist gardens could have explicitly driven chapter 3, I think this idea of fragments of rhetoric could have carried me into chapter 4. The excavation, analysis, and preservation of these marginalized texts offers opportunity for unique professional and undergraduate research. That current of thought, that through line, didn’t develop in time, but revealed itself to me after months of writing and re- reading.

A loose end that I was aware of throughout, on the other hand, has to do with identity. I didn’t want the dissertation to be about contact zones and difference, what Rickert is referring to when he uses the term worldviews. I couldn’t bring myself to cut every reference and yet I did delete various sections that strayed dangerously toward a mare’s nest of claims and equivocation. But here, I can say enough already about our individual selves, an emphasis that has become, like so much we do, a form of consumption, and a player in our difficulty thinking collectively. I could have written a whole dissertation about that, but it would have been too aggravating.

If there are three forms of incompleteness in the dissertation, the first being connections I didn’t see in time, and the second, themes I avoided developing, the third is new ideas. In chapter 4, for example, I write that I would like to offer students “a space of productive rest”(149). This sentence simply volunteered itself one day, and I thought: Yes, that’s true! What am I saying? I don’t know that it is satisfactorily explained, but I look forward to thinking about it more.

5 My dissertation had an imaginary alter-ego for the last year. This colloquial twin was a blog, which carelessly combined photographs of artifacts, plants, bugs, other gardens, and images I found online with theory I was reading, garden history, quotes from novels, documentaries, and pop culture. It was a narrative of gardening, a rain gauge, a photojournal.

Though it is almost July, I think of my dissertation as a . For me it is densely, colorfully inhabited by memory and imagination. To a passerby, it is forms under snow.

6 Introduction

Composition, Rhetoric, and Gardening

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. - Marcus Tullius Cicero So little in our culture asks us to remember our dependence on . - Patricia Klindienst, The Earth Knows My Name

This work is the result of my attempt to combine three of my primary passions: teaching, writing, and gardening. Each has been part of my life from my earliest memories: play, in my childhood, included a chalkboard on the front porch which I credit for my fine chalk handwriting; in addition, there was the creation of stories plotted and illustrated by me and stapled into tiny books by my mother. I also had a small piece of ground beside the backyard fence for unrewarding experiments with carrots and marigolds. Most of my play, however, took place in the woods behind our house, where there were paths, climbing trees, bugs, and, after a good rain, a lively stream. I didn’t realize at the time that in the countless hours I spent there I was creating a foundation of knowledge about soil, drought, the movement of water, shade, sun, and habitat, all of which would later contribute to my environmentalism and deep commitment to organic gardening.

In childhood, the three forms of play were intertwined, but growing up parted them. I studied writing and visual art as an undergraduate, teaching as a graduate student. New York City was a place in which I rarely even thought of gardens. As soon as work took me out of the city, the lawn in front of my apartment building exerted a forgotten pull, and in my late twenties, I became a gardener again.

7 For years, gardening was a relief from teaching, a place for an introvert in an extroverted job to find balance at the end of the day. I mostly took for granted that environmentalism was a private interest, separate from teaching. During the day, I taught students how to read, write, and take tests. On weekends I read about what we then called global warming, I studied composting techniques in Organic

Gardening magazine, and I grieved over scientific articles about the decline of frog populations around the world.

Then, for five marvelous years, I was one of four teachers at a public school program sited on the grounds of the Cincinnati Zoo and . Suddenly

I worked with a math teacher and two science teachers who were all committed to educating young people about , zoology, biology, climate, and how environmental issues interact with politics and human society. Our shared mission was to invest young people in the work of repairing human relations with nature, and to provide them the tools for doing so. Looking back, I realize that I accepted us as an anomaly, and at my next school, I slid unhappily back into my status as an environmentalist oddball, the only teacher the staff and students had ever known who didn’t drive.

Parallel to my own journey, of course, was that of the warming world. In the first long-term relationship I’d had with a garden, I observed the effects of extreme drought that the 100 year projections for Ohio forecast would increase in intensity and length. The plans for planting, ambitious in wet spring, contracted over the years to an area easier and more responsible to water in summer drought. I added rain barrels, drip irrigation. My first tomatoes failed because the nights that year

8 were almost as hot as the days. The stresses on the planet acted themselves out in quieter, more manageable forms on my as I anxiously celebrated every bee and bird and snake. I started to keep a garden journal, tracking the day the chiggers started biting, the first raspberry, the circumference of leeks. I wrote a short story about a garden. The pieces of my life were agitating to be together again.

I entered graduate study in rhetoric and composition with the intention of creating a dissertation about gardens. How this relationship would take shape was unclear then, but it wasn’t long before I realized how much I could learn about myself as a writer by paying attention to how I garden. From there, I saw, I could invigorate and reframe my teaching of writing. It took years for me to see the freedom offered by the word composition, with its embrace of visual texts, but when

I did, I realized it wasn’t only a matter of personal transfer from one form of composing to another.

Studying the parallels between composing a garden – which is a visual text,

(usually) a public text, and – importantly – a living and thus collaborative text – and composing an essay allowed me to discern that gardens are performing persuasive work in the world, offering gardeners an activist voice in addition to those with which we are more familiar. And though composition is a field with a respectable commitment to environmental concerns, we have not taken on landscapes as texts worthy of inclusion in our syllabi. We neither compose nor read the living world in our field.

It is time to come to terms with how the practices and traditions of writing instruction have participated in broad cultural patterns that now situate us in such a

9 way that we are ill-equipped to react to an increasingly fractious and demanding climate. Though rhetoric has long been understood as a traditional practice exclusive to language, we have the encouragement of an environmental imperative to shed that assumption and explore the full range of our options. Moving into the space that environmentally conscious compositionists have made we can expand into the full capacity of the definition of composing and allow our pedagogy to reflect the degree to which the digital-visual and living modes of composing are as vital to future persuasions as alphabetic writing.

In 2002 Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser published Natural Discourse:

Toward Ecocomposition. Since then the science related to climate change and its multiplying effects has become still more dramatic, more accelerated, altogether more concrete. It isn’t possible to thoughtfully consider the effects of climate change as relevant to only glaciers and polar bears far away. It isn’t possible to ignore any longer that the effects of climate change are the penultimate social justice issue of our time, as well as being of inconceivable – I mean that, I don’t believe any of us can imagine what is ahead – environmental importance. Dobrin and Weisser’s heartfelt argument for attention to the link between environment and discourse now sounds excessively deferential, its suggestions provincially constrained to our academic field. By contrast, Derek Owens writes in Composition and Sustainability, published the previous year: “my overriding concern is how English studies, and particularly composition, might respond to a complex web of environmental crises and catastrophes threatening not just students in English courses, but all of society”(5).

This work is written from the belief that we must find a way to apply the

10 work of the humanities to environmental sustainability, whatever our academic area, whatever our inclinations. We must all bend our talents toward this complex task of preventing ecological and human calamity on a scale unknown in recorded history. We are outside of one of the most, if not the most, critical conversations of our age.

We have slept too long. The water is rising.

This work seeks to contribute to a long tradition in the field of composition – a tradition that demands we do more than teach students how to write. Though I have drawn specifically upon scholars whose participation in this tradition contains explicit reference to material place, there are many whose teaching and writing clearly recognizes the physical, geographical context of their work, their world, and student lives. The diversity of our perspectives and approaches improves the likelihood we will achieve our aim of making the world better through the study of language and communicative arts. In addition, I have found boundless inspiration from the writing of gardeners, ecologists, botanists, and sustainability activists during the course of my research. I would love to see more of their texts in our curricula.

I also wish to articulate the need for a more institutionalized, durable link between the university and secondary education. I have described my feeling of isolation as an environmentalist in public schools. What I have not described is the painful astonishment with which I, a long-time high school English teacher, learned the expectations of the first-year writing course students enter in college. There

11 was a weak connection - even, it’s safe to say, a contradiction - between the expectations at the university and what I taught students to do at the high school level. What I emphasized in high school writing, based on the school district guidelines and the professional development teachers were regularly required to attend, was primarily response to literary texts, personal narrative, and short answer responses designed to help students pass standardized tests. I know I wasn’t the only one, and that these habits aren’t exclusive to my school district, because each term teaching undergraduates I spend some energy parting them from the methods they learned in high school English.

While it may seem excessively daunting to add another responsibility to those we already face in higher education, I can’t help imagining the time and frustration we might be spared if we and high school teachers could consistently find our way onto the same page. When I think about specific pedagogical applications in chapter 4, and when I dream of how these practices might have real effects in the lives of our students and the health of our world in the conclusion, I’ll have the teachers who chronologically precede us in mind. I hope you will too.

I will argue here that our discipline is poised to play a leadership role in sustainability education at the university. This is our ecological turn. The term ecological turn of course references other “turns” identified in the history of composition, and that use, as I understand it, is meant to suggest the winding way of a growing and changing discipline. The word “turn” has another meaning that is powerful in this context. Our ecological turn can also refer to the members of our field stepping up to take a turn working against the effects of climate change, joining

12 scientists, environmental activists, select politicians, and writers who have struggled to bring the matter into public view. Rhetorical landscapes challenge us to notice which literacies we promote in composition. Rose and Weiser advocate

“developing literacies that are most critically needed in communities”(4). Gardens expand the skill set we associate with literacy and broaden our range of activism and service by adding landscape to the available rhetorics of protest and community engagement. As Owens writes, “learning how to live sustainably ought to be our primary cultural concern and, as such, must play a central role within our curricula”(8).

I will argue that our contemporary moment provides an opportunity for growing composition and positioning its role more centrally in the work of the university. In the process, I think practitioners in the field may find insights about writing and teaching, as I have done. I suggest there are important gaps in the skills to which we have paid the most attention, for example, as I will explore further in chapter 4, we have asked students to describe but we have not talked much with them about how to see. We have largely omitted three-dimensional texts from study and production in our courses, though, as I will argue in chapters 2 and 3, they play a prominent persuasive role in our everyday lives and have quietly participated in the history of our nation. With the omission of three dimensions we have sacrificed texture, the data available from touch, and with it, the information available from the other senses. For example we have encouraged an understanding that limits listening to meaning, and not to the qualities of the noise.

Thinking of my own garden and the gardens created by writers, political

13 figures and activists has helped me to notice these gaps. In an era when GPS systems are eroding the ability of the brain to find its way, when people ‘farm’ on

Facebook, and when human beings injure themselves by texting and by sitting too much, movement, nature, geography, and embodiment are not interesting solely for what they can contribute to theory, or even to the products of the writing course.

These are potentially life-saving attention practices.

Specifically, this project seeks to articulate and develop an explanation of the rhetorical performance of gardens. I wish to establish the contention that gardens are rhetorical, and by demonstrating that rhetorical gardens have an underscrutinized role in human history, an evolving role in popular culture, and an underutilized function in the pursuit of social justice, show that the communicative and persuasive modality of gardens offers a fresh perspective for the study and teaching of composition and rhetoric.

To this end, I have divided the text into the following sections, described in more detail below: chapter 1 explores theories, texts, and practices existing in composition, rhetoric, feminist, and new materialist scholarship from which I draw my contention that composition is ready for an ecological turn; chapter 2 describes specific gardens to establish the rhetorical potential of landscape; chapter 3 mines garden writing for activist rhetoric and provides examples of activist garden sites; chapter 4 returns to a selection of the sources addressed in the first chapter in order to extend and build upon the teaching and learning practices offered there. The conclusion imagines the effects we might aspire to have through an increased attention to place in our pedagogy - not only on the health of our world, but on the

14 emotional health of the young people we instruct. As we have always understood in our field, we are not only teaching students to write with increased complexity and depth, we are doing so in order that they might have more awareness as they compose themselves, and as they compose their lives.

Chapter 1 explores the connections among key ideas and texts in the field of rhetoric and composition that, together, create a foundation for the inclusion of landscape texts in our teaching and critical study. It draws upon the work of Dobrin and Weisser’s collection Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, and Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition. These texts articulate “an interest in places and the relationship of discourse in and upon those places”(Dobrin and

Weisser, Natural Discourse 88) and demonstrate the extent to which varied points of view in the field are engaged with both the metaphor of and the pursuit of environmental literacy in the writing course. Also Owens’ Composition and

Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation, a book that explicitly links our work in the writing class with efforts toward global sustainability. In his text,

Owens asks, “If the writing teacher has the power to make students write and read about practically anything, what then are the most important things for them to write and read? Of all the information available… what is absolutely crucial to their intellectual, spiritual, economic, and physical survival?”(7). Of the many possible approaches to this question, I have chosen the study of place. Not primarily the metaphor of place or theories of place but the investigation of real places, places with an intimate, visceral and rhetorical role in student lives.

In 2005, Dobrin produced Saving Place: A Ecocomposition Reader, further

15 building an infrastructure for teaching environmentally-themed composition. In

2009, Dobrin and Morey edited Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, a collection intended to “take into consideration the visual facet of environmental rhetoric”(2).

Reynolds in 2004 and Crawford in 2010 explored the opportunities material places provide for teaching and research. In 2007, Donehower, Hogg, and Schell wrote

Rural Literacies, an argument for examination of the material, social, agricultural, historical, and cultural specifics of rural lives and literacies, followed by Reclaiming the Rural, an edited collection.

All of these texts focus our attention on place and the rhetorics of place. All of them share the concern that meaning-making has too often left out the location and spaces of its of subject matter. All of them make connections to lives and circumstances that are or will be affected by the environmental challenges ahead.

Though Dobrin argues in 2010’s Postcomposition that ecocomposition has been a failure because it produced no new theories of writing, and was interpreted primarily as an invitation to emphasize place, nature, and environmental issues among composition’s subject matter (125), I suggest that ecocomposition was interpreted in the way the field was inclined to use it, and thus served a useful and not yet fully decided purpose.

Reading landscapes rhetorically can also be oriented in relation to developments in rhetorical theory. In “Agential Matters,” Gries notes the growing awareness in contemporary theory that rhetorical “agency is both multidimensional and dispersed among author, audience, technologies, and environment”(67). In the preface of Ambient Rhetoric, Rickert writes: “I argue for a richer, more dynamic, and

16 materialist understanding of rhetoric that declines to zone rhetoric within symbolicity”(xv). As I will describe more fully below, gardens provide countless source texts for the examination and development of these ideas.

Chapter 1 will reach beyond scholarship concerned primarily with rhetoric and composition to illustrate how writers and scholars working in areas that are rarely seen to intersect in fact wrestle with the same concerns and in many of the same terms. Conversations occurring in the fields of urban planning, and sociology align with efforts in composition and rhetoric to address sustainability and related social justice issues. Valerie Kuletz, geographer and environmental sociologist, “suggests that, too often, researchers and scholars have been content to simply present a ‘postmortem of an already disastrous situation.’

She argues, instead, for a ‘proactive scholarship’ that points out patterns of environmentally destructive and socially unjust activity and that also identifies resistance movements working for community and environmental survival”(Adamson et al. 2002: 7). This work is an effort to respond to Kuletz’s call.

Theoretical trends in composition advocate a view of writing as an ecological practice, and seek to draw insights about writing from the study of the natural world. Theoretical trends in rhetoric seek to understand the elements of rhetorical experience in more complex and participatory terms. This work attempts to form an extension of and further connection between these movements. Reading gardens rhetorically has potential value for the study of rhetoric, by broadening the available archive and field of texts, for composition, by suggesting an additional mode of composing, and for pedagogy, by offering a new framework for teaching, and new

17 materials for critical study and discussion. Gardens offer expanded literacy opportunities for students in terms of research subject matter and textual analysis, and add scholarship opportunities for professionals in our field. Chapter 1 seeks to extend the list of modes available in the curriculum to explicitly include composing work done with the natural world, thereby enabling increased horticultural literacy and critical attention to the rhetorics available in landscape.

Gardens, both literally and metaphorically, offer a means to explore the relationship between the material world and human composing, provide examples of participation among human beings and the elements with which they compose, and express the contextual fluidity and impermanence of rhetorical efforts. Thus

Bennett’s concern with “lively things” (viii) and Turkle’s “evocative objects”(5) work in concert with ecocompositionists’ study of writing as an ecological endeavor.

Furthermore, I believe this scholarship is proactive in its potential to develop students’ ecological ethics, and thereby enable them to consider and address environmental issues more confidently.

Reading gardens rhetorically draws heavily upon the insights available through the study of visual rhetoric. Dobrin and Morey, Hesford, and Alexander and

Rhodes, among others, discuss the importance of addressing visual rhetorics in our scholarship and pedagogy. For example, Hesford writes that an understanding of human rights politics “requires a methodology that emphasizes the materiality of rhetoric and the distribution of visual capital, as well as recognizing representations that … may suspend or refocus our perception”(16). The observations Hesford applies to human rights parallel the image rhetorics Dobrin and Morey explore in

18 environmental debate. The inclusion of three-dimensional, living compositions extends the field of study for visual rhetoric.

Landscapes can also be read to expand the way we perceive the contribution of women and others whose voices have been less likely to receive mention in rhetorical history. Writer-gardeners including Jamaica Kincaid draw attention to the alternate route of creative expression and self-discovery available through gardening. Recent books such as the study of Vita Sackville-West’s garden at

Sissinghurst offer rich insights about a writer’s life and work through investigation of their gardening (Sackville-West and Raven) and Boyd demonstrates how the histories of literary women may be read differently through analysis of their garden writings. Recent archeological excavation of Emily Dickinson’s garden has yielded insight into the meaning of her poems (Jabr).

Understanding gardens rhetorically can provide a means to describe persuasion as it is traditionally understood: a performance authored by an individual in a specific time and place with a particular audience in mind and a focused purpose. It is equally true, however, that the rhetoric available in landscapes can also give us a location for exploring more challenging and complex understandings of rhetoric. Landscapes are composed of living elements, influenced by weather, by turns collaborative or uncooperative, and often beheld by a more interactive and unpredictable audience. In these ways, landscapes may mimic the rhetorical environment of modern life more accurately than the argument essay that has been so exhaustively taught in composition.

Chapter 2 offers a detailed demonstration of the rhetoric present in gardens.

19 Drawing upon the expression of royal power in the garden at Versailles and the patriotic intention of George Washington’s landscaping at Mt. Vernon to establish gardens as rhetorical actors in history, the chapter will also discuss public landscapes including Central Park, the outdoor creations of homeless people in New

York City, and the Ridge memorial, to illustrate how space and are employed as persuasive texts.

Building from the argument that gardens can perform a rhetorical function, chapter 3 develops the idea that gardens are an activist player in environmental and urban politics. Many gardeners and garden designers intend more than a rhetorical gesture with their landscapes, instead seeking to move the readers of their texts to action. The chapter will explore the work of individuals, groups, organizations, and governments using landscape, particularly in the form of gardens, to involve people in community projects for progressive social action. Texts ranging from a guerrilla gardening manual to the mission statement of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden exemplify the persuasive purpose of these horticultural projects.

Chapter 4 develops connections between the rhetorical and activist potential of gardens and themes in composition theory and pedagogy, arguing that including landscapes among our texts, modes of composing, and subjects for critical study is the next direction of our field. While I do not advocate that gardens become the center of every composition course and the guide for every rhetorical study, I do propose that we explicitly increase our attention to landscapes and other places in our pedagogy and scholarship.

An ecological turn indicates an increased emphasis on place, an inclusion of

20 landscapes among our source texts and products, and the addition of sustainability to our pedagogical aims. I argue that composition’s readiness for an ecological turn means changes not only in the methodology of our analysis of writing, or in the subject matter of our texts, but in our political focus and opportunities for service. I argue that composition must explicitly include horticultural texts in its critical frame, and teach students to read and interpret landscapes as cultural work with important effects. Gardens offer a material site and a metaphor by which to broaden our understanding of rhetoric and composition, as well as increasing the rhetorical archive and opportunities for scholarship. An emphasis on material place in composition is more necessary than ever as sustainability issues are among the toughest challenges college students will face in the years to come.

Landscapes have more to offer composition and rhetoric than a role in the critical action for sustainability. Rhetorical landscapes build on the work of scholars whose pedagogy explores the relationship between body, mind, and world. Kroll,

Shipka, and Reynolds explore pedagogies of multimodality and materiality in an effort to further refresh our definitions of composition and rhetoric. Kroll creates a pedagogical framework of “kinesthetic modality”(11) in order to explore argument as contact and connection (2), and Shipka seeks to extend the “range of materials students might take up and alter”(84) in order to gain “a more nuanced awareness” of the choices and effects involved in producing a text (85). Reynolds writes:

“Geography gives us the metaphorical and methodological tools to change our ways of imagining writing through both movement and dwelling – to see writing as a set of spatial practices informed by everyday negotiations of space” (6). All of these

21 pedagogical understandings can be enriched by the rhetorical study of gardens and the exploration of gardening as composition.

Building on the connection between theories of rhetorical dwelling and the work food gardening performs in urban spaces, the conclusion imagines composing and reading urban landscapes with aims more subtle than academic development.

Amy Stewart, in a memoir of her first garden, observes, “When you set to work on a garden, something surprising happens. The garden goes to work on you, too. In the process of bringing a patch of earth to life, your life is transformed”(12). The conclusion explores the opportunities in urban landscapes to develop and explore natural resources, primarily through gardens of all sizes and descriptions in an effort to enrich the dwelling practices for student writers. As cities become increasingly dense sites of human habitation, sustainability is a matter very much entwined with the practices of urban life. The way students understand, respond to, and imagine their interaction with their surrounding landscape will determine - or at least influence - not only the future, but their immediate health and happiness. In the conclusion I suggest that we include dreams, defined as the ideas of hopeful, proactive people, in our composing pedagogy, and I provide examples of how those dreams have manifested themselves in the form of contemporary, visionary gardens.

I trusted, in the pursuit of this project, that the purpose I find so easy to access in the garden could be unpacked and applied to address what Durst bluntly identifies as the “quite pervasive phenomenon” of “students’ resistance to writing instruction”(27). While, in my experience, the question of “why?” is unspoken in the

22 college classroom, high school and middle school students were entirely willing to voice it, and they did me a service by training me to always ask that question of myself when planning instruction. It is possible that college students don’t ask because I offer reasoning with each assignment. However, there is no guarantee that they buy it.

What am I doing in the garden that is different but also related to what is valuable and compelling in the work of learning and teaching composition? What explains the fact that composing the garden never feels stale to me in the way that writing an alphabetic task or a talk periodically does? Is there a transferable insight to be gained from how I interpret my work in the garden? In what ways is a garden a composition like the compositions we design and assign in college courses? In what ways is a garden a work of rhetorical value with rhetorical content? And, to what degree can the study of these parallels help us broaden the modes available to us in both the practical study and the philosophical aims of rhetoric and composition?

As I will reiterate periodically through the pages to follow, I do not set out to convert my readers to gardening, nor do I suggest that all composition teachers adopt a curricula of gardens and landscapes. Rather, I seek to share the insights I gained, and how I think they can, and even should, be transferred to our work in the field of rhetoric and composition. I seek to build on the leanings of environmentalist compositionists as well as scholars, teachers, writers, activists, and gardeners who share a passion for the living world and seek to make human participation in it more sustainable.

The environment is not a theme. It is the element of our existence that

23 permits and sustains life. It is air, and water, and nourishment, without which there is nothing else. Increasingly, it is a matter of public health, with the attendant implications for learning, working, shelter, nourishment, justice, and economic security. Ultimately, the changing climate is related to everything, and it will touch even the most privileged of human beings, while offering devastation and death to millions of the most vulnerable. Owens writes, “So far in English studies, ‘the environment’ has taken a back seat to race, gender, and class, and this disparity illustrates a lack of awareness that must be addressed, for matters of social justice are largely matters of sustainability as well”(xiii).

Kif Scheuer, Climate Change Director at the Local Government Commission in

Sacramento, puts it this way: “generally speaking, low income communities and communities of color particularly who are socially and economically marginalized also are physically at greater risk from climate change… Foremost they may lack the individual and community capacity to respond to extreme events.” He continues,

“beyond the immediate vulnerabilities to events, there are longer-term vulnerabilities … While much of this does focus on income and minority status I do believe there may be some elements that can be extended to other marginalized populations (e.g. elderly, disabled, LGBTQ) who may have less social connectivity in their community, or be less supported by services and so may be more at risk from events and changes.” The concerns of critical literacy, so long defined in the humanities primarily by identity, must extend to sustainability.

Coral Davenport and Campbell Robertson in The New York Times recently profiled the community of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, whose inhabitants are

24 poised to be the first climate refugees in the United States. The Department of

Housing and Urban Development has allocated a grant of $48 million dollars for the resettlement of the 60 residents of Isle de Jean Charles. Estimates by the United

Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security and the

International Organization for Migration predict that “between 50 million and 200 million people - mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen – could be displaced by

2050 because of climate change”. Davenport and Robertson spoke with Mark Davis, the director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, who points out that “if you look at the forecast for South Florida, maybe even millions” of

Americans may need resettlement in the foreseeable future. While it is possible for humanities professors in American universities to continue teaching without reference to the changing climate, I think it is increasingly irresponsible to do so.

Links exist between our projects and the threat that approaches us all. It is only a matter of seeking them out, and finding the ways that our work connects to and addresses the greatest challenge human civilization has ever faced. Until we do this, we are complicit in the slow and dangerously apathetic response of Americans, in particular, to what is upon us. “[E]mphasis on sustainability,” Owens argues,

“responds to a need to recognize fundamental interconnections between culture, survival, body, and place”. In the chapters to follow, I will outline how these interconnections can enrich the study, instruction, and practice of rhetoric, composition, and gardening.

I live on a narrow urban lot densely planted with flowers, herbs, vegetables, bulbs, bushes, fruit trees, raspberry canes, ferns, and more. One of my happiest

25 moments as a teacher and a gardener came when a high school senior visited me and observed, “Wow, planting all this must have taken a lot of time.” He recognized the botanical variety, and from that, the necessary labor. Many people look at the living world and see a blur of brown and green: undifferentiated, unreadable. A couple of years later, a Montessori teacher dropped me off at my house, eager to see the yard she’d heard so much about. As she parked in front, she said cheerfully, “If you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known this was a garden!” I was too astonished to ask her to explain. In my interpretation, however, she is an example of the absence of landscape literacy common in modern life, even among educators from a tradition that includes teaching children out of doors.

In the pages that follow, I hope to demonstrate that gardens and other landscapes perform a rhetorical function that can be read alongside the other texts we study and create in composition. There are many terms to describe this pedagogy, many angles of approach to place as a primary text. Owens describes teaching students to consider places as “extensions of themselves”(75). There is limitless possibility for further interpretation and development, all of which has the potential to contribute to the vitality and relevance of our field.

26 Chapter One

Literal Ecologies

[A]ttending to writing as, indeed, a crucial part of – but not the whole of – what it means to compose is a necessary first step in working toward the realization of a composition made whole… - Jody Shipka Toward A Composition Made Whole

Some years ago, approaching the study of rhetoric and composition after teaching English in a science-centered high school, I briefly understood compositionists’ use of the word ecology to mean, literally, systems in the living world. This momentary misreading allowed me to imagine something that, once imagined, could not be forgotten. As I discuss throughout this work, the results have included not only this text, but changes in my teaching, my gardening, my activism, and my reading of rhetorical and pedagogical theory. In order to gather support for the picture that began to form five years ago, at the start of my doctoral work, I have gathered inspiration from works far afield of rhetoric and composition scholarship.

Literary theorists, art historians, garden writers and architects, as I will show, have long perceived the rhetorical qualities in landscape. Within my own branch of the humanities, I have elected to see encouragement of these ideas where perhaps none was intended.

In this chapter I will endeavor to demonstrate that there is broad precedence in rhetorical scholarship and composition pedagogy for my claim that our exploration of texts in the field of rhetoric and composition should extend to include compositions made with the material landscape. I will, at times, take liberties with other people’s ideas. None of the scholars cited in these pages has, to my

27 knowledge, written that we should turn to landscapes as the persuasive compositions of the future, nor have they suggested we include landscapes among the texts we subject to critical study. I embark here on a project of identifying paths not taken, enticing gaps, incomplete lists of possibilities, hints, implied permissions.

In this work at large I make use primarily of gardens to supply my examples of the rhetorical use of landscape but the concept of rhetorical landscape contains much flexibility and encompasses many opportunities in scholarship and practice.

Gardens are clearly and explicitly composed by human beings, for the use and/or enjoyment of other human beings and thus, like other visual texts, they lend themselves to interpretation as an element of discourse. Once we begin to read landscapes as texts, they place demands on the stable understanding many of us have long held of what rhetoric is, how it is made, and what it does in the world.

Through these considerations of landscape as a form of discourse in both the public and the private sphere, I have been able to deepen and complicate my understanding of rhetoric as a collaborative, evolving persuasion, less reasoned than experienced.

As I will explore in this chapter, scholars in our field have ranged broadly with these ideas but have not yet applied them to composing with landscape. I argue here that the next turn in composition is toward a sustainability-based pedagogy and theory informed by the recognition of the rhetorical capacity of landscapes. I hardly know whether I build on the unfinished preoccupations of others in the field or whether I perceive a space in their ideas where mine might fit. I leave this to my reader’s discernment.

28 When Marilyn M. Cooper wrote in 1986 of resisting “the solitary author”(365) she was identifying the increasingly lively recognition in the field that writing is a social behavior, practiced within a social context. Her essay proposes to organize this developing understanding by way of “an ecological model of writing”(367). “Ideas,” Cooper writes provocatively, “are out there in the world, a landscape that is always being modified by ongoing human discourse”(372).

Cooper’s use of “landscape” and “world” provide an early suggestion of the importance of materiality and embodiment to this social understanding of discourse. Her claims challenge an enduring perception of writing, still very much alive in classrooms at every level of education: that the writer alone comes up with ideas as opposed to discovering them in cooperation with the surrounding world.

It would not be truthful of me to claim that Cooper’s essay was the cause of an electrifying insight, delivered whole to my imagination. Instead, it started a train of thought in the mind of a writing gardener. Cooper’s vocabulary permitted me to grant additional dimensionality to acts of composing, encouraged me to see my eager returns to the same small plot of land as revisions, and my talkative neighbors as audience. In time I came to see my vegetable and as a purposeful work of persuasive text. There are many overlaps between composing a garden and composing an essay.

At the same time, thinking of gardening as a rhetorical performance challenges the traditional methods by which rhetoric is taught and practiced. In a garden, it is impossible to sustain the fiction of authorial agency, for it is so clear that the living world participates in ways beyond the gardener’s control. Much of

29 gardening is a mystery, or a matter of good or ill fortune. The joy of gardening comes as much from surprises as from intentions successfully realized. It is these experiences I brought to other scholarly work explored below.

Gardening ties together my conscious rhetorical being in the world with my belief that we must all find ways to promote sustainability awareness in our students and in each other. I imagine Cooper had a very different landscape in mind when she chose the word to develop her metaphor. She cannot be blamed for the way a gardener interprets her ecological explanation of rhetorical practice – as an invitation to understand discourse in terms of sun, shade, poisons, neighbors and botany, but still, I thank her.

A gardener has no pretensions to solitary creation. Giving up the idea of control might be the first rite of passage, in fact, for serious gardening. As this gardener knows from experience, and as any reader of garden writing might quickly find, gardeners must consult the landscape, and must bow to the vagaries of the world – be they weather or inconvenient bugs or lack of the right bugs at the right time. A gardener, even though she wields the shovel and the shears, the seed catalog and the , is a rather lowly member of a complex team. She must be observant, and she must be informed. Her ideas are a suggestion, an offering to the garden.

Collaboratively, a composition is made, made again. Gardening brings humility to the act of creation, and at the same time distributes responsibility. A gardener, then, approaches the ecology of composing literally. She can’t help it.

One of the opportunities present in a pedagogy that incorporates ecological sensibility is that an ecological perspective reframes or challenges stubborn binary thinking. In Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, Ted Steinberg writes that

30 Rachel Carson “helped to transform ecology into the rallying cry of the environmental movement. Unlike wilderness, conceived as a world apart, the word ecology suggested, in a sense, the reverse – that all life was bound up in an intricate, interconnected web”(247). Steinberg contrasts Carson’s belief that “human beings … were part of the balance of nature, not divorced from it”(247) with his claim that “[H]uman relations with nature – the logging of forests, damming of rivers, plowing of grasslands, and other attempts to significantly transform ecosystems,” in other words the “benefits of modern living, from fast food to flush toilets … have come at the price of ecological amnesia”(xii). Steinberg’s point raises the question of how this amnesia might be applicable to the understanding of the processes and practices of discourse. Is the inattention to our role within interactive systems a general state that affects how we approach writing, composing, and reading? Is there benefit to be had from creating a literal bridge between rhetoric and nature?

Introducing the collection, Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical

Approaches, in 2001, Cooper writes of her “ambivalence about the notion of ecocomposition”(Weisser and Dobrin xi). Her concern, that ecocomposition will be reduced “to a matter of teaching ”(xi), is in contest with her belief in the value of “the centrality of systems thinking in ecocomposition”(xi), or, in other words, the effort “to articulate a systems approach to teaching writing”(xi). She further explains: “it is the understanding of relationships, rather than the analysis of of entities” to which the study of writing should attend”(xi). I like to think that what I suggest in this work is a possible solution to the problem of teaching the ecology of writing without falling into the limited study of nature writing.

I think we should continue to value a close study of alphabetic texts, but I also

31 think the time has come for us to find texts in the world, (too), where they root and grow, collect fingerprints, insert themselves upon the notice of unpredictable audiences.

There, we may both learn to observe how a text is made, and try to determine how very far its interdependencies and relationships extend. In this way, I suggest we teach relationships in composition. On the other hand, I am a writing teacher who is uncertain that writing need occupy us so fully as it has done for generations. Many years ago I was very struck by reading of an international project that attempted to anticipate what symbol could be interpreted thousands of years in the future by people who might come upon nuclear waste disposal sights. What universal symbol could be expected to span unimaginable years, and unimagined cultures? We like to think that language endures, but there are methods of communication older than our alphabets, and they will continue after us. Among these communications is the one we have long managed with the living world.

A true experiment in composing ecologically, then, cannot content itself with only writing. In Natural Discourse, Dobrin and Weisser engage with Cooper’s concerns.

They write: “composition studies in its post-cognitive, post-process, post- expressivist incarnation is also a study of relationships: relationships between individual writers and their surrounding environments, relationships between writers and texts, relationships between texts and culture, between ideology and discourse, between language and the world”(9). Though this relational definition seems very tied up with products of human culture, an extension of the definition contains the following language: “In order for ecocomposition to become a truly ecological endeavor … it must recognize that knowledge, truth, reality, even identity, emerge as a result of a complex array of influences, both human and non-

32 human”(Dobrin and Weisser 127). The explicit reference to the non-human influences present in composing experiences offers, at the very least, scaffolding for the rhetorical possibilities of landscape and the insights available when we study composition through the complex, interdependent, inherently ecological work of gardening.

Dobrin and Weisser further explain: “ecocomposition examines all sorts of spaces, including natural, urban, constructed, political, personal, virtual, and even imagined spaces”(8). They stop short of recognizing the rhetoric of the spaces themselves. “Ecocomposition highlights the impact of the spaces in which discourse occurs,” they write, “suggesting that most inquiries into these relationships do not fully account for the degree to which discourse is affected by the locations in which it originates and terminates”(Dobrin and Weisser 9). These observations do not fully provide for the direct participation of place in the performance of rhetoric. Yet the “impact” to which they refer is often deliberately constructed – as, for example, when a writing instructor arranges chairs in a circle. This arrangement is a persuasive gesture, with a purpose, and the intention to create effects in those who experience it. From such humble examples of imposing our rhetorical stamp on the anonymous spaces of writing instruction, I will develop in chapter 2 the potential available in gardens, lawns, and other natural (and unnatural) shared or public spaces. In later chapters I will explore how the rhetorical role of place becomes unpredictable and unruly when enacted out of doors.

I linger with Sidney Dobrin because he is among a number of composition scholars whose work arrives at the boundary of my proposition and then turns

33 away. Dobrin continues to explore the importance of place in his work, while remaining, in my estimation, confined by his focus on alphabetic writing. In the introduction to his textbook, Saving Place, Dobrin writes that his book “is about the ways in which the activity of producing writing both interacts with environments, nature, and places and is itself ecological”(xi; my emphasis). He continues: “this book borrows methodologies from the ecological sciences for better understanding how we produce writing and how that writing, in turn, affects and is affected by environments”(xi; emphasis added).

There is an inert quality to this exclusive concern with the production of writing that is brought into sharp relief by the work of scholars including Thomas

Rickert, whose definition of rhetorical activity I will explore later. In the picture of composition Dobrin draws here, writing looms out of proportion to the context he mentions, the very opposite of a working ecology. Writing “is affected by environments,” retaining a central, dominant, and immobile position. In his description of the pedagogical task of the book, Dobrin writes, “Saving Place will ask you to participate in two intellectual inquiries. First, we will think and write about the environments and places we live in and engage with. Second, we will look closely at the role writing plays in how we perceive places, at how places affect our writing, and at how our writing affects those places”(xi). To borrow some terms from fiction, place in Dobrin’s pedagogy is a static character, mentioned, recurring, but undeveloped. Even the organization of the work into linear, numbered parts creates artificial separation between interrelated elements. At times he comes excruciatingly close to allotting place its appropriate measure, as when, referring to

34 writers included in the collection: “Many writers, like Lame Deer… William Cronon,

Ted Kerasote, and Louis Owens … have asserted that before white settlers came to the new world, native populations did not make distinctions between what was nature and what was civilization. That is, many cultures identified themselves as part of their environments, not as residents within places and environment, separated from those places”(Dobrin 1). While the pedagogy seeks to ally itself with the former model, his insistence upon prioritizing the centrality of symbol systems reduces place to a container for or atmosphere of writing, as opposed to a participant or surface for composing in its own right.

Dobrin and Morey offer an additional tease in the collection, Ecosee: Image,

Rhetoric, Nature. “Ecosee,” they write, “is the study and the production of the visual

(re)presentation of space, environment, ecology, and nature in photographs, paintings, television, film, video games, computer media, and other forms of image- based media”(Dobrin and Morey 2). Dobrin and Morey elect to describe and analyze

“the role of visual rhetoric, picture theory, semiotics, and other image-based studies in understanding the construction and contestation of space, place, nature, environment, and ecology”(2). As I will demonstrate in the chapters to follow, the omission of visual rhetorics in landscape is a double loss. Not only are three dimensional works created out of doors a frequent contribution to rhetorics in the public sphere, study of them, as I will argue in this work, builds the capacity of students to recognize and read such rhetorics, providing them with an important literacy.

It is possible to value Dobrin and Morey’s effort here, while at the same time

35 experiencing disappointment that they stop short of gardens and other rhetorical expressions in landscape. “Ecosee,” they write, “is not (only) an analysis of existing images, it is a work toward making theories that put forward ways of thinking about the relationship between image and environment, nature, and ecology, as well as a theory … of visual design for those who make images”(Dobrin and Morey 2). As with Dobrin’s ecocomposition work, this theoretical exploration feels bound to the world of books, magazines, and screens. The grammar of the sentence prioritizes the clarification that it is the image the theory values, before relationships among environment, nature, and ecology that might be explored by other modes of visual expression. “Ecosee,” they contend, “is bound to writing, as the production and interpretation of image walk hand in hand with the production and interpretation of written discourse”(Dobrin and Morey 2).

They do not acknowledge here that images are only a single possibility among visual rhetorical options. “For ecosee,” Dobrin and Morey write, “the environmental dilemma is not just a political/ecological crisis about the protection of the environment but a dilemma of representation, a dilemma of rhetorical and visual-rhetorical choice”(3), and to this I would add that we must seek flexible and expansive options in visual rhetoric to address the protection of the environment in new ways. As Dobrin and Morey acknowledge, “studies traditionally have paid little attention to how images are used to spread eco-political capital and how these ‘eco’ images might interact with texts and other images” (3). While “scholars have successfully focused on the verbal/discursive representations of nature and the environment,” they write, “they have, for the most part, overlooked its visual

36 representation and construction”(Dobrin and Morey 3). What I hope this study contributes to the concerns Dobrin, Morey, and I share, is visual representations and constructions in landscapes composed for persuasive effect.

In Postcomposition, Dobrin breaks completely from any possible alliance with the rhetorical in living form. Here, he suggests: “There is an (ethical) imperative beyond the boundaries of composition studies’ field that demands that work be pursued that theorizes writing beyond the disciplinary limit-situation”(Dobrin 3).

Eager for ways Dobrin will offer to address climate change from within the university, this reader greets his language with a sigh. Dobrin continues: “what I argue for in these pages is that composition studies requires (or perhaps is already witnessing) a shift from the disciplinary focus upon (writing) subjects and pedagogy to a more explicit focus on writing itself”(3). “I contend,” Dobrin writes, “that the field lacks the vocabulary necessary to talk about writing as writing to any useful degree and that finding such a vocabulary would require some hard work”(5 emphasis added).

I contend that we should not be limited to talking about writing as writing.

In the chapter Ecocomposition Postcomposition, Dobrin writes, “I see less need to shift the object of study of ecocomposition and postcomposition to issues of discourse than to develop ecological approaches to writing qua writing, without being hampered by the ambiguities of discourse”(Postcomposition 123). It is not for me to decide what should interest another scholar, but I am disappointed that

Dobrin has leaned away from environmentalism to solve a puzzle upon which there is little pressure for a solution. “[N]o work in ecocomposition of which I am aware

37 (including my own previous work) provides any insight to the functions of writing as an ecological system outside of ways of engaging environmentalist politics in terms of the teaching of writing” he laments (Dobrin, Postcomposition 124). Again, this reader struggles with Dobrin’s insistence on the study of writing as an enclosed system.

Other scholars have approached fresh methods of teaching writing very differently. Reynolds encourages “re-imagining composing as spatial, material, and visual”(3) through a geographic writing pedagogy. “Geography,” she argues, “gives us the metaphorical and methodological tools to change our ways of imagining writing through both movement and dwelling – to see writing as a set of spatial practices informed by everyday negotiations of space”(Reynolds 6).

Reynolds’ emphasis on both the negotiations required in composing practices and the importance of the everyday are an effort to address the elephant so often in the composition classroom. “In composition studies, it’s important to understand the ways in which writers feel alienated from certain discourses or institutional practices, or why new forms of reading and writing are so difficult”(6), Reynolds writes. “[C]omposition studies needs cultural writing theories and material literacy practices that engage with the metaphorical – ways to imagine space – without ignoring places and spaces – the actual locations where writers write, learners learn, and workers work”(Reynolds 3). I would emphatically add that we must not ignore the places and spaces where our food is sourced, our energy is produced, our and our waste disposal is sited. Reynolds’ geographic pedagogy identifies methods of teaching not only alphabetic composition, but also – through material literacy

38 practices and attention to place - critical literacy and social justice (Reynolds 3).

This complex interaction of place, writing, teaching, and effects is an ecology of composition.

Reynolds’ pedagogical project, described in Geographies of Writing, sticks closely with the concrete study of tangible places. Her interest lies more with the cultural gains available through exploring place than with investigation of rhetorical creation. Reynolds’ frame is one within which students take observation of stable places. Activity and change occur in students, through the processing of those observations and experiences in the writing class. The primary actor of importance in such an arrangement remains the instructor, whose assignments make transformation available.

There is a messier way to understand, and encourage students to understand, the acquisition and processing of ideas into communication. Gries contrasts traditional beliefs about rhetoric with “an ecological sensibility”(67) in rhetorical scholarship. She writes of a “growing awareness that agency is both multidimensional and dispersed among author, audience, technologies, and environment” (Gries 67). Gries’ use of the idea of dispersal signifies an impulse to shift attention among various factors involved in writing. “[W]ouldn’t it be productive,” she writes, “if people began to think more ecologically and realize that this entire web of life is actually a dynamic dance in which people, discourse, technologies, other entities and our environments intra-act to co-construct our daily materialities?”(Gries 88). As Dobrin seeks to untangle the matter of writing from

39 even its intimate relations with discourse, Gries proposes that understanding comes through embracing the tangle.

I wonder how Reynolds results might have varied if she had presented place as a rhetorical collaborator rather than an object of study? Gries observes: “too often, I think our imperative to generate theories and methods to improve the teaching of rhetoric precludes us from generating theories and methods that improve our understanding of how rhetoric actually materializes in the world”(75).

She recommends “[R]ethinking agency with an ecological sensibility and from a new materialist perspective … especially if we develop research methods that make visible how people and rhetoric itself become agential”(Gries 70). Reynolds’ work is terrifically important for sending students into the materiality of the world, and asking them to observe three-dimensionally. Later in this chapter I include more scholars who have done just that, taking the study of rhetoric out of the classroom, out of books and speeches and digital texts and into the public sphere of movement, architecture, and community in an effort to expand our understanding of rhetorical agency, purpose, and effects.

In the introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Coole and Frost argue that “foregrounding material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its conditions in the twenty-first century”(2). One of the most interesting tensions between the way I understand composing a garden and the way I have most often presented the construction of alphabetic texts in my teaching is the obvious participation of the garden in my (our) text. The primary value, for me, of

40 considering composition in terms of ecology is the potential for equalizing the partners in rhetorical creation. In a true ecology, the importance is the relation of things, without a static hierarchy such as we see in the concept of a writer producing a text. Coole and Frost suggest that it is time “to reopen the issue of matter and once again to give material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects”(3). It is worthwhile to consider how new challenges our conception of writing, but, as Coole and Frost point out, developments in physics

“do become disseminated among educated publics… and they gradually transform the popular imaginary about our material world and its possibilities”(5). Complex understandings of rhetoric, especially those that explore new materialism through rhetoric in the living world, can potentially facilitate student awareness and understanding of the modern sciences.

The implications of a new-materialist approach to rhetorical study and instruction are many, including attention to the co-creation of texts possible in horticultural sites. But how do landscapes deliver a rhetorical message? Creation is one part of rhetorical practice, and it is important to consider how gardens and other landscapes might perform persuasion. In the 2015 essay, “Rethinking Non-

Human Actors and Agents as a Strategy of Rhetorical Delivery,” Jim Ridolfo argues that “the next turn in delivery will need to address the complexity of strategizing delivery beyond the localized speech act”(175), specifically, “through the lens of multiple actors”(174-5). Ridolfo suggests that while “recent scholarship on digital delivery is increasingly concerned with the movement of texts from one location to another… there has been little work done to theorize” print and digital technologies

41 “as extensions of the rhetorician”(178). How is this complicated, and explicated, by a text that lives, acts, and continues to evolve the performance of our rhetoric in our absence, as a garden does?

In his example of pigeons used for delivery of contraband in prisons in Brazil,

Ridolfo writes: “Beyond simply incorporating the pigeon as a non-human actor, this example provides a way to consider delivery as a confluence of technologies”(179).

“Confluence,” like Gries “dispersal,” suggests an unpredictability little-emphasized in our study or teaching of rhetorical practice. If both agency and delivery are subject to the complexity inherent in collaborative, interactive performances, new modes are necessary for the demonstration and exploration of rhetoric.

Ridolfo suggests that “[s]uch an expanded perspective on the diversity of delivery may, in turn, benefit rhetoricians by broadening their rhetorical imagination to think beyond linear models of delivery such as the speaker-message- audience triad in classical rhetoric”(180). Drawing from his study of the national student organization United Students Against Sweatshops’ campaign targeting Coca

Cola, Ridolfo observes that “rhetorical delivery is increasingly dependent on the actions of other human actors and the force and potentiality of non-human actors, and this rhetorical situation over time poses an interesting research problem”(186).

Allowing for the number of actors involved, the passage of time, and geography,

Ridolfo writes, “makes it difficult to research the multiple roles of actors and activity in even a single instance of delivery”(186). I would add that it places increased pressure on composition instructors to provide for this complexity in their rhetorical instruction.

42 It might be said that Gries explores the movement essential to agency and

Ridolfo explores the movement central to delivery. Ilene Crawford, in turn, develops the importance of movement to a thorough understanding of rhetoric in a way that echoes and extends Reynolds. In “Growing Routes: Rhetoric as the Study and Practice of Movement,” Crawford describes her experience conducting feminist literacy research in Vietnam in 2002:

I had a rhetorical problem: the tendency … to freeze Vietnam in time, circa

1975, impaired my ability (and that of my readership) to see the future

Vietnam my subjects were imagining, a modern nation respected for its

intellectual and technological contributions to the world. To learn the lesson

of Vietnam – a lesson about the twenty-first century, not the twentieth – I

needed to be moved rather than persuaded. I needed to develop a different

methodology. (71)

Crawford writes of this methodology, “I first had to reconstruct Vietnam as topos… I had to learn to see… a dynamic place” (71). Crawford’s detailed articulation of this insight leaves no question that understanding, analysis, and communication in her project required what she calls “body-conscious writing”

(78). She could neither read nor think her way out of the strong pull of cultural associations that obscured modern Vietnam from view. Walking, traveling, observing, touching, and participating in the everyday life of the country was a non- negotiable prerequisite to her collection of literacy narratives from Vietnamese women. Her description is an example of a collaboration between non-human and

43 human actors – a necessary rhetorical interaction among places, objects, sensory inputs, and people.

Crawford’s explanation of movement through Vietnam as a precondition of her intended research fruitfully blurs the line between context and text. As Thomas

Rickert writes, the dominant rhetorical paradigm “acknowledges context primarily as a discursive, social, and cultural formation within which a rhetorical agent works to achieve the effects she or he intends” and in this paradigm “the context is simply the situation … and not a robust participant” (xvi-xvii). Rickert’s argument for an understanding of rhetoric as ambient helps to explain the effects explored by

Dobrin, Reynolds, Gries, Crawford, Ridolfo and others. Ambient rhetoric also provides a rich theoretical ground for developing the idea of rhetorical landscapes.

“If we retain rhetoric’s traditional notion of context,” he explains, “it is stretched far beyond its delimitation as a social-discursive situation to include a vibrant materiality, such that rhetoric is not just played out in an environment but embedded complexly in and through it”(Rickert 254). Rickert’s description of rhetoric contains, in its expansive vocabulary, ample allowance for the composition and interpretation of rhetorical texts in botanical and other landscapes.

Furthermore, Rickert describes rhetoric “as a living practice” and notes that it “has always been … called upon for understanding, creating, and interceding in community, sensibility, and action”(xvii). The development of a critical sensibility that in turn motivates students to social activism has long been a central thread within composition’s purpose. As I will show in the examples explored in chapters 2 and 3, gardens around the world have come into being in response to community

44 needs, and have, in turn, persuasively expressed themselves on behalf of those stakeholders. These visual rhetorics are rooted in and communicate a living intercession for public good. Indeed Rickert suggests that “rhetoric is one of the modalities for attunement to the world”(xviii). Through the observant and interactive effort of rhetorical production, one can become more aware of where and for what purposes persuasion is needed.

This sensitivity is what Crawford terms “growing routes.” Without attunement we are less able to observe or create rhetorical effects. And through its collaborative, responsive creation, we become more deeply attuned. “The claim that rhetoric is ambient fits rhetorical studies moving forward inclusive of its past by making the world essential to rhetoricity, and perhaps coming to a renewed sensibility of what the ancient Greeks called periechon, seeing that which surrounds and encompasses as also gifting and guiding us”(Rickert 285). This text is an effort to demonstrate how we might return to the world in our rhetorics.

It is perhaps unnecessary to mention how reluctantly the commonsense understanding of “rhetoric” will be parted from alphabetic language and the spoken word. I do not propose that we do away with our traditional forms, only that we allow our definition to evoke more possibilities. Rickert recommends “as provisional starting points the dissolution of the subject-object relation, the abandonment of representationalist theories of language, and appreciation of non- linear dynamics and the process of emergence, and the incorporation of the material world as integral to human action and interaction, including the rhetorical arts”(xii).

45 As Reynolds demonstrates, composition pedagogy is moving, literally, to develop a more interactive, material experience of rhetorical instruction.

In “Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy,” Nathaniel

Rivers demonstrates a pedagogy “designed to explore how writing and rhetoric move and how this movement shapes both rhetorical activity and the locations it inhabits”(576). Rivers argues that writing “composes connections” and thus

“produces publics”(576). In his essay, Rivers describes students working together on a “project exploring public rhetoric”(577). Rivers’ pedagogy immerses students in a preexisting community of people who recreationally participate in geocaching;

Rivers terms this geocomposition (577). He describes writing as a “locative medium”(577), as in: “A primary goal of geocomposition (or geocomp) is to have students write on the move in order to compose the multiple layers of a public place”(Rivers 579; emphasis added).

Rivers writes that he saw “students developing an embodied situational awareness of public space while cultivating the rhetorical skills to navigate and negotiate that space with others”(579). The complexity of the rhetorical experience

Rivers describes is one way of seeking the action-through-understanding that

Rickert explains above. “[G]eocaching reorients participants to their environment, which the course treats as an inherently rhetorical activity,” Rivers writes (580).

Rivers’ pedagogical model provides multiple avenues for the development of rhetorical landscape activities in the university composition course. His design shifts students away from the classroom as the primary locus of rhetorical instruction; indeed, instruction appears deemphasized in favor of the collection and

46 analysis of rhetorical experience. The course expects students to circulate in the world, making connections with a community outside of the university as well as places and individuals who will randomly pass through the experience. Rivers withdraws the artificiality of the classroom’s rhetorical circumstances, returning student rhetorical experience to the public sphere, where students both collect and contribute to the swirl of communicative activity without defined expectation of their effects or the effects such activity will have upon them.

Rai conducts a related experiment in what Rivers describes as the

“imbrication of the discursive and the material”(580) through “rhetorical ethnographies and field methods”(Rai 19). Rai’s examination of public and political rhetorics in Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention, uses a community struggle over the redevelopment of a vacant lot called Wilson Yard in

Chicago to demonstrate the complexity and messiness of lived rhetoric. In her introduction, Rai explains: “If rhetoric both emanates from and shapes everyday life, and if rhetoric always exists in relationship to power, ideology, and materiality, and thus, if rhetoric and rhetorical situations are profoundly tethered, then it makes sense that studying rhetorical invention requires deep and sustained inhabitation of social spaces afforded by field researchers”(18).

Rai uses rhetorics in action as her primary source material, seeing and hearing for herself the interplay of rhetorical behaviors with competing needs and interpretations in a diverse community. Her project is one of immersion within the material, circulating rhetoric described by the scholars whose work I have studied above. Like Rivers’ geocomp pedagogy, this is a form of rhetorical study that

47 embraces the unpredictable in communication, persuasion, and democracy. These scholarly and teaching practices offer fresh ways to explore the discoveries inherent in collaborative invention.

I recognize early moves toward work like that of Rivers and Rai in the efforts scholars and teachers have long made to articulate and practice values of embodied rhetorical performance in the classroom., writing in 1999, argues for the recognition of “bodies as sites of and participants in meaning-making”( Fleckenstein 281).

“Reducing materiality to signifiers,” she warns, “limits our ability to formulate, recognize, and challenge cultural truths and material conditions”( Fleckenstein

284). To address the need for “an embodied discourse”(281), Fleckenstein proposes “[t]he concept of somatic mind – mind and body as a permeable, intertextual territory”(281). Fleckenstein’s description of the benefits of somatic mind are reminiscent of the pedagogy and scholarship discussed above, with their emphases on the movement of the body, the recognition of places in real time, and the multipart nature of invention and delivery. A pedagogy of somatic mind,

Fleckenstein writes, both “locates an individual within concrete spatio-temporal contexts” and “recognizes the cultural, historical, and ecological systems that penetrate and reconstitute these material places”(281).

Fleckenstein emphasizes her intention that student writers do more than become consciously embodied writers for their own benefit. “[W]riting somatically

… requires ... the contextualizing of personal body within public body”(Fleckenstein

297). As we expand our recognition that the whole embodied person is implicated in rhetorical action, we must also recognize the multiple components of “public

48 body.” Fleckenstein names time, space, history, and place among the factors present and participating in the practices of writing.

Another approach to the use of embodiment in rhetorical instruction seeks to extend how we interpret argument. Kroll explores an embodied pedagogy of rhetoric with “kinesthetic and contemplative learning”(21). He contends that the study of kinesthetic composing practices and attention to these in our teaching can provide new methods for responding to rhetorical situations. He describes this as

“the rhetoric of inquiry as well as the rhetoric of cooperation”(Kroll 5). Students in his course, Arguing as an Art of Peace, “learn how to reframe disputes so that the focus was on problems or questions that drew writers and readers away from contentious argumentation and into mutual inquiry”(Kroll 6). “One of my aims in

Arguing as an Art of Peace,” Kroll writes, “was to offer opportunities for inquiry and learning that extended beyond the conceptual-procedural modality that prevails in college teaching”(11).

Kroll observes that students often enter writing classes with an understanding of rhetoric based on right/wrong true/false win/lose dichotomies that narrow their options for research and potentially impede their ability to learn from and about writing. His emphasis on “mutual inquiry” disrupts the expectations so regularly attached to rhetorical work. A collaborative and curious definition of persuasion readily lends itself to rhetorical projects such as those I explore in these pages. Kroll’s practices include “clapping in” to begin class each day in an effort “to defamiliarize our work on arguing and provide fresh perspectives from a non-

Western tradition”(1). His deliberate structure acknowledges the strength of the

49 attachment students (and writing teachers) have to familiar traditions and customs.

In this way he is both teaching students to approach argument with an “open hand” and he is immersing them in an experience of the technique. Kroll explains that he seeks to offer rhetoric and composition instructors “alternatives to the familiar thesis-support patterns of arguing that many college students know from prior experience”(3). Kroll defines the rhetoric of the open hand in terms of aikido -as the creation of “a dynamic response to an unfolding encounter”(2-3). His language emphasizes the physical, temporal, and interdependent nature of rhetorical activity.

Kroll notes Deborah Tannen’s 1998 assertion that our culture “assumes that

‘opposition is the best way to get anything done’”(Kroll 4). It is interesting to speculate how students familiarized to Kroll’s inquisitive, connected definition of argument might respond to the idea of gardens as a mode of non-verbal public discourse, indeed one in which it is especially challenging to interpret an oppositional frame. Kroll offers an alternative understanding of argument to provide students increased flexibility in both the creation of rhetorical material and the processing of rhetorical situations they encounter in their lives. Though his methods are strikingly original, his aims will be relatively familiar to composition instructors.

Other scholars seek pedagogical change in our modes of persuasive expression. Palmeri argues in Remixing Composition: “Rather than positioning our field as one narrowly dedicated to teaching students to compose alphabetic texts, we might instead reclaim our heritage as a field dedicated to helping students develop a robust understanding of rhetoric and creative process that they can apply

50 and adapt to all the diverse forms of alphabetic, auditory, and visual composing they are likely to encounter in their lives”(152).

Palmeri balances an emphasis on rhetorical understanding with the development of an understanding of “creative process”(emphasis added) and offers a generous list of modes in which students may expect to compose during their lives. Though Palmeri does not allude to landscapes, or composing in living materials, there is room in his reading of our field’s history and his vision of its future for rhetorical landscape composition and critical analysis. “[S]cholars of graphic design, visual culture, and architecture have much to teach us about ways that images and built environments can be employed to persuade audiences,”

Palmeri writes, continuing: “musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, performance poets, dancers, animators, filmmakers, and other artists have much to teach us about understanding and practicing composing as a complex, recursive process of making meaning” (155).

Palmeri’s recommendations for innovation reach beyond the classroom and syllabus of single instructors to address institutional development. “[C]urricular change,” he writes, “can best be achieved through an evolutionary, flexible, and collaborative process in which instructors and program administrators work together to reinvent strategies for teaching multimodal composing within their own local contexts”(Palmeri 153). As an innovator, Palmeri clearly knows the importance of independence, and at the same time his recommendations recognize that change benefits more people when it occurs on an institutional scale. His nod to the importance of local context is both inclusive of place-based curricular

51 possibilities, and fuel for my argument that gardens and other landscapes offer a unique mode for the creation and study of locally relevant rhetorical acts.

Furthermore, a multimodal pedagogy that includes landscape texts moves student rhetorical creation into the public sphere. Alternative modalities have not been broadly adopted among composition instructors, but a link between the growing interest in public rhetorics and modes that operate in large format, as gardens and landscapes do, might alter the inclination of both students and instructors to consider work in alternative modes some kind of composition- lite.

Shipka, too, advocates a multimodal pedagogy. It is “crucial” she writes, “that we commit to expanding our disciplinary commitment to theorizing, researching, and improvement of written discourse to include other representational systems and ways of making meaning”(Shipka 131). Shipka argues that through the selection of multimodal means and surfaces, students act as producers of new knowledge as well as consumers (104). Shipka’s text urges the field to make a transition the world of communication is reflecting all around us – from the interactive maps available in digital versions of the newspaper to the use of the body as text in protest marches. The “privileging of a linear, academic essayist prose style contributes to a limited conception of writing,” she argues (Shipka 6).

Building on the work of Reynolds, who concludes Geographies of Writing with the suggestion that we must better map the work of writing, Shipka adds, “I have argued here for the importance of developing still more comprehensive maps of literate activity – maps that represent more than the spaces, tools, and strategies associated with the intellectual work of writing and the production of written texts.

52 … These new maps of composing must work to highlight …. the various ways that semiotic performances are re-presented or re-mediated through the combination and transformation of available resources (human, non-human, natural)”(131; emphasis added). As she demonstrates through her examples of student work,

Shipka approaches the surfaces upon which semiotic performances might occur with an open mind. She is adamant that we not limit ourselves to understandings of technology that include only the modern and the digital. I am particularly drawn to her language of “available resources,” containing, as it does, an inclusive notion of textual surfaces and communicative forms.

Sophisticated rhetorical work in nontraditional modes, including composing and interpreting landscapes, involves careful observation and understanding of objects: their associations, history, potential for meaning, and independent vitality.

If students are to have full access to these communicative options, we must explicitly recognize the importance of objects in our composition teaching. Kate

Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell write in Artifactual Literacies: “Artifacts are particularly useful to educators because they travel across domains and boundaries and therefore offer insights into the home-based, cultural resources of students that often remain hidden; they enable teachers to access communities that may not be visible within schools; and they evoke multilingual, multimodal literacies”(vii).

New materialists argue that objects have the capacity to participate in these literate expressions, as well as evoke them. Jane Bennett, who prefers the term

“vital materialist,” describes realizing that the capacity of a collection of objects included “the ability to make things happen, to produce effects”(5). As we seek to

53 move our curricula to serve a diverse student population in an age of increasingly complex and rapidly evolving compositional demands, artifacts and objects are a means of enriching our materials for composing and our understanding of the breadth of existing texts. They are also a means of deepening our understanding of how rhetoric comes into being.

Pahl and Rowsell note: “material and symbolic artifacts matter to the meaning-drenched process of composition because they create opportunities for interaction and listening, offer insights about everyday life, and provide an understanding of culture, family, and community”(vii). Plants, seeds, and gardening practices are among the valued artifacts that are passed from generation to generation in many families, and these are means by which people carry valued culture from one country to another. Garden communities are places where such artifacts and skill sets help strangers form attachments and enable people to make a new sense of home. We rarely – if ever - call upon such artifacts and skills in our composition classrooms, thus neglecting the recognition and development of important and generative student literacies.

Pedagogy that includes three dimensional landscape study can complicate student understanding and performance of rhetoric, as well as broaden awareness of their own literacies and the literacies available for negotiation in the world.

These are lessons in engagement with enduring effects. In Rural Literacies,

Donehower et al. draw attention to the privileging of urban literacies and points of view in most college curricula. This is not simply an academic matter. Cori

Brewster notes: “For more than a century, ‘agricultural literacy’ campaigns have

54 exerted a profound if often unnoticed influence over Americans’ understanding of political, social, and economic concerns, particularly in rural communities” (34).

Brewster points out the need for critical agricultural literacy in times of

“increasingly sophisticated and well-calculated ideological battles between competing agricultural interests”(35).

The absence of academic expectation that students learn to read public space, interpret land use, and critically analyze municipal planning and transportation systems, except through the medium of alphabetic text or by some other expert means, denies students a vital capacity to see their environment for themselves. Brewster ties agricultural literacy to identity politics, noting, “How

Americans should understand matters of race, nation, gender, family, and religion have necessarily been central if not always explicit elements of these campaigns as well”(35). Comparing two contemporary curricula, one available free online and designed for middle and high school students, the other a half-hour public television program, Brewster observes that the curricula “illustrate two different but equally concerning rhetorical trends: attempts to dehumanize and ostensibly depoliticize agriculture, on the one hand, and on the other, attempts to appropriate and redeploy long-standing agrarian tropes” (Brewster 35). As I will continue to discuss throughout this work, there are important gaps in curricula that focus on urban and academic points of view through a primarily alphabetic lens.

Urban people have no less need than rural people for clean water, sustainable living spaces, and healthy food. Literacies that include the complexity of rural points of view, such as Brewster advocates, can be incalculably increased by a visual literacy

55 that can read farmland, water management systems, signage, urban green spaces, and more.

In the essay, “Ecology, Alienation, and Literacy,” Killingsworth and Krajicek argue that the environmentalism of Western culture has a central political ethos composed of three intellectual conditions. The first two, they maintain, are

“frequently recognized – ecological awareness and alienated consciousness – but the third … an intellectual commitment to literacy and dependency upon the written word, has been largely overlooked”(Killingsworth and Krajicek 41). “Literacy,” they argue, “tends to decontextualize, to such an extent that the isolated reader alone with a book or the writer confronting a blank page rather than a present audience becomes the very figure of the alienated individual”(Killingsworth and Krajicek 41).

Killingsworth and Krajicek suggest, instead: “we should recognize the opportunity of participating in the development of a more socially conscious environmental rhetoric, which advances both environmental protection and social justice”(53). The authors term this sociable literacy (Killingsworth and Krajicek 53).

“Sociable literacy is an idea that comes directly from our encounters with our students. It fits with the ‘process approach’ that has dominated college composition classrooms since the 1980’s. In the arena of ecocomposition, sociable literacy provides a companion concept for social ecology”(53).

The overlap between Brewster’s attention to agricultural literacy and Wendy

Hesford’s analysis of visual rhetoric in a human rights context comes from how

“discourses, structured by visual constructs of recognition, become entangled with systems of identification”(Hesford 12). Just as identity stereotypes can dovetail

56 with misinformation about agricultural issues, “normative identity registers join visual technologies to produce the world citizen of human rights internationalism”

(Hesford 12). Critical visual literacies are more essential than ever to navigating information streams, and these literacies must parse both the use of human and non-human imagery.

Spectacular Rhetorics, explains Hesford, “approaches the political effectiveness of rhetoric in terms of how, when, and why certain tropes, arguments, and narratives gain momentum among rhetorical publics”(9-10). As I will explore further in chapter 4, a vital aspect of what we must offer in higher education is the ability – not only to read – but to critically observe. Three-dimensional texts, including the sites of food production I deal with extensively in this work, challenge the easy recognitions and familiar tropes that permit some narratives to collect rhetorical momentum while others languish. The systems of identification that concern Hesford – what she calls “normative identity registers”: gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, ability, and sexuality (12) perform similar functions to the urban vs. rural identifications explored by Brewster and others.

Pedagogies that emphasize first-hand observation, the collective nature and complexity of rhetorical activity, and the participation of place, offer strategies of resistance to forms of persuasion reliant on context that “defines the parameters of the public’s engagement”(Hesford 9-10). Hesford argues that the “study of human rights has not grasped the rhetorical intercontextuality of the spectacle of suffering”(11). Hesford, Brewster, and Donehower et al. challenge us in the field of composition to apply a multimodal pedagogy to the furtherance of critical literacy.

57 It is not only on the composing side that including high-stakes visual text production is important but on the analysis side as well. “Studying the cultural translation of human rights principles into a visual vernacular for Western consumption will help us understand the public’s readiness (or lack thereof) for deliberations and policies predicated on human rights principles, she writes”(Hesford 21).

I have paired Hesford’s argument with Brewster and Donehower et al. in order to introduce the notion that many apparently disparate aims are highly complimentary. For Owens, “the inherently cross-disciplinary composition course can serve as an introductory arena where students begin to view their personal and academic needs and desires through the lens of sustainability”(6). Owens is mainly concerned with sustainability in terms of avoiding the depletion of natural resources; he recommends that we “envision composition studies as – not as an offshoot of ecology but as the study of one’s immediate and future environs (city blocks, mall parking lots, backyards, office cubicles, apartment buildings, crowded highways) so that students might explore how their identities have been composed by such places and vice versa,”(Owens 6). As Owens points out, though, composition is the ideal circumstance for cross-disciplinary study, which can encompass a definition of sustainability that includes but is not exclusive to an emphasis on natural-resources. Donehower et al. promote a “sustainability metaphor”(155) that allows for “rural literacies as adaptive practices”(155).

Literacy in the visual vernaculars that saturate modern life, in the often unconscious stereotypes of people outside of our immediate communities, and in the environments of our everyday are interconnected elements of our shared future.

58 Sustainability understood in terms of the social, in this way, has the potential to connect communities “to ensure a stable future for all”(Donehower et al. 155).

One of the efforts of this work has been to show that when it comes to landscapes, urban and suburban dwellers lack essential literacies of their own surroundings as well as of rural ones. A comprehensive attention to landscape literacy is equally vital across geographical populations. While we have paid the least attention to landscape literacy in our field, it is not the only part of modern life to which composition courses can lend their rhetorical expertise if we are to hope for a fully realized literacy in our college-educated citizens.

Change in our perception of the goals of composition will not come through the efforts of a few individual scholars and writing instructors, as Palmeri notes above. A broader understanding of our task must exist at the institutional level.

Rose and Weiser frame the WPA as “citizen-educator,” noting recent “calls for colleges and universities to be more accountable to the broader public”(1). This call has been met, they note, by “the service-learning movement in higher education” and they draw particular attention to the contribution of college and university writing programs to this effort (Rose and Weiser 1). The critical pedagogies discussed here and in chapter 4 demonstrate methods of engaging students outside of the classroom, moving research and direct observation into public spaces and ongoing public conversations. “Philosophically,” they explain, “engagement … becomes an underlying principle of higher education, not simply a contribution to student success”(Rose and Weiser 2).

Service learning programs necessarily involve learning in environments

59 beyond the classroom. In most cases, these sites of engagement are fodder for the production of alphabetic texts. Students step into the world and return to write.

Even in the case of service learning that involves the out-of-doors, the desired outcome is text in traditional modes. The alternative I suggest here is a recognition of the experiential service-oriented learning as the text, specifically with regard to the creative, persuasive alteration of landscape.

Rose and Weiser cite the Kellogg Report, 1990, which states that the engaged institution “must enrich students’ experiences by… offering practical opportunities for students to prepare for the world they will enter” and it “must put its critical resources (knowledge and expertise) to work on the problems that the communities it serves face”(qtd. in Rose and Weiser 1-2). While we might take “critical resources” to mean knowledge and expertise in written communication, use of social media, and other platforms, there are additional means by which engaged students and composition instructors might work on the problems facing their surrounding communities. As I suggested early in this chapter, if we consider honestly what we teach and produce in composition classrooms against the needs of the world at large and our immediate communities, we may find that there is too much writing, and a shortage of other texts.

Gardens and landscapes expand our ability to represent and investigate rhetorics and literacies in the public sphere, broadening the accepted modes and contexts for the recognition of such problems, as well as the compositional forms by which we are engaged in efforts to address them. Julier, Livingston and Goldblatt identify the desire of writing instructors “to connect personal commitments to social

60 and political realities, in the hope that writing could address problems the writer recognizes in the world”(56). Julier et al. constitute community-engaged pedagogy as “a kind of experiential learning grounded in the understanding of writing as a situated, social act”(57 emphasis added). The only missing piece is the inclusion of the gardening itself as a situated, social, and rhetorical act.

Norton and Goldblatt observe: “We grow as a field when we address language practices that run counter to the norms and conventions of dominant culture, but locating university- community projects and partnerships within institutional boundaries remains a considerable practical challenge”(30). They go on to offer the potential benefits available in such a challenge. “University- community literacy partnerships may be irritants to any and all involved, but this may be part of their appeal. By challenging business as usual, they bring a new attention to pedagogical practices and the relationship between a given institution – large or small – and its surrounding world”(Norton and Goldblatt 31). Specifically,

Norton and Goldblatt write: “On the college side, normal classroom practice often prizes a brand of school literacy defined by teacher’s assignments and evaluations.

Once the door is open to literacies in different settings, A’s and F’s compete with communicative efficacy and human interaction as the measure of success”(31). In the public sphere, in other words, purpose, audience, and persuasive effectiveness come to life.

I have noticed that the richest connections students make to research in their writing are rooted in places with which they are deeply familiar. Owens argues for the value such personally rooted work offers the university and the community

61 beyond. Owens suggests that composition might become a “different kind of

‘service’ discipline” if it is “reconceptualized as a disciplinary vehicle that, in developing the intellectual and cultural arts of writing, reading, and talking, promotes sustainability-conscious thinking”(7). Owens proposes that composition provide “a writing workspace where [students] could grow as writers and readers,” adding that “it would also serve the larger academic and public realms by making available student testimonies about their environments”(7). While I value these testimonies and I think they are essential to building the critical literacies explored here, they must be accompanied by the understanding and accompanying analysis of lived environments, natural landscapes, and gardens as rhetorical productions in their own right.

This text is an effort to bind my love of working in the dirt to the luscious words and ideas that stream through my head as I do so. How can my desire for movement, for work of the body, for embodied text, as well as embodied writing, be realized in this field? “Fruitful encounters”, writes Donna Haraway, “depend on a particular kind of move – a tropos, or ‘turn.’ Faithful to the Greek, as tropos, nature is about turning. … Topically, we travel toward the earth, a commonplace (159). Is it possible, then, that the study of rhetoric might turn, might turn again, to the earth?

Might find purpose as a discipline in rhetorical projects as public work that will inform all of our future lives? Haraway suggests that “we must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation, and nostalgia”(158). I think it is possible that the collaborative creation of public rhetorics is such a(nother) relationship to nature. In chapter 4, I will address

62 specifically how we might bridge the combined streams of rhetorical theory, landscape rhetorics, composition instruction, and social action through a pedagogy attuned to the rhetorical repair of public place.

63 Chapter Two

Rhetorical Gardens: Plants, Power, and Politics

Rhetorical landscapes are all around us. Some have been authored with conscious persuasive intention; others composed haphazardly, their effects available to be read without having been deliberately written. In both cases, and all the alternatives in between, there is great personal and public benefit to be gained from an awareness of these under-attended texts. In this chapter I will explore a range of rhetorical landscapes in an effort to highlight the richness of intellectual experience they offer a willing reader, as well as the subliminal power they exert over the unattentive audience. It is more than interesting to read landscapes, it is empowering, and, as I will argue with increasing insistence here, it is necessary for the health and well-being of ourselves and future generations.

First, we must adjust our frame of reference for ‘reading.’ Smartphones and other digital devices have significantly altered the sites and circumstances of reading – for instance, one would be unlikely to open a novel or newspaper at the bus stop when there was only time to read a phrase, but to check a text message as the bus pulls up is not at all unreasonable. And while digital texts provide an increasing variety of multimodal forms, including interactive maps, video clips, photographs, and links, smartphones are a portal into a world other than the immediate environment. To look into one’s phone is to look away from one’s surroundings. Reading the visual in digital form is an altogether different activity than reading a landscape. Landscapes intersect with our lives in ways that their

64 authors, if they have authors, often cannot anticipate. The interpretive interaction is not curated, as the material in The New York Times or Talking Points Memo will be.

To some degree, digital texts are fixed, traceable, whereas a landscape is infinitely variable. Thus, to engage with the world of material rhetorics, we must employ our senses to study the here and now.

Urban planner Ryan Gravel writes of an enlightening homework assignment he was given by a professor in Paris to “conduct a derive, or unplanned journey”(1).

“In mid-twentieth century Paris,” he writes, “the situationists deliberately created situations that would build critical awareness of spaces and actions in people’s everyday lives”(Gravel 1). Gravel explains that “conducting a derive requires you to pay attention to the world around you, to allow your feelings, intuition, and experiences to guide you through an exploration of the urban landscape (1-2).

Gravel’s description of the derive is useful for framing a way of being in the world that is necessary for reading landscapes as texts. Indeed Gravel interprets the city as a living text, writing:

In Paris or in any place where people live in relatively close quarters, layers

of shared infrastructure networks, including communication systems, storm-

water drainage, transportation, and power, are developed to support them.

These systems interact with local conditions including history, geography,

topography, and climate. The resulting assembly is occupied and used by

people in both expected and unexpected ways, both successfully and

unsuccessfully over time, and those activities build economies, culture, and

social life. The position of this assemblage, the strength of each part, and the

65 skill with which people utilize the assets made available to them, result in a

unique, complex living organism called a city. (2-3)

Gravel highlights the links between infrastructure, human activity, and culture. Here, and elsewhere in his text, Gravel’s description of the city is one of a discourse between place and inhabitants, systems and human behavior, in which all of the elements are in intricate relationship. This is a landscape of many rhetorics.

Gravel’s subject, the Beltline Project in Atlanta, is an example of a large scale public project that utilizes human and non-human actors to deliver an argument for the use of public space, or, as Gravel puts it in his title, an argument for where we want to live. My purpose, unlike Gravel’s, is the close reading of single landscape texts, as opposed to gathering an understanding of whole cities. Of course, as I will explore in chapter 4, the two are intimately related. Gravel contends that human beings are shaped by the environments around us, and we must understand them in order to transform them for our benefit and the benefit of our communities. Many, many people travel through their everyday material lives with little sense of this interaction, a fact that his work and mine seek to change.

In the 1974 essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker identified her mother’s garden as the site of her “living creativity”(237). With this portrait, Walker was claiming the connection between materiality and mind that science and philosophy had historically attempted to sever. Walker’s insights foresaw the need to investigate the materiality of intellectual, creative activity.

Walker describes gardening as “work her (mother’s) soul must have”(241). This observation, densely interwoven with the images Walker draws of her mother’s

66 labor, her mother’s body, the intense visual presence of her flowers, articulates resistance to the claim that we write, think, pray, understand, or in any way live apart from the rich stew of biological matter all around and within us. Indeed, recent advances in quantum theory suggest that our quaintest myths may have been, instead, insightful guesses explaining the mysteries of experience. In the explosion of possibility surrounding the re-legitimization of the material world as a ground for intellectual work in the humanities, I look again at one specific way human beings have long interacted with the living world. I go in search of gardens.

Alaimo and Hekman introduce Material Feminisms by stating that their purpose is to bring “the materiality of the human body and the natural world into the forefront of feminist theory and practice”(1). Alaimo and Hekman suggest that while postmodern feminists “claim to reject all dichotomies,” they are

“uncomfortable with the concept of the real or the material”(2). My investigation of topographical materiality seeks to make legible how the rhetorical power of gardens is employed for purposes ranging from oppression to resistance.

While Alaimo and Hekman recognize the reasoning that has led feminists to focus “exclusively on representations, ideology, and discourse,” they argue that feminism must cease to exclude “lived experience, corporeal practice, and biological substance from consideration”(4). Specifically, they seek to reorient feminist theory to engage with the living world. “[M]aterial feminism,” they write, “demands profound –even startling - reconceptualizations of nature”(5). Walker’s phrase,

“living creativity,” evokes a dimension of experience that is neither exclusively human nor merely botanical. Her words suggest a state of being in which time,

67 motion, materials, and invention become more difficult to distinguish and define.

Indeed, Walker writes that it is difficult to understand where her mother got the energy to work in her flower garden, after all the other labors of her day.

Material feminists, write Alaimo and Hekman, are “redefining our understanding of the relationships among the natural, the human, and the nonhuman” .… “in which nature is more than a passive social construction but is, rather, an agentic force”(7). If nature contains agency, we may interpret living creativity to be the energy created by interactive, collaborative work between the human gardener and the countless elements that make up the non-human garden.

To conceive of gardening thus, as a partnership, is, I hope, a startling reconceptualization of nature. The theoretical and practical shifts Alaimo and

Hekman identify encourage an expansive investigation of gardens, one which complicates authorship in human-managed landscapes, broadens the definition of rhetorical purpose, and further challenges traditional understandings of agency, audience, and the meaning of a garden.

Robert Pogue Harrison argues that contrary to popular belief, gardens do not have their origin in agriculture. He cites Italian scholar Pietro Laureano, who has noted that the domestication of plants for utilitarian goals takes generations, and would not have produced immediate benefits. Laureano writes that the first gardens were, instead, ‘ritualistic, magical, or simply ludic and aesthetic, but not economic or productive’ (cited in Harrison, Gardens 40). Harrison explains the impulse of early humans to create such gardens as a response to the “craving in human beings to transfigure reality”(Gardens 40). The transfiguration of reality, I

68 offer, is at the root of the impulse to rhetorical involvement, and such a description provides room to move within the term rhetoric, which is so often understood in terms of language.

This chapter will explore the garden as a site for the study of rhetorical production, both in the enactment and the interpretation. Landscape is a rich environment for literal, material, embodied understandings of the collaboration intrinsic to communicative effects. To explore the rhetorical potential of gardens is to – possibly - make them more rhetorical, both through the adoption of gardens as a legitimate rhetorical mode suitable for critical analysis and by more often deliberately designing them for persuasive interaction.

One of the most famous and enduring gardens in the world is the garden at the palace of Versailles, designed by Le Notre for King Louis XIV beginning in 1662.

Alain Baraton, gardener and historian at Versailles since 1982, writes that the garden designed for King Louis XIV was intended to exert control over all who saw it. Baraton explains that Le Notre’s garden sculpted “nature into the dreams of his time and to the glory of his king”(81-82). “The gardens were an excellent means for demonstrating power,” Baraton claims. “Who would dare raise their voice in such a place? Such an abundance of beauty imposes silence and respect”(Baraton 81-82).

The gardens demonstrated control over nature, through what Michael Pollan calls

“Le Notre’s confident geometries”(1991, 61). Furthermore, “The king dominated the world because the world was at Versailles. Rare plants and animals were brought from the four corners of the earth”(Baraton 81). Not only the rarity of the

69 collection but also its beauty served to reinforce the king’s influence. Baraton suggests that the gardens subjugated the court “by serving it the affectation it so desired”(80). Through the garden, Le Notre performed an act of persuasive ventriloquism, articulating the power of the king to impress and control the French aristocracy. Baraton writes, “Domination through aesthetics was perhaps the greatest exploit of the reign of Louis XIV”(80).

Versailles is a particularly fertile example of rhetoric at work in landscape because Louis XIV “spoke little and wrote even less,”(104) but by means of the gardens “he put himself on display”(Baraton 104). Baraton argues: “Louis XIV wanted to leave his mark in the stones of Versailles, not in the pages of a book”(97).

Le Notre designed the garden, but the King was fully aware of its potential effects.

“[O]ne of the rare documents [Louis XIV] wrote himself concerns the gardens … [i]n a clipped and martial style, the king indicates his itinerary point by point, leaving nothing to chance, down to the day and hour of the visit … the moment of the day when shadows begin to lengthen, adding supplementary depth to the garden’s geometry. Even the pauses… are decreed”(Baraton 97).

King Louis XIV understood the rhetorical potential of landscape, and used it to augment his influence and reach. “Louis intended to dominate others through his own image,” Baraton writes. “The gardens were, in this sense, an excellent means of expressing his power”(Baraton 104). The gardens at Versailles are a blatant and conscious use of landscape to serve a persuasive intention. Coauthored, as they were, by Le Notre and his king, the gardens had a specific audience in the French courtiers Louis sought to control, a narrow purpose, and a clearly defined rhetorical

70 situation. It would seem that these factors would be encumbrances too heavy to allow the rhetoric of such a garden any agility, but during the French Revolution the rhetoric of the gardens shifted dramatically. Facing the destruction of the gardens,

“Richard, the gardener at the Trianon, averted disaster by offering to donate the harvest from the potager to the people. The Convention took little time deciding whether to divide up the land or avoid famine, and the gardens were spared. …

Richard’s stroke of genius was to have the grounds become the property of the

Convention, with the king’s gardens becoming the people’s gardens”(Baraton 273).

Jamaica Kincaid suggests another manner by which gardens manifest persuasive power in her memoir, My Garden [Book]. “This ignorance of the botany of the place I am from (and am of),” Kincaid writes, “reflects the fact that when I lived there, I was of the conquered class and living in a conquered place; a principle of this condition is that nothing about you is of any interest unless the conqueror deems it so”(120). She recalls that the botanical garden near her home contained plants from across the British Empire, but no plants native to Antigua were represented. “The botanical garden reinforced for me how powerful were the people who had conquered me; they could bring to me the botany of the world they owned”(Kincaid 120). The botanical garden performed a rhetorical purpose by excluding the native plants and foregrounding (as Louis XIV had done) the reach of the conquering peoples’ access to other parts of the world. Kincaid notes that while native plants may be erased – deemed uninteresting – within the botanical garden, botanical treasures are often removed from a conquered place and renamed, a botany thus doubly lost.

71 A “conquered class,” Kincaid argues, not only suffers an ignorance of their own country’s botany, and the dispossession of species, but a less tangible loss of connection to the landscape. Writing about Hernando Cortez and his army’s invasion of Mexico, Kincaid suggests that “within a generation,” the conquered would likely “have lost touch with that strange idea – things planted for no other reason than the sheer joy of it”(117). Kincaid writes of “sheer joy” for the sake of making an observation about freedom. In her descriptions of her own gardening, she writes, “How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated. How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed”(Kincaid 14). Joy is the word she uses for exercising control among the materials of one’s self-expression; in this case, botanical materials. To be denied the botany of one’s country, to be denied the “joy,” is to be silenced.

Landscape is intricately entwined with both emotion and identity, which is why it can be employed both to suppress personhood and to express the same.

Conquering people may not consciously know the importance of destroying native species and familiar topography, but those actions have recurred too often throughout history to be coincidence. Kincaid notes that she “marveled at the way the garden is for me an exercise in memory, a way of remembering my own immediate past, a way of getting to the past that is my own (the Caribbean Sea) and the past as it is indirectly related to me (the conquest of Mexico and its surroundings)”(8). For Kincaid, the garden provides a stage for various affirmations of self: creativity, memory, knowledge. These are the elements necessary for joy.

72 Kincaid retrieves memory through gardening, but other scholars recognize how memory is reified through interaction with landscape. In Dominion of the Dead,

Harrison demonstrates that human burial rituals have long served to assert and persuade. “In the West the establishment of belonging through burial has origins dating to the very beginning of the Neolithic way of life,” Harrison writes. “In his

New Science … argues that the remote ancestors of what would later become the patrician families of Europe originally laid claim to their lands by pointing to the wooden graveposts of their own forefathers. Through that gesture they would legitimate their ownership of the land”(Harrison, Dominion 25). Harrison further notes that The Aeneid contains the use of burial ground to serve a rhetorical purpose: “To save the House of Troy and preserve its continuity in time, Aeneas must not only relocate the penates to a new land, he must also domesticate the terra nova by interring his people there. The Aeneid is punctuated by such ritual burials”(Harrison, Dominion 26).

The presence of the dead creates an enmeshment of the living with the place of burial. The dead act as irrefutable persuasive material, extending forward in time. “Each one of those sites becomes in its turn a place in Rome’s future history”(Harrison Dominion 26). “In this retrospective epic of Rome’s founding – all the more revealing insofar as its mythic burials are retrospective – Virgil makes of

Aeneas a tamer of the Italian peninsula, a hero who founds places in its wilderness by giving them the names of those whom he buries there”(Harrison Dominion 26-7).

Burial, then, whether literal or mythical, creates relationship with landscape that establishes a claim to that place, a right to name it and own it, a genealogy of place.

73 Harrison’s use of language is worth noting here: he describes Aeneas’ action as one of domestication. In this version, at least, the dead lay a homely, versus an aggressive claim. The material relationship with landscape grants persuasive power to the naming.

In , where many died during World War I, recognition of the dead makes a very different sort of claim. Of his design for the Canadian

National Vimy Memorial in France, completed almost twenty years after the , Canadian sculptor and architect Walter Seymour Allward wrote:

I dreamed I was in a great battlefield. I saw our men being mowed down by

the sickles of death. I saw thousands marching to the aid of our armies. They

were the dead. Without the dead we were helpless. So I have tried to show

this in this monument to Canada’s fallen. (qtd. in Brandon)

The memorial site, located on the highest point of Vimy Ridge, commemorates 11,169 Canadian soldiers killed or presumed dead in France during

WWI, both those Canadian Expeditionary Force members who fought at Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917, and others killed and unaccounted for in France. These individuals have no known grave.

The website of Veteran Affairs Canada encourages tourists to “visit the preserved Grange tunnel and front line trenches” and the “beautifully maintained cemeteries,” drawing attention to the unusual blend of battlefield and resting place.

The website declares: “The Memorial does more than mark the site of the engagement that Canadians were to remember with more pride than any other operation of the First World War. It stands as a tribute to all who served their

74 country in battle… particularly to those who gave their lives.” The 250 acre park contains preserved trenches and tunnels, available for tours, but also preserved battlefield that “encompasses a portion of the ground over which the Canadian

Corps made their assault”(en.wikipedia.org). The landscape includes visible craters and sections of the grounds are closed to public access because they may contain unexploded munitions.

The Vimy Memorial is visually dominated by a giant monument, but the inaccessible and visible grounds, carpeted in tall grass and trees, its surfaces formed by military preparation and battle a century ago, are as eloquent of sacrifice and death as the names inscribed on the monument walls. The unnatural shapes of the earth speak of the dead who lay the wreckage of their bodies there. The green that flows over the unpreserved trenches and tunnels is only a skim coating on the very present past, a past, the “Danger” signs remind visitors, that may be very much alive under its cover of earth. The grounds at the Vimy memorial offer a visible, tangible recognition of the labor, suffering, and destruction of human bodies that is in powerful contrast to the order and symmetry of cemeteries. Here is the mess of war, the bits of men that could never be recovered, the devastation of natural forms.

And here, too, is the passage of time.

Allward saw the dead on the move in his dream, and through this memorial the dead appear to move in the wind stirring the grass and the passage of light across man-made swells in the land. This portion of land on Vimy Ridge blends many rhetorical strands: France ceded to Canada perpetual use of the site for a battlefield park and memorial, blurring the lines of nation usually defined by

75 borders. The place, then, is an ongoing public expression of both battle and alliance, loss and gain, the horror of sacrifice, and the reason sacrifice is made. The experience of the visitor is likely to vary by her preconceptions of war and knowledge of history, as well as whether her eye is attracted more to the land curling over the past or the tall white monument against the sky. The incorporation of the naturalizing landscape of battle lends itself to an interaction with the visitor’s imagination unconstrained by the pat interpretations of text on a historical plaque.

The visitor can, in this manner, have an unmediated address from the dead and from the disordered land.

Beyond the purposes to which human beings have put their dead, use of place for the performance of public rhetoric is a subtext of the earliest American narratives. Historian Andrea Wulf writes that “through records, letters, and diaries,

(she) came to see how vegetable plots, ornamental plants, landscapes and forests

(played) a crucial role in America’s struggle for national identity”(4). It is traditional to view George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other historical figures who had an interest in horticulture as statesmen in public life and gardeners in private. Wulf makes no such division. “The founding fathers’ passion for nature, plants, gardens, and agriculture,” she argues, “is woven deeply into the fabric of America and … it is impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners”(Wulf 4). For Wulf, this is obvious, yet it is worth noting that not all biographers of the founding fathers have chosen to interest themselves in the gardens. In award-winning biographer Ron Chernow’s otherwise

76 comprehensive 817 page 2010 biography, Washington: A Life, he spends little time on analysis of Washington’s landscape. Though Mount Vernon has 114 mentions in the index, fewer than 20 can be even faintly associated with Washington’s interest in the botany and topography of his estate, and none develop his interest in plants.

Though “gambling” appears in the index with six listings, “gardening” is not a category at all. This is no discredit to Chernow, but it does demonstrate that scholarly analysis often skims over land as a sort of wallpaper decorating the rooms in which important matters occur.

In contrast, and historian Wade Graham writes that Thomas

Jefferson’s “layered landscape” at Monticello provides us “a map, not only of his deep engagement with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment, but of his own, often deeply conflicted mind as a statesman, businessman, slave owner, farmer, and lover”(xii). Not only does Graham identify Jefferson’s garden as a text, he explicitly claims it as a text deserving equal critical attention. “His garden, every bit as much as his celebrated writings, is a testament to this seminal work of creating something unprecedented: an American character, and an American landscape to go along with it”(xii emphasis added). For historians, it is possible to read more deeply into

Jefferson’s thinking by making a study of his garden. For rhetoricians, it is important to note also that Jefferson and Washington intended their gardens to act rhetorically.

Wulf argues that “America’s endless horizons, fertile soil and floral abundance became the perfect articulation of a distinct national identity – of a country that was young and strong”(10). She describes how George Washington

77 “saw in the cultivated soil the country’s wealth and independence”(Wulf 17) and transformed his estate, Mount Vernon, into “the landscape garden of a revolutionary”(Wulf 20). His garden was truly American, “a radical departure from the traditional colonial plots, for it was the first ornamental garden to be planted almost exclusively with native species”(Wulf 22). Washington consciously created a garden that made an argument for the viability of the new country.

Peter Hatch, too, uses the language of revolution, describing Thomas

Jefferson’s Monticello vegetable garden as “a revolutionary American garden”(3).

While Washington used his site to declaim the superiority of native plants, however,

Hatch writes of Jefferson’s “obsession with economic plants as a vehicle for social change”(19) and claims that Jefferson “envisioned his garden as a means for transforming society”(4). Jefferson’s garden, distinct from Washington’s in

“showcasing a medley of vegetable species native to hot climates, from South and

Central America to Africa to the Middle East and the Mediterranean”(Hatch 4), continues to influence visitors today.

The very fact that Washington and Jefferson employed their gardens for different purposes supports the case for their rhetorical intent. While Washington showed off the plants of the new country, “Jefferson’s Monticello garden was an Ellis

Island of introduced economic plants”(Hatch 4). In this way, Hatch writes of

Monticello: “The vegetable garden itself is the true American garden: practical, expansive, wrought from a world of edible immigrants”(5). Gardens continue to be sites of revolutionary and democratic expression, as I will explore further in chapter

3.

78 The places where we are most likely to notice the capacity of landscapes to communicate and persuade are, unsurprisingly, the most dramatic. But commonplace landscapes, too, can contain complex rhetorical geology. Perhaps the best example is the lawn. Remarkable for its ubiquity, the lawn is a complex cultural site rarely recognized as a densely layered palimpsest containing traces of our nation’s historical, sociological, and moral development. The lawn is both signifier and agent of identity, community, conservatism, aspiration, and resistance.

Moore, Mitchell, and Turnbull provide the example of The Breakers, a

Vanderbilt mansion in Newport Rhode Island: “On the ocean side are a terrace, a few steps, and then an unbroken lawn to the edge of the cliff, where the ocean starts.

Just a lawn. It is hard to imagine a European house of comparable magnificence that would not have sported a much more elaborate garden. Yet on that site the lawn is a splendor, suggesting in its simple sweep a dominion that extends across the Atlantic to Spain”(215-216). The Breakers’ landscaping employs the lack of gardens to project ownership far beyond the actual boundaries of the property. Like Le Notre and Louis XIV, whose clipped hedges, plays of light, watercourses and dizzying variety of plants magnified the power of the throne, the Breakers’ lawn exaggerates the property - and with it, the suggestion of the family’s wealth – in the visitor’s imagination. Here, as in Kincaid’s botanical garden, absence – of formal gardens - is an eloquent participant in the cumulative effect.

Paradoxically, on smaller properties, the absence of lawn and the presence of garden, particularly if the garden is practical rather than decorative, is countercultural, even offensive. Michael Pollan describes the disapprobation his

79 father drew from the neighborhood when he merely refused to mow their suburban lawn. “[M]embers of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who establishes a relationship with the land that is not mediated by the group’s conventions,” Pollan observes (60). How did the lawn come to be freighted with so much cultural importance? According to Pollan, “[i]f any individual can be said to have invented the American lawn, it is Frederick Law Olmsted”(58). In the design of the suburban community of Riverside, outside of Chicago, Olmsted prohibited walls.

“Each owner would maintain one or two trees and a lawn that would flow seamlessly into his neighbors’, creating the impression that all lived together in a single park”(Pollan 58). English lawns, popular in England since Tudor times, were,

Pollan writes, “usually found only on estates; the Americans democratized them, cutting the vast manorial greenswards into quarter-acre slices everyone could afford”(59).

Olmsted’s landscape rhetoric had a consistent theme, whether he addressed himself to the matter of personal or public property. Olmsted is perhaps best known as the architect of Central Park in New York City, and his opinion of the value of parks is instructive. He wrote, “‘The great advantage which a town finds in a park, lies in the addition to the health, strength and morality which comes from it to its people’”(qtd. in Stevenson 282).

American lawns were aspirational, political, and moral: Pollan suggests there is an “unmistakable odor of virtue that hovers in this country over a scrupulously maintained lawn”(57). Frank J. Scott, whose The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home

Grounds, “probably did more than any other to determine the look of the suburban

80 landscape in America”(Pollan 59), wrote: ‘It is unchristian to hedge from the sight of others the beauties of nature which it has been our good fortune to create or secure’(qtd. in Pollan 59). Pollan argues that Scott’s focus on the responsibility of the individual to his neighbors was a “radical departure from Old World practice”(59). In American Eden, garden historian Wade Graham writes of Scott’s attitude to lawns that: “[I]t was moral, a sign of good citizenship, which must be made visible to the neighbors”(102). “Scott, like Olmsted before him, sought to elevate an unassuming patch of turfgrass into an institution of democracy”(Pollan

59). Private property, then, both belongs to the individual and is expected to reflect his acceptance of communal beliefs and practices: Christianity, and democratic principles. “One’s lawn, Scott held, should contribute to the collective landscape”(Pollan 59). These expectations of uniformity set limits on self- expression in the out-of-doors that have endured (in the form of homeowner’s association rules, for example) through successful challenges to other forms of censorship. The landscape of the private individual, perhaps due to how little it is recognized as a communication, is one of the last frontiers of repression.

There is tension in these interpretations of lawn, arising from the incompatible precepts that a) a lawn represents the good fortune of an individual living in a democracy in which he or she has some freedom and choices and b) that it is moral, virtuous, responsible, and necessary to maintain and share one’s individual outdoor space in keeping with the aesthetic mores of the neighborhood.

The lawn, in short, does not ultimately serve to illustrate an experience of democratic freedom. What, then, does it communicate?

81 “With our open-faced front lawns,” Pollan suggests, “we declare our like- mindedness to our neighbors”(59-60). He goes on to explore the coercive element of this ubiquitous landscape:

In commending the ‘plain style’ of an unembellished lawn for American front

yards, the mid-century designer/reformers were, like Puritan ministers,

laying down rigid conventions governing our relationship to the land, our

observance of which would henceforth be taken as an index to our character.

And just as the Puritans would not tolerate any individual who sought to

establish his or her own back-channel relationship with the divinity, the

members of the suburban utopia do not tolerate the homeowner who

establishes a relationship with the land that is not mediated by the group’s

conventions. (Pollan 60)

In most cases, lawns, unlike gardens, are not a deliberate creative project.

Most suburban and rural homeowners think in terms of maintaining or improving an existing piece of turf, rather than using it as a site of self-expression. Yet according to Pollan and Graham, our lawns clearly express unanimity with mostly unwritten cultural codes. “To begin to assess the legacy of Andrew Jackson

Downing and the middle 19th century on our contemporary American landscape,”

Graham suggests, look to the lawns: “whether you’re in Poughkeepsie, Pocatello, or

Phoenix, lawn literally carpets the country, about fifty thousand square miles, an area larger than Pennsylvania and larger than that occupied by any food crop. Lawn is now the de facto garden style”(102). How have so many people come to agree on this single landscape?

82 Pollan suggests that lawn represents much more than a democratic style or neighborly responsibility or even personal righteousness. The American lawn exists in direct reference to our historical preoccupation with wilderness. “Domination,”

Pollan writes, “translated into suburban or rural terms, means lawn … The lawn holds great appeal, especially to Americans. It looks sort of natural – it’s green, it grows – but in fact it represents a subjugation of the forest as utter and complete as a parking lot. Every species is forcibly excluded from the landscape but one, and this is forbidden to grow longer than the owner’s little finger. A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule”(48).

Though individual Americans may have their own patches of ground, “The land is too important to our identity as Americans to simply allow everybody to have their own way with it,” Pollan writes. “And having decided that the land should serve as a vehicle for consensus, rather than as an arena for self-expression, the

American lawn – collective, national, ritualized, and plain – presented the ideal solution”(Pollan 61). If, as Pollan and Graham suggest, lawns cumulatively communicate the values and mores of an entire nation, then singly each possesses at least a fragment of communicative material. It is possible that lawns carry rhetorical agency with them, involving those who mow and water them in a largely unconscious, collective, rhetorical collaboration.

Laurie Gries suggests that from a new materialist perspective, “we can think of rhetoric as agential matter” that “often unfolds in … innovative and inconsistent ways not … anticipated by the ‘original’ author”(79). In the case of the American lawn, it is difficult to locate deliberate authorship in the homeowner. Gries notes

83 the growing awareness in contemporary theory that “agency is both multidimensional and dispersed among author, audience, technologies, and environment”(67). This complex interaction is clearly visible when we consider the rhetorical performances available in landscapes. Lorraine Johnson cites Paul

Robbins, who writes in Lawn People: “‘the lawn has, since its inception, been proffered as an instrument both for maintaining growth in contemporary urban development and for creating a responsible domestic American citizen: a responsible, domestic kind of person. Rather than simply being an artifact of culture, then, the lawn is better understood as a vehicle for creating certain kinds of cultural subjects’”(qtd. in Johnson 108). Lawns, appearing, in their uniformity, so modest and unassuming, are a cultural project, in which people participate unconsciously. “Aesthetics is one part of the rigid scaffolding that supports lawn dominance. Convention, endlessly repeated across North America, has taught us that lawn is beautiful, weeds are ugly, and vegetables belong in the backyard”(Johnson 108).

Though rhetorical scholarship neglects to critically address horticulture, recognition of the relationship between landscape and rhetoric is common in garden scholarship. In her in Canada, Edwinna von Baeyer writes that the first thirty years of the twentieth century “were an exciting era, characterized by a variety of horticultural innovations as well as an abundant rhetoric, frequently forceful, sometimes moralistic, which influenced the creation of our ornamental gardens in railway stations, school grounds, vacant lots and our

84 own back yards”(vi; emphasis added). In von Baeyer’s history, the rhetoric exists in traditional alphabetic form, and also in the landscapes themselves. “[T]he railway garden, popularized in Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railway, was not promoted for its beauty alone, but rather for demonstrating the fertility of the land to potential settlers” (von Baeyer 3; emphasis added). Rail passengers consumed the persuasive performances of the gardens without benefit of alphabetic guidance. They were expected to understand the argument the gardens made merely by seeing them.

In the forward to von Baeyer’s book, Rhetoric and Roses, Allen Paterson quotes Francis Bacon’s assertion that gardening contains morally uplifting qualities:

‘God Almightie first planted a Garden. And, indeed it is the purest of Human pleasures.’ Though Bacon wrote that ‘Gardening were the Greatest Perfection,’ following ‘Civility and Elegancie,’ Paterson notes that in von Baeyer’s history, “we see a still emergent nation being exhorted to attain Baconian ideals through gardening”(von Baeyer viii). The sight of gardens serves to persuade, and the action of gardening, to reform. Paterson writes that “the prevalent attitudes of the ruling groups in nineteenth century Europe toward their lower classes” were reflected in the belief that “[t]he poor who looked after their little plots of ground were … less likely to indulge in wife-beating” and neglect of their children” (von Baeyer viii). It was also believed that Canadian settlers “who owned and maintained a garden would have a vested interest in the political status quo”( von Baeyer ix). Gardens, by multiple avenues, persuaded people to act differently.

The belief in the power of gardens to influence both observers and gardeners for the better was widely held. Pioneering landscape architect Michael Hough

85 explains that “‘Reformers … crusaded for public parks by underlining the health and educational values they would have for working people. They saw contact with nature as a source of pleasure and social benefit, and a necessary way of improving moral standards’” (qtd. in Platt et al. 44). As we have seen, Olmsted considered parks (and the design of suburbs) an opportunity to improve the moral quality of communities. Olmstead wrote: “The poor need an education to refinement and taste and the mental and moral capital of gentlemen” (Stevenson 98). The rhetoric of parks had multiple layers – the one that existed in letters and public documents, and that which was planned into the landscapes themselves. Stevenson, an Olmsted biographer, notes that “Parks were to civilize, but by an appeal below the level of the rational”( ).

Gardens are a mode of subtle persuasive expression that can be used to influence behavior and also to convey identity. Just as landscapes can create effects through subliminal persuasion, gardens offer a means of communication to people for whom access to mainstream forms of textual representation is denied, or unsafe.

Reynolds credits bell hooks’ “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” as an influential work for feminist geographers because in that essay hooks identifies home as a site of resistance. Reynolds writes: “hooks calls for contemporary black women to reconceptualize ideas of homeplace as a site for subversion … and to resist above all white bourgeois norms that frame the home as a politically neutral space”(60). As

Alice Walker and Jamaica Kincaid have demonstrated, hooks’ argument can be usefully extended to domestic sites beyond the dwelling. The home garden, especially when the gardener is a woman, has been deemed a politically neutral

86 space, or a space so supportive of the status quo as to be invisible.

Catherine Horwood writes in her history, Women and Their Gardens,

“Arguably, women were actually the first gardeners. Evidence from the earliest human settlements suggests that, while men went away to hunt, women harvested and, eventually, cultivated the nearby land, which became a kind of .

Once more stable societies with larger-scale agriculture developed, men no longer had to leave their homes for days or weeks on end to find food and women lost most of their influence over plant cultivation”(2). According to Horwood, it was not until the sixteenth century that women again become visible in gardening records, and it is botany that was the first science accessible to women (4). Precisely because women have been less visible and less studied as gardeners there is potential for greater understanding of women’s resistance if we consider their gardens.

Shelley Boyd’s study of five Canadian women writers argues that a more complex understanding of women’s history and literature is available through a closer look at their literal and literary garden work. Boyd’s project investigates the fiction of Canadian writers, and also explores the descriptions of their real life gardens in letters and diaries. “All five writers reveal that supposedly private, domestic space is inextricably connected to meaningful and readily visible redefinitions of social, gendered conventions,”(18) Boyd writes, which “force a reassessment of early conceptualizations of Canadian literature, the varied spaces and configurations of our literary landscapes, and … women writers’ contributions to our collective culture”(18).

Boyd’s work explores the writings of Susanna Moodie and her sister

87 Catharine Parr Traill, middle-class sisters who both emigrated from Britain in 1832:

“Moodie and Traill use the garden as a ‘plot,’ a significant spatial and ideological narrative frame that situates their characters and personae in order to express the shifting gender domains of female immigrants in ”(20). Boyd writes,

“Actual gardens offer concentrated, artistic expressions of the human subject’s relationship to, and experience in, the larger ”(14). As we have seen above, garden historians have argued that the aesthetic of lawns is employed to corral cultural subjects; Boyd, in contrast, observes the potential for self-expression in the landscape of the home, especially, perhaps, for women.

Boyd looks at the relationship between the gardens these writers made and their use of gardens in their literary work, suggesting that we have overlooked important elements of women’s literature by our assumptions about the meaning in gardens. She notes: “While both sisters view these terrains as vital to their daily lives, critics largely ignore this aspect of their domestic environs even when the scholarship focuses on landscape and landscape aesthetics”(Boyd 24).

Furthermore, “The ‘plots’ of their texts significantly posit women as active, even strategic contributors to larger cultural landscapes in which their gardens… are situated”(Boyd 18). Gardens, because they were not considered significant sites for rhetorical activity, moved safely below the radar that has frequently censored the creative expression of women. “Moodie and Traill’s gardens become pervasive interspaces of creativity; in and through them they realize a productive marginality as they reshape their understanding of women’s place and daily work by accommodating the demands and realities of pioneer life. These terrains can no

88 longer be dismissed as mere potato patches but rather must be re-evaluated as highly relevant, expressive backwoods gardens”(Boyd 31).

It is not only a deeper understanding of the women themselves that is available through an investigation of their literal and literary gardens but an improved understanding of broad historical circumstances: “In addition to involving female settlers economically, aesthetically, emotionally, and physically in the formation of their homes,” Boyd observes, “backwoods kitchen gardening further counters the emigrant experience of displacement through the creation of social and geographic networks. Seed and plant exchanges are essential means for not only maintaining familial and cultural associations with England, but also fostering new communities within the colony”(51). Here, on a personal and local scale, is the sort of work Thomas Jefferson pursued at the level of international diplomacy: plants for the sake of creating community and economic sustainability, gardens through which pioneer women communicated their possession of and belonging to a new land.

The biography of Vita Sackville-West contains little surface similarity to that of the writer-gardeners who figure in Boyd’s study. Rich, aristocratic, and successful, Sackville-West was famous for both her writing and for the innovative gardening she did at her historic property, Sissinghurst. Insulated by wealth,

Sackville-West managed to live a very unconventional life without public scandal, but social mores required a degree of care and secrecy that would be far less true today. Unable to write her queerness openly into her books and poems, Sackville-

West was free to express her personality in her garden, and her sensuality in her garden writing. Through gardening, Sackville-West made her case for a more

89 permissive society than that to which she was born. I see in her garden, and in her

garden writing, an effort to push for the personal freedoms she sought in her

emotional and sexual life. Her garden prose demonstrates the uninhibited

sensuality of her imagination. In Some Flowers, published in 1937, she writes the

following:

The Velvet Rose. What a combination of words! One almost suffocates in

their soft depths, as though one sank into a bed of rose-petals, all thorns

ideally stripped away. We cannot actually lie on a bed of roses, unless we are

very decadent and also very rich, but metaphorically we can imagine

ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it

in an intimate way into our private heart. This sounds a fanciful way of

writing, the sort of way which makes me shut up most gardening books with

a bang, but in this case I am trying to get as close to my true meaning as

possible. It really does teach one something, to look long and closely into a

rose, especially such a rose as Tuscany, which opens flat (being only semi-

double) thus revealing the quivering and dusty gold of its central perfection.

(Sackville-West 68)

In this passage Sackville-West describes a beloved heirloom rose, but I read here a

coy celebration of Sackville-West’s close observation of female anatomy. Gender

theorist Lindsey Kurz notes Sackville-West’s line: “we can not actually lie on a bed of

roses, unless we are very decadent and also very rich,” and observes, “To literally

and openly indulge in the ‘rose,’ one had to be ‘very rich.’” Appearing to speak of an

heirloom flower, Sackville-West may be acknowledging the difficulty of living openly

90 as a queer person, a difficulty buffered by wealth. Kurz also notes Sackville-West’s comment, “I’m trying to get as close to my real meaning as possible,” which Kurz suggests is a “playful” way for Sackville-West to underline her double subject matter.

The elements of Sissinghurst’s design provide further material for analysis of

Sackville-West’s self-expression. The garden, by all accounts, was a collaborative project of Vita, whose vision determined the selection of plants and how they would be arranged, and her husband Harold Nicolson, who provided the geometries within which Vita’s designs were contained. Sarah Raven, married to Sackville-West’s grandson Adam Nicolson, writes in Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden, “As Vita wrote, and they both clearly thought: ‘Hedges are always an important feature in any garden, however small, however large. Hedges are the things that cut off one section of the garden from another; they play an essential part in the general design.’ They create surprise, containment, a sense of arrival, a narrative for anyone walking through the garden”(Sackville-West and Raven 58).

Raven writes that Harold Nicholson was responsible for “the arrangement of the garden ‘rooms’, to create that sense of privacy that both he and Vita so much wanted. In 1948, Nicholson wrote of the mature garden, “‘Sissinghurst has a quality of mellowness, of retirement, of un-flaunting dignity, which is just what we wanted to achieve… I think it is mainly due to the succession of privacies: the forecourt, the first arch, the main court, the tower arch, the lawn, the . All a series of escapes from the world, giving the impression of a cumulative escape’”(qtd. in

Sackville-West and Raven 60-61). Perhaps it is unfair to subject Sackville-West and

91 Nicholson’s garden to analysis in light of what we know about the compromises to convention they were forced to make throughout their lives. The complexity of experience resulting from the combination of botanical exuberance and concealment has created a place of intense beauty. And the combination of exhibitionism and reclusiveness in the garden closely parallels Sackville-West’s choices in her personal life.

I offer Sissinghurst as an example of how reading gardens rhetorically offers unstudied texts to feminist historians and literary scholars. An analysis of Sackville-

West’s biography and garden side by side suggests that she composed at

Sissinghurst the public life she would have liked to live, had society permitted her to do so. In the profusion and generosity, the artfully disordered non-traditional spectacle of her garden, Sackville-West articulated the permissiveness and transgression that she kept relatively quiet in her personal relationships. There are cues to the parallels between garden and erotic life in passages like the one above, but the garden itself is the primary text. It is delicious to note that her gardening style was widely adopted, and the rebellious, sensuous style of Sissinghurst traveled into the most conservative gardens in England. Perhaps the garden, in turn, inflected the customs and protocols inside the British household. At the very least, a study of Sackville-West as a literary person is incomplete without an investigation of her garden as one among her many rhetorical documents.

When we understand gardens as more than sites of necessary labor or mere aesthetic demonstration, we increase our likelihood of perceiving rhetorical moves

92 made by people with limited opportunity for self-expression. Diana Balmori and

Margaret Morton introduce their book, Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives, with the words: “This book is dedicated to the uprooted individuals who have tilled the streets of New York City in search of a home and, in the process, have laid bare the meaning of garden”(Dedication). In 1993, when the book was published, the authors could already note in the Preface that “Most of the gardens documented in this book have been destroyed.” As a result of the impermanence of the sites, they explain that the documentation was “driven by a sense of urgency”(Balmori and

Morton Preface). Balmori and Morton write that in the process of documenting the garden sites, they “saw an opportunity to expand the historical record, which has always portrayed the garden as the domain of prosperous individuals”(Preface).

These gardens complicate how garden is defined in a variety of ways, all of which are important for the understanding of landscape as a rhetorical player. They extend the meaning of the word garden through their nontraditional sites and materials; they encourage recognition of unexpected voices; and they challenge the temporal qualities gardens are usually understood to have.

While some of the “transitory” gardens contain plants, some are collections of objects arranged deliberately out of doors. Balmori and Morton’s definition of a garden is “an exterior composition in space consisting of recycled elements, requiring little expense and maintenance, and creating an imagery that reflects the situation of its maker”(10). These rhetorical arrangements are rich with affective quality provided by the combination of their authors’ care and their impermanence.

Harrison, writing about Transitory Gardens, explicitly recognizes the communicative

93 nature of the transitory gardens, writing, “Insofar as they embody an affirmation, declare their human authorship, invite recognition, and call for a response, they represent speech acts… in the sense of militating against and triumphing over a condition of speechlessness”(Gardens 45).

Gardens are supposed to be creatures of many seasons, with productive and fallow cycles. Gardens are expected to be the process of many years, during which plants mature, and a vision is slowly realized. The works recorded by Balmori and

Morton are distilled by circumstance. “The point of looking at these gardens,” they write, is not to identify the artistic category to which they belong: it is to bring to light compositions made in open spaces, compositions that have been constructed from a variety of elements and that, through their detachment from the usual conditions in which gardens are made, liberate the word garden from its cultural straightjacket and validate the temporal, the momentary, in landscape”(Balmori and

Morton 4).

Balmori and Morton’s project records twenty-six New York City gardens, which they categorize as “community, appropriated, and squatter’s gardens”(11). I am interested here in the appropriated and squatter’s gardens, which, as the authors note, contain work unprotected by official sanction. These gardens are of particular interest because they do not serve an obvious practical purpose. Precious resources of time and energy are spent on their design. What is the benefit?

Harrison suggests that “the gardens arise from a basic human need in the individuals who made them: the need for creative expression”(Gardens 42). Balmori and Morton note: “Historical records have always favored the gardens of the

94 wealthy and powerful, who can preserve or document their gardens”(2). This is true also, of course, of other rhetorics, both visual and alphabetic. Privilege preserves self-expression through time. But the need to be seen and known is no less for those whose works will not endure. Perhaps there is a greater need.

Harrison suggests that the “homeless gardens introduce form,” which in turn allows the gardens to “visibly gather around themselves the spiritual, mental, and physical energies that their surroundings would otherwise dissipate, disperse, and dissolve”(Gardens 43). This, he argues, secures the “limits necessary to human repose”(Gardens 43). The definition of a garden as an introduction of form with the capacity to gather and maintain energy is especially rich in the context of homelessness, a circumstance in which the control of form is often lost. People who do not own property are limited in the canvases on which they can declare their alliances and beliefs to others. Wealth multiplies the surfaces for self-expression: cars, bodies, homes, front yards and digital spaces all provide places for the projection of self and the development or definition of community. In Balmori and

Morton’s work, homeless and low-income gardeners secure space for self- expression in the public sphere. Owning none, they claim property by manipulating objects within or upon it.

In Anna’s Garden the plants are volunteers – primarily ailanthus trees. The gardener’s project is a collection of non-vegetal materials. “Arranged around the fence and hanging from branches or set in furniture dispersed throughout the forest is a menagerie of [stuffed] animals and dolls”(Balmori and Morton 34). Balmori writes that in winter, without the cover of foliage, it “becomes evident that, although

95 the animals are intact, most of the dolls are damaged or maimed. …. The dolls, which may lack an arm or have a severed head or broken feet, are surrounded by intact animals”(34). Most of the gardens in the book are accompanied by the words of their gardeners. In the case of Anna’s Garden, Balmori concludes the section with this note: “The gardener is a recluse and lives in a tenement across the street from the garden she tends. She speaks to no one. The neighbors say that she came from

Eastern Europe and was in a concentration camp as a child”(Balmori and Morton

39).

When Harrison writes of how these transitory gardens provide “repose,” he means the word in the most wakeful among its potential definitions – not in terms of sleep but in terms of the tranquility useful to purposeful being and attentive discourse. Place grounds us, literally and figuratively, to engage the world.

Harrison’s notion that the gardens “gather” “necessary” energy vividly clarifies the vulnerability of human beings who lack a place of their own. The images and interviews in Transitory Gardens combine to articulate how these compositions persuade an audience of the gardeners’ possession – however brief - of place.

Balmori writes: “On one level, transitory gardens show us how human beings transform their environment so that it can help to sustain them. On another level, they represent a new language, a language not yet clearly heard or one that may have been ignored because it speaks a different, even colloquial tongue”(7).

Balmori describes a garden located beside the Manhattan Bridge thus:

“Gabriele’s first garden consisted of vegetables, flowers, a large stuffed bear, some rocks, and two ailanthus trees”(124). Gabriele herself explains: “‘after the winter,

96 when there was still snow on the ground, I started thinking about it. The idea was to change perceptions… and the way to change perceptions is to make it prettier. I really wanted something beautiful out front and … something for people to look after… so I started the garden’”(Balmori and Morton 124; ellipsis in the original).

This garden was created to perform a specifically rhetorical function. It was built to persuade other people to gather in that place and cultivate it, while also deliberately projecting the story of the community to passers-by. The gardens

Balmori and Morton record in their book parallel classic instances of rhetoric more perfectly than Le Notre’s work at Versailles because they are almost as temporary as live rhetorical performances. In the case of Gabriele’s garden, the audience moves past in cars, so the garden and the interaction are equally impermanent, the effects of the discourse impossible to assess.

Graham argues that the function of a garden is “essentially social: a garden is in effect a miniature Utopia, a diorama of how its makers see themselves and the world”(xii). As Balmori and Morton demonstrate, these Utopias take many forms, and make use of many varied materials. But all are social: Vita Sackville-West’s ostensibly private garden attracted visitors, spawned many imitators, and in time supported itself with tourism. In the case of homeless gardens, the rhetorical performances endure only in Balmori and Morton’s book, but were, for a time, declarations of humanity and assertions of belonging sited boldly in the public sphere.

The homeless gardens were impermanent because they were created in spaces where their rhetoric could be quickly erased with a bulldozer. Their visual

97 performances were fleeting because they were unprotected. No right to an audience was guaranteed. When such works are lost, we can only hope that they pop up again somewhere else, that the desire to be recognized finds an outlet in another place. But the New York City of Morton’s photographs, the New York City of neglected land and vacant lots, is vanishing. The space available for the most disenfranchised of the city’s citizens is a shrinking canvas. Even public spaces that were once ignored and thus available – space under bridges and along broad sidewalks – is increasingly smartened up, valuable, and controlled. It is important to ask where the homeless go when their places of refuge are absorbed. It is also vital that we ask where they will be heard, and how their histories will be known.

If we look for the nontraditional rhetorics of the disenfranchised, we find the sites where they occur contested in a broad variety of places. The homeless of New

York City (and elsewhere) are not the only group whose spaces for expression are at risk. In “Endangered Landscapes and Disappearing Peoples: Identity, Place, and

Community in Ecological Politics,” Devon Pena explores the information about traditional agroecological livelihoods that can be read in the irrigation patterns of the upper Rio Grande bioregion. “Over the generations,” Pena writes, “the dendritic networks of earthen-work ditches have created a veritable landscape mosaic pattern”(59). In this pattern, which reflects sophisticated awareness of the local ecology and balances the natural movement of water with the needs of the farmers,

Pena reads a precious cultural history. The irrigation methods that threaten to erase this historical record are significantly less sustainable. The acequia farms demonstrate the reasoning for sustainable responsiveness to the land. “The loss of

98 this agroecological landscape,” Pena writes, “may seem a bit more poignant if one compares the messy diversity of the acequia farms with the neat, orderly, and legible crop circles produced by the agro-industrial in other parts of the interior or intermountain West”(59). Both of the landscapes Pena describes are persuasive, and the cultural messages that incline us toward aesthetic orderliness are strong. It takes education and awareness to see the cultural and ecological value represented by the acequia farms landscape.

Pollan writes, “gardening ... depends on me acting like a sane and civilized human, which is to say, a creature whose nature it is to remake his surroundings”

(53). I have argued here that this remaking is social, public, persuasive. Human beings seek to communicate through a range of modes, landscapes among them.

The transformation of our surroundings has provided us safety, continuity, and self- expression. No wonder Harrison suggests that we find “repose” in the transfiguration of landscape. While our communication via natural forms precedes alphabetic text, we have never abandoned the expression of our values, beliefs, and possession through the manipulation of landscape. We have, however, abandoned, to a great degree, the cultural conversation about communication in these forms, relegating analysis of it to narrow and specialized communities of scholars and hobbyists. As I argued in chapter 1, there is growing recognition in the field of rhetoric that these forms of speech and persuasion belong in our studies. Rickert calls for an ambient understanding of rhetoric, arguing that our traditional

“rhetorical practices disallow more fundamental insights into an a priori enmeshment of person and world, leaving little room to explain how the material

99 environment itself matters for how life is conducted”(252). Gries critiques “typical approaches of rhetorical analysis,” noting their “focus on production and delivery in specific contexts and instances of time”(79). Rhetoric, often described as if it were work that acts toward the world, is in fact a practice of engagement with the world.

The better the rhetoric, one might say, the greater the degree of participation. In

Rickert’s reworking of rhetoric, “the world is revealed differently… in a way that calls for… action”(29). Rhetoric “from an ambient perspective,” he writes, “can no longer be situated solely in human subjective performance”(Rickert 29). A garden both literally manifests, and challenges, each element of the traditional understanding of rhetorical action. The tensions provided by the experience of considering a garden rhetorically offer a perspective from which we can consider composing in general by a more realistic measure.

Gardening is often considered a conventional and modest pastime, though, as

I have noted above with regard to lawns and other sites, irregularities of practice take many forms and offer homeowners and gardeners many degrees of rebellion against protocol.

Johnson writes that resisting the industrial food system by growing one’s own food is a political act, but she emphasizes another benefit. A passionate gardener herself, she knows from experience that “one of the most meaningful gifts we receive from the food we grow ourselves is the gift of story. What we consume… are the narratives embedded in the fruits of our labor … Our gardens are narrative forms of self expression that reveal … our particular histories, who we are and how we want to create a place for ourselves in the world”(14). Creating a place for

100 ourselves in the world is more than story, more than labor, more than the persuasive nature of lot after lot capped with a square of manicured grass. Creating a place is active, transformative, responsive to what is with what might be. The notion of creating a place in the world takes us to chapter 3, and activist gardens.

101 Chapter Three

Activist Gardens: Resistance by Pansies and Kale

In chapter 2, I argued that gardens and other landscapes contain communicative potential: the deliberate design of horticulture, topography, and objects in landscape express possession, identity, power, conformity, even reverence. Here, I contend that gardens are capable of still more assertive persuasive performance, that, in fact, gardens are regularly employed to engage audiences in personal, and social, transformation. These are activist gardens, gardens that are built, created, and grown, not merely to please, or beguile, but to push against, to raise awareness, to make change.

When Michelle Obama broke ground for a vegetable garden on the White

House lawn in 2009, she did so with full awareness of the garden’s persuasive possibilities. In her book about the garden, she writes: “this was not going to be just any garden – it would be a very public garden. Cameras would be trained on its beds, and questions would be asked about what we had planted and why”(Obama

9). Obama’s consciousness of the audience for the garden extended beyond how it would be perceived through the frame of media. She writes of her quest for “the perfect spot on the grounds” that, in addition to soil and sun conditions, she was looking for a site “visible from outside the gate”(Obama 31). The garden was intended to do its work on camera and off, live and in person, unmediated by script or planning. The White House kitchen garden was meant to be able to speak for itself.

102 Though Obama was not, previous to this project, a gardener, she chose landscape as a mode by which to communicate one of the central messages of her platform as First Lady. “I wanted this garden to be more than just a plot of land growing vegetables on the White House lawn,” she writes (Obama 9). “I wanted it to be the starting point for something bigger”(Obama 9). “I hoped this garden would help begin a conversation”(Obama 9). Obama understood the role a landscape could play in the effectiveness of her argument. The White House kitchen garden helped

Obama articulate an emphasis on children’s health, in terms of what they are eating, where it comes from, and how much – or little – exercise they get. The First Lady wrote these values into a book, but they were first written into the ground of the

White House lawn, in the form of a kitchen garden.

Though passers-by could not participate in the garden Michelle Obama devised for the White House, she made sure that it was visible to all. She conceived of the garden as a “public” site, despite its inaccessibility. She used the garden to blur the boundaries that fences and security details tend to sharpen around the first family and their home, by working in the garden with school children, and designing it to be both a learning garden (Obama 32), and a place of food production for the

White House and beyond (Obama 33).

The White House garden invites discourse. Johnson writes that on the first day of spring in 2009, “Obama achieved what food activists and nutrition advocates could only dream of: she made the planting of a vegetable front page news around the world”(32). Through the homely act of vegetable gardening at the White House,

Obama gave material credibility to her public health initiatives. Through the site of

103 her garden, Obama framed a food conversation in a place that was both her front yard and the front yard of the nation.

As I discussed in chapter 2, Obama is joining a rich historical tradition of rhetorical gardens. These gardens of the politically powerful were created in order to be observed, and sought to achieve specific purposes with particular, well-known, audiences. The gardens in this chapter do not conform readily to rhetorical protocols or the aesthetic or practical expectations associated with the word garden.

Strangely or illegally sited, their authors sometimes invisible or anonymous, their audiences unpredictable, these gardens perform their rhetorical tasks from an impulse to push against circumstances operating in the world. They work to destabilize the status quo. Like weeds, many of these rhetorical works occur where they are inconvenient, unwanted, and difficult to control.

The gardens I will explore in this chapter perhaps represent better than any other sort the symbiosis between place and rhetoric. Lisa Taylor notes that outdoor spaces can become sites for discourse without that purpose having been the intent of their design. Of Hyde Park, in London, she writes: “The park is not only a haven of peace and green in the heart of the city, not only ‘London’s personal space’ (as described on its own website in 2009)” but “also a key national territory for people’s political agitation”(Taylor 22). One has only to think of the locations of the

Women’s Marches on January 21, 2017, to notice that they assembled in parks and on public malls around the world. Taylor cites Paul Gough, who observed the potential of public spaces to become “‘polemic landscape’”(qtd. in Taylor 22).

Because of their scale, such places allow people to gather in numbers that create a

104 visual rhetoric to underline the spoken or written communications that accompany public demonstrations. The January 21, 2017 Women’s Marches used these visual rhetorics to great effect, collecting a mass of living bodies to refute the politics of the new administration. The aesthetics of the Women’s March operated not dissimilarly to those of a pleasing horticultural text. I noticed that in my efforts to photograph the march in Atlanta, I framed shots that complimented closely packed faces and bodies, a legible arrangement of signs, or a balanced sprinkling of pink hats. This is comparable to when I photograph my own garden and I am careful to omit the compost bin, the garbage cans, and the bare earth where the beans have yet to sprout. Just as language is polished to create the most persuasive effects, visual rhetorics arrange elements with care and artifice. Unlike a photograph, however, a living landscape, even one that is well planned and executed, is disobedient and changeable. The activist rhetorics in this chapter embrace, or at least accept elements present in all rhetorical interaction but little emphasized: disorder, collaboration, temporality.

As I hope to demonstrate here, landscape activism is not worthy of study merely as a novelty, or a route to fresh insights about rhetoric and the pedagogy of composition, but worthy of study as a matter of urgent necessity in the life of our field and, more important, our planet. We can ill afford the luxury of abstraction; we must not only read and write but get our hands literally dirty in the problems and solutions of our world. Composition must teach beyond the standard tools of rhetoric; we must attend to the resources that give vitality to persuasion.

In his history of gardening, Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in

105 the Garden, George McKay observes: “notions of utopia, of community, of activism for progressive social change, of peace, of environmentalism, of identity politics, are practically worked through in the garden, in , and through what Paul

Gough has called, ‘planting as a form of protest’”(6). Such gardens, as I will show in the pages to follow, take a variety of forms, and manifest a range of persuasive, activist intention.

The gardens most obviously unlike the gardens of kings, presidents, and privileged authors are those called guerrilla gardens. David Tracey’s “manuelfesto” of guerrilla gardening describes the practice as: “people using plants to reclaim public space for the public good”(1), “with or without permission”(4). McKay’s history of radical gardening describes guerrilla gardening as a demonstration that

“the garden, and gardening, have a political resonance”(154). And Johnson suggests that guerrilla gardening is “an artistic act … focusing our attention on … neglect by turning it around”(160). She gives the example of U.K. artist Paul Harfleet, who plants “pansies at sites where homophobic attacks have occurred”(Johnson 160).

The Pansy Project homepage explains that Harfleet “finds the nearest source of soil to where the incident occurred and generally without civic permission plants one unmarked pansy.” The flower is photographed where it was planted, posted on

The Pansy Project website, and titled with language drawn from the homophobic attack, including: “Let’s Kill the Bati-Man!” and “Fucking Faggot.” The website states

Harfleet’s intention to “reveal a frequent reality of gay experience, which often goes unreported to authorities and by the media” (Pansy Project). Gries has argued that

“the public sphere is constituted by a network of human and nonhuman actants and,

106 by putting objects at the center of rhetorical study, rhetoric might expand its domain”(87). Harfleet’s work provides an intersection of public space, politics, rhetoric, art, and botany. His work deploys varied rhetorical modes on different platforms – the botanical in public space, the alphabetic and visual online.

Harfleet’s gardening places a plant in the role of rhetorical actant. His tiny gardens, each composed of one plant, emphasize the frailty of a single life and the diminutive volume of a single voice. By locating a mute and vulnerable object at the center of his rhetorical project, Harfleet relinquishes the expectation of control that a rhetor traditionally assumes. The complexity of rhetorical work in the public sphere is efficiently demonstrated by the performance of the single, ephemeral flower left to communicate what it may to its audience. It may not even be noticed, or, if it inserts its unlikeliness, its queerness, on the consciousness of passersby amidst the glut of urban impressions, the effects of this interaction will never be known. What I want to highlight here is that Harfleet’s artistic act is not uncommon.

It is the field of rhetoric that has omitted close study of such explorations beyond linguistic text. If we foreground the capability of objects to perform rhetorical work, as Gries recommends, we expand our potential as rhetors, scholars, teachers, and activists.

While Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden and the use of the Washington Mall for the post-inaugural Women’s March represent powerful individual and collective forces at work to recruit physical sites for discursive activity, Harfleet’s garden rhetoric demonstrates that neither the great nor the many are needed to undertake activist uses of landscape. What shifts landscape from a site of persuasion to an

107 agent of transformation is not the human architect of the work, but the intent and the effects. Activist gardeners like Harfleet plant in public sites because their work is self-consciously rhetorical. These gardens seek to engage a public audience not only in unlikely spaces but through the unexpectedness of their rhetorical locations and the content of their texts.

Rai writes of “extra-linguistic experiences” and her gathering appreciation of how “the perception of one’s neighborhood is experienced, in part, as bodily sensations”(195). Harfleet’s flowers have the potential to make people look, but they also might literally move people. I, for one, would carefully avoid stepping on a flower, no matter where it was placed in my path. Both the experience of observing the flower and, possibly, of redirecting one’s body to avoid destroying it, are “extra- linguistic.” Rai argues that we are “wise not to deny” the political power of

“primitive, intimate forces of persuasion”(195). She might be describing Harfleet’s work when she suggests “imagining small private actions as also productive activities that respond to the local conditions in which we dwell”(Rai 205).

Rachel Riedner argues for the “need to create literate practices that struggle against … rhetorical borders and boundaries”(82). Riedner studies the use of affective human interest stories to validate neoliberal rhetoric, and suggests that we must look for “ghosts” – which might include “when a person, a social figure, or a textual sign disappears from representation because it does not produce affective value that can be circulated to shore up consensus for neoliberalism”(Riedner 79).

When I argue that rhetorical landscapes belong in our contemporary scholarship and historical archive, it is with the intention that such textual signs are accounted

108 for, and do not disappear, or become “ghosts.” As examples in this chapter demonstrate, activist gardens, by virtue of their authors and intention, are often at risk of erasure. We must be alert to them, ready with the skill to interpret their communication, and prepared with means to include them in the records of our field.

The literacy practices Riedner proposes have the effect of “scrambling affective neoliberal rhetoric” and “point to nascent cultural activity that might not appear or present itself as political but might be read and understood in that way”(82). While Riedner seeks such “ghosts” in alphabetic text, her attention to peripheral rhetorics and fresh literacy practices can be usefully applied to the reading of rhetorical performance in landscapes.

The gardens discussed in this chapter span a variety of forms of “extra- linguistic” rhetoric, from the deliberate and high-profile kitchen garden at the

Obama White House to “ghost” rhetorics occurring in the gardens of transient people in New York City. Attention to these landscapes enables us to see the political ambition that activist gardeners nurture along with their vegetables, whether these ambitions are articulated in other, more familiar and legible forms or not.

Taylor observes: “there is more, both in terms of what the garden can signify and in terms of what we understand as a garden: from public parks to allotments, squatted community gardens to the ‘polemic landscapes’ of peace or facist gardens”(8). In chapter 2, I argue that the New York City gardens documented by

Balmori and Morton were assertions of the gardeners’ humanity, a form of posted

109 notice of their presence in the city. The people whom the propertied and privileged often do not see, or wish not to see, are making themselves more visible upon their landscape by creatively transforming it.

In this chapter I will take up gardens in Morton and Balmori’s study that engage with community and municipality with a more active, outcome-oriented agency. McKay places emphasis on community gardens “which have sprung up from the grassroots, as projects of reclamation and transformation of urban life and waste land” (168). “Such projects,” he writes, “have involved the garnering of community action … self-organization and local autonomy. They were not usually led by the authorities”(McKay 169). Johnson explains that “the roots of Montreal’s city-supported program can be found in the guerrilla spirit of some unsanctioned rogue gardeners”(146). She describes how Montreal responded to the illegal gardens of Italian and Portuguese immigrants in the early 1970’s by regulating and organizing the gardening. “Rather than fight it,” Johnson observes,

“the city saw an opportunity to formalize a structure for an activity that communities were doing anyway. The result: Montreal has the largest community gardening program in Canada, with more than 6,000 plots, approximately 10, 000 participants”(146).

In New York City, Balmori writes, “Tenement dwellers, as individuals or groups, sometimes take over land to make gardens. Since the tenement dwellers have a legal place of residence … their efforts have more continuity and are longer lived than those of other transitory garden makers. In some cases their garden making becomes the basis for the establishment of an official community garden,

110 and it is possible to see certain of the squatters’ and tenement dwellers’ appropriating efforts as the first stages of community gardening”(30). As in the case of North Montreal, the gardens generate their own legitimacy, persuading city officials that they suit their site.

Gardens built without official sanction can serve purposes more complex than the production of food. “At times squatters, individuals who have illegally broken into and camped out in abandoned city-owned buildings, have also illegally made gardens on an empty lot near their squat”(Balmori 40). Pitts, who belongs to a squat called Foetus, explains that squatters must break into a city owned building, remain there for thirty days, and have witnesses. Gardening further secures the rights of a squat. Pitts: “The garden is a way to hold the land. If you have the community behind your garden, the city is more hesitant to move against you.’”(Balmori 40). In this circumstance, the garden becomes part of the social and legal apparatus that establishes a right to housing. The squatters employ unused land to persuade others of their belonging to a place, their legitimacy within a community.

Balmori and Morton also observe a characteristic common to those who garden illegally: “as the squatter Pitts has stated, there is among these groups a great distrust of government agencies, bureaucracies, and rules, and in many cases the garden makers specifically want to avoid such interventions, preferring to make their own way in spite of the danger of having their unsanctioned gardens destroyed. These garden makers believe that as long as the city lots remain vacant, the holding of the land by garden use is an improvement over holding it by

111 ownership. We call these gardens… appropriated”(30). Why do some gardeners accept coordination with city officials and some resist? Balmori explains that some

“groups continue to make their gardens with no outside help, remaining independent of the laws and regulations that come with the governmental hand”(13). If we interpret these gardens as not only rhetorical, but also activist, there is additional purpose to be understood from their insistence on an absence of security or formalized status.

McKay suggests that in the “marginal, or unofficial, or illegal uses of the land for gardening … the temporary nature of the garden space can be part of the political imperative, directly related to the movement’s social or cultural practice”(154). The transience of the gardens, as in the case of Harfleet’s undefended pansy, potentially makes their rhetorical effect more powerful. Taylor confesses, “I am attracted to the stories of the plots that are no longer there, so marginal that they have been easily erased or pushed over the edge”(8). It is not only the marginality of these gardens that puts them at risk of destruction. If, as

McKay believes, illegal gardens must be illegal as a component of their political persuasiveness, it is the challenging rhetoric that necessitates silencing.

Karen Schmelzkopf suggests the “conflict over the community gardens in

New York City was a contest over the right to the city. It was about control over public space, about who has (or does not have) the right to space, and about the right to be part of the public. While the community gardens provided important benefits to marginalized people, within the urban entrepreneurial government of the Guiliani Administration, ultimately it did not matter: marginalized people had no

112 right to the city” (qtd in McKay 174). In “The Death of Little Puerto Rico, NYC

Gardens Are Getting Plowed by a New Wave of Urban Development,” Sarah

Ferguson describes the displacement of four community gardens on the Lower East

Side by condominium developers in the late 1990’s. “It was as if we didn’t exist,”

Ferguson writes (Wilson and Weinberg 61). “In fact, when the [New York City

Housing] Partnership proposal came up for a vote before the City Council, our garden and the three others were listed as ‘vacant, blighted lots.’ This despite the fact that folks at Little Puerto Rico had been tending their plots for over 10 years”

(Wilson and Weinberg 61). Ferguson explains the city’s persistent inability to recognize the gardens as a meaningful, valuable part of urban life, writing that the

“oversight is sadly typical of the Guiliani Administration, for whom gardens are seen as ‘interim sites,’ space savers for future development”( Wilson and Weinberg 61).

This interpretation of urban land in terms of its maximum monetary value prioritizes the individual over the community. Activist gardens often challenge this definition of land in a deliberate contest of messages, putting places to use instead of viewing them as an empty container waiting to be filled with financial importance.

Gardens define land as public, whereas lots for sale define land as private.

Exploring the meaning of public space, Tracey writes: “One traditional definition uses the right of access. Public space is where everyone is allowed to go, to do whatever they want, so long as it’s legal”(5). He goes on to suggest using

‘public space’ “to mean all the places we as a society share environmentally. This can include private land even if the only access is visual” (Tracey 5). Tracey notes that “cities, those grand experiments in social living, have a lot of public spaces”(5).

113 Contesting the use and interpretation of these spaces is of enormous importance to the future health of city dwellers.

In Landscapes of Change, Thoren points out that external forces are changing the context of landscape architectural design. “[C]ities are demanding parks, streets, and plazas that perform environmental and ecological as well as social functions .… residents have demanded that roads and rail lines connect instead of divide cities .… and city residents are calling for local food options”(Thoren 10). “These factors have led to the rediscovery and reinvention of urban sites as complex hybrids that perform multiple functions”(Thoren 10). Ferguson notes that even in the late

1990’s, New York lagged behind Boston, Philidelphia, and Chicago in terms of public policy that incorporated green space in their urban designs (Wilson and Weinberg

61).

For those residents on the edges of cities, whose voices are less likely to be heard in discussions of the forms urban planning should take, Tracey articulates the activist role of gardening as follows: “You may redefine your role as a citizen as you discover new ground on which to take a stand … No longer a passive consumer, you become what has never been needed more: an active citizen engaged in your environment”(1). Tracy’s language unites citizenship with an embodied response to a literal place. Engagement is not theoretical, it is physical.

Similarly, Johnson describes community gardens as: “participatory landscapes, places where people shape the shared resource of public land”(135).

Not only does the word “participatory” evoke civic engagement, but Johnson speaks of shaping the land, emphasizing it as a “shared resource.” Balmori, too, echoes this

114 emphasis on the transformation possible through labor with her use of the term

“garden makers” instead of gardeners (Balmori and Morton 30). Her language is expansive enough to include the nontraditional nature of many of the gardens and at the same time her terminology necessitates a rethinking of the activity and the actors performing it that would not occur if she used the accustomed terms. The use of “garden makers” stresses the action of making. The gardens she describes are important once they are made, but in their self-conscious impermanence, the making is deeply significant.

“The offense isn’t that someone cares enough to dig in and cultivate some neglected corner,” Johnson argues, “the offense is the neglect in the first place”(159).

Johnson is writing about the neglect of land, but civic neglect encompasses vacant lots and disenfranchised people. Johnson suggests that such neglect “is what guerrilla gardening nudges us to confront”(159). As Ferguson’s example illustrates, city governments can understand the city as a community, or as a collection of individuals existing in a densely inhabited area. This municipal framing will define the urban future.

Tracey emphasizes the effects of place on human well-being and behavior:

“Our shared environment is defined by both the natural and built spaces around us.

Together they make up our urban ecosystem. Because everything in an ecosystem is linked, these places affect the city and those living in it in countless physical, mental, spiritual and other ways. … enhancing these public spaces with guerrilla gardening can be seen as a public right. Maybe even a public duty”(6). Tracey suggests that the guerrilla gardener be “armed with a determination to make the

115 landscape itself a declaration of interdependence”(1-2). Reversing the offense of neglect, Tracy suggests, incorporates care for people and land. “Guerrilla gardens,”

Johnson writes, “encourage us to look at the city in a different way – they tweak our imaginations and help us discover opportunities”(158).

They also, as I have mentioned above, assert the belonging, the presence, of city dwellers who are ignored and underserved. These assertions, communicated in landscape, have the potential to reach a broader audience than other texts because they exist in public spaces. When Johnson writes about looking at the city in a different way, it may not be a way that the observer or audience want to look – not everyone wishes to think about homeless and transient people. Landscape can insist on notice, can impose itself upon the attention of passersby, and thus force engagement with the issues it seeks to address, be they homelessness, food insecurity, sustainability, hate crime, or neglected property.

Property has long granted visibility and citizens’ rights in this country, and in the actions of squatters we can identify a tradition that extends back to the mythical burials Harrison ties to the founding of ancient Rome. Those who dig the earth, who plant in the soil, lay claim. And those who possess the land are its citizens. In the introduction to Growing a Garden City, Bill McKibben contends that “growing food, the most ancient of occupations, can address very modern social problems, from poverty and addiction to the sense of disconnection that is such a destructive part of contemporary life”(Smith xi). Considering the transitory gardens as a form of citizenship lends the blurred boundary between anti-establishment and establishment gardens a particular poignancy. Even among these ephemeral sites,

116 privilege and permanence exists by degrees.

Probably because activist gardens often disrupt the expectation that public landscapes be mute and apolitical, their use as sites of demonstrable community action and their visual demand for recognition increase the risk that they will cause offense and be destroyed. “The oldest and best known of the urban garden-making efforts are community gardens,” Balmori writes. “Some of these gardens sit cheek by jowl with those of homeless individuals. Originally the initiative of individuals or communities, they have grown in popularity and have garnered the support of many city social organizations, which have begun new community garden efforts. …

Although many of the early community gardens were destroyed by the lot owners or the city because they were sometimes established by activities outside the frame of legality, of late their value has been recognized”(Balmori and Morton 11).

Balmori notes that community gardens acquire “respectability and an air of permanence” and ties these qualities to their ability to endure. “Indeed they have a longer life than any other of the urban gardens recorded here”(Balmori 13).

In Avant Gardening, Peter Lamborn Wilson notes the vulnerability of famous guerrilla gardens such as Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden on the Lower East Side in

Manhattan but also of gardens known to only the members of the immediate neighborhood. “I miss a little pocket of green on my block that was swept away without a murmur of protest,” he writes. “Between an alley and a vacant lot a

Puerto Rican neighbor had squeezed a garden shed, flower pots, real and plastic flowers, plaster virgin, Xmas tree bulbs, and a few strange white poultry he called

‘Chinese Chickens.’ I was a pleasure to hear them clucking as I walked by, and to

117 admire the astonishing wall of blue morning glories that half-concealed the garden.

It all vanished a year ago when the vacant lot was sold to developers. Nothing remains as I write but a vast mud-hole”(Wilson and Weinberg 9). The gardener created a space of color and sound, committed his labor, his domestic animals, his treasured objects to the neighborhood without protection of ownership or permission. He demonstrated what was possible in the city, even for the poor. He took action, and, for a time, the area was transformed. I’m sure Wilson is not the only person who missed that little garden. The effects of such a garden, like the effects of Harfleet’s pansies, can’t be definitively explained. They make ghost trails of rhetorical work in the world. But the solitary gardener touched Wilson with his garden, left a mark in memory and an affective remnant. Wilson doesn’t claim that his neighbor built the garden for anyone other than himself. But because it was a garden, a landscape in shared space, it was an offering to others. It connected people to place, and, in Wilson’s case, to the gardener.

I originally conceived my own front yard garden as a space created for, and serving, only me and my household. In my imagination, the limit of my property acted as a wall against the public. That wall didn’t exist, as my neighborhood soon taught me. Gardening where other people have visual and physical access is a public act, and as I came to realize the effects I could have on the neighborhood, this fact made the garden much more rewarding. Balmori explores the social function of community gardens with similar conclusions. “Spaces in which community members interact with one another, they weave people into a neighborhood and enable them to combat some aspects of urban anomie. Here gardening and garden

118 making are activities that create a small, familiar, comprehensible and livable community within the urban metropolis”(Balmori and Morton 15).

The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens publication, Community Gardening, notes the broad range of sites within the category of community gardens: these may “operate on municipal land, land trusts, and private land; many are official, others are guerrilla acts of cultivation”(Kirby and Peters 5). The common element Kirby and

Peters identify across these differences “is that all of these gardens are created and maintained by members of the community for the benefit of the community”(5).

Gardens differ from other activist texts in their quality of collective, evolving authorship. Even collaboratively produced alphabetic or digital visual texts almost invariably present themselves in a manner that is interchangeable with single authorship. Gardens, due to their scale, their diverse, often uncohesive appearance, and their cultural associations, manifest, on the contrary, a recognizable group effort.

Activist gardeners are motivated, too, by recurring themes of collective concern: injustices related to food and environmental quality; building community; the need for sustainability in our urban practices. Rai observes that “collective public activities create a space for ongoing deeply situated and productive responses to the world”(207). In her interviews with community activists, Rai learned of a garden that had been started in 1994 to address local hunger (207). “At least one farmer I interviewed saw their work as creating an alternative market and distribution circuit as a counter-response to the systematic inequalities and means of distribution of capitalism”(Rai 207). Activist community gardens materialize

119 these micro and macro goals all over the world, responding to local need within a context of broader environmental, social, political, and economic patterns.

Ron Finley, whose 2013 TED talk, “A Guerilla Gardener in South Central LA,” has had 2,924, 598 views as of April 24, 2017, notes that 26.5 million Americans, including himself and his neighbors, live in food deserts (.53). After he started growing food on city land in front of his house - land, he points out, that the homeowner is responsible to maintain – someone complained and the city issued a citation for his garden (3:01). His volunteer organization, LA Green Grounds, involved the community and the press, and the citation was withdrawn (3:37).

Finley observes that the city of LA could plant 725 million tomato plants on vacant land that the city already owns (4:07). “People are dying of curable diseases,” he observes, the result of “the ill effects of the current food system”(1:37). “Gardening,”

Finley claims, “is the most therapeutic, also the most defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city”(6:06). Finely explains that he has “witnessed my garden become a tool… for the transformation of my neighborhood”(5:42) and proposes that through such work, “we can train those kids… to have a sustainable life”(8:28).

Finley defines his work in terms of communication, resistance, and social change.

“Gardening is my graffiti,” he says. “I grow my art”(5:00). His aim, beyond feeding people, is to “flip the script” (9:37) and persuade young people of color to become

“ecolutionaries” (9:31) and “change what gangsta is”(9:39) to: “get gangsta with your shovel. Let that be your weapon of choice”(9:46). Through community- produced food, the mind, body, and network of people are changed, bound more tightly together for a healthier and more sustainable future.

120 An example of similar work far from Los Angeles is the Program in Ecological

Agriculture and Society (PEAS) farm in Missoula, Montana, co-managed by Garden

City Harvest and the University of Montana Environmental Studies Program. The aims of the PEAS project are described on their website as follows: “Garden City

Harvest builds community through agriculture by growing produce with and for people with low incomes, offering education and training in ecologically conscious agriculture, and using our sites for the personal restoration of youth and adults”(Garden City Harvest). The farm has come to include the participation of an elementary school, young people convicted of drug offenses, patrons of the food kitchen, and low-income elderly people, as well as students at the University of

Montana.

The PEAS farm seeks to transform individuals through labor, interaction with the garden, access to fresh produce, and education, with local purposes spanning immediate food security and long-term sustainability. The farm has addressed the food needs of many individuals in the area, and it unexpectedly revealed a deep need for community that was met when the garden came into being.

Montana writer Jeremy Smith conducted interviews with fifteen participants in the PEAS farm project. His book, Growing a Garden City, offers a multi- dimensional perspective of the personal and social effects of the farm. With these interviews and photographs of the garden and its beneficiaries, Smith demonstrates the transformation of individuals through the material existence of the garden and the community the garden builds by inclusiveness, labor, and service. This farm embodies what Rai calls “deeply situated and productive responses to the

121 world”(207).

At PEAS farm, Community Gardens Director Tim Hall tells Smith, “There’s a social justice factor to helping others who can’t grow food or don’t have a place to do it, and to distributing food to those people”(Smith 75). Hall notes the importance of the garden site – central and publically held: “We’ve got these public lands – we can use them … for outdoor classrooms, for summer gardens, for places where people … can get together safely” (Smith 75). In the PEAS farm model, the community garden that elsewhere in this chapter has been created illegally or evolved from illicit to protected status is fully institutionalized. Yet its purpose is anti-hegemonic.

Neva Hassanein, University of Montana Professor of Environmental Studies, puts it this way: “Combine everyone’s actions and you get this cascade. As more and more people grow even a little bit of their own food and disconnect from that dominant system, they build an alternative system”(Smith 31). Jim Schenk, who helped establish a community garden in Cincinnati, Ohio and wrote an instruction manual, Starting Your Urban CSA, emphasizes the collaborative nature of the practice: “A community garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a group of people”(15). Schenk develops the definition by writing: “Community gardens provide fresh produce and give participants a sense of accomplishment through their labor in growing and harvesting the . They also create a connection to the environment and can promote community building and neighborhood improvement”(15).

Hassanein’s goal, to “disconnect” and build an alternative food system, is parallel to Schenk’s, who writes of his CSA: “What we really want to do is to develop

122 and demonstrate a new paradigm – a new way of living our lives – by creating relevant and useful jobs and simply living well with less”(49). The demonstration

Schenk refers to is the labor and product and material presence of the garden. The garden is the alternative in action. Schenk writes: “If we can begin to work outside the current economy, we can think about what is best for the farmer and how to make people see the worth in work like local farming”(49). In the embodied actions of gardening, Schenk identifies the potential for increased empathy, intellectual engagement, and attunement to sustainable practices. Johnson sees the same goals achieved, in part, through the sensory experience of the garden. “If homegrown food provides us with an instant wake-up call in flavor and freshness, and takes us outside of an industrial system… it likewise increases our chances of conscious consumption”(14).

Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal, authors of The Essential Urban

Farmer, put it this way: “We became passionate about urban farming for a variety of reasons. One is the way connects urban people to the food they are eating. … We realized that many city folks don’t think they can produce their own food, and so they miss out on these connections. By growing even a little food in the city, these experiences become accessible”(Carpenter and Rosenthal xi). Or, as Ron Finley declares in his TED talk, “If kids grow kale, they eat kale”(7:44).

All of these urban gardeners are deeply invested in sustainable practices, for the sake of human beings, and larger ecological systems. “Growing in the city also means that you can go a bit beyond organic by growing a variety of crops on one site

(instead of growing a single crop []), using water efficiently, integrating

123 livestock, and using city wastes to create a more closed-loop nutrient system”(Carpenter and Rosenthal xii). Riedner suggests that gardening is an

“assertion of agency and autonomy in the face of a global food crisis”(84). Though her example comes from gardening in Cape Town, South Africa, where hunger and poverty are extreme to a degree and on a scale far beyond food scarcity situations found in the United States, we can apply her insights. Riedner identifies gardening as “resistant cultural activity”(94) and points to the importance of seeking “nascent” political language(82).

Riedner’s project, to develop a transnational feminist literacy, “entails looking for activities and listening for words that do not assert themselves as political discourse yet offer an engaged critique of … political economic systems, and that suggest economic activities that are on the margins of discourse”(92). Riedner’s model, combined with the overlapping expressions of activist purpose from gardeners in this chapter, can direct us to read gardens “as locations of agency, autonomy, and praxis(88),” even though, as in the case of Riedner’s study, “women who grow gardens might not push for recognition from the public sphere”(Riedner

88).

Gardening need not seek recognition to transform. Because it is a collaborative work with nature, it makes even a solitary gardener a member of a community. And because it is a material project, visible, and three-dimensional, because it takes up space, most gardening becomes an event in the life of some public, however small or limited its scope. The act of gardening, like a plant, multiplies itself on many levels. It is not singular, and thus it becomes dialogic.

124 “Raising food,” as Carpenter and Rosenthal describe it, “is a constantly changing dialogue between you the farmer and the landscape, animals, community members, and political and social circumstances”(xiii).

One of the most famous and influential gardeners to harness this dialogue is

Will Allen, whose urban farm, deliberately sited in a former food desert in the city of

Milwaukee, has become a far-reaching organization of gardens and urban renewal projects. What began as a private urban farm in Milwaukee on which Allen did the bulk of the manual labor has grown into an organization, Growing Power, whose work with intensive urban agriculture, composting, farm-raised fish, and much more, resulted in Allen being awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

In the early chapters of his book, The Good Food Revolution, Allen includes a narrative about the unassuming beginning of his work. He describes driving past a

For Sale sign in front of some deserted and a barn in urban Milwaukee.

“The sign intrigued me,” he writes, “because of an idea I had held quietly in my heart”(Allen 13).

Allen’s work combines a commitment to growing food with a commitment to making urban communities healthier, more beautiful, and more economically self- sustaining. Industrial farming has disrupted relationships, Allen observes, “and it has torn the fabric of communities” (222-223). “The work of creating a new food system will offer work that engages both the spirit and the body. It will allow people the satisfaction of seeing and tasting the results of their labor. It will require the cultivation of human relationships that are off the grid, as well as an attitude of respect toward the natural world”(Allen 243). Here, Allen is describing the dialogue

125 that connects sensory experience with sustainability politics and physical work with community building.

Rai explores “how to account for the affective, sensual, emotional aspects of

[her] fieldwork as rhetorical objects of study”(195). She notes that not only are these difficult to capture, but it is “even harder to factor in how affective structures become embedded in the economies of rhetorical force”(Rai 195). She explores this question in her concluding pages through an example of smell. Rai admits that she might have missed the importance of the interview in which Jake talks about the odor of the Wilson stop on the eL train. Her resulting insight, that “smell, and other bodily experiences, become public, and, in becoming public, become part of the valences that make up rhetorical force”(Rai 196) helps to illuminate how landscapes operate with unique and powerful rhetorical tools unavailable to alphabetic and visual texts of material or digital form.

In the passages above, both Johnson and Allen refer to the persuasive power of the taste of locally grown food. Allen includes the sight and taste of food people have labored to grow themselves alongside such benefits as engaging the spirit

(Allen 243) and Johnson suggests that “homegrown food provides us with an instant wake-up call in flavor and freshness” which, she argues, is powerful enough to take us “outside of an industrial system” (14). Gardens transform through an array of persuasive tools alphabetic text can never replicate.

Slotnick describes the response of people in Missoula to the farm: “I think the town needed a public farm. People drive by, they walk by, they come here, and they congregate. It’s part of the public sphere and public dialogue and culture”(Smith

126 15). Again and again, descriptions of community food sites articulate the power of landscape to bind people to a place and to each other.

The domestic garden is an interface between the privacy of the house and the civic property of the street. “It is a space onto which others can look, examine and judge,’” notes Taylor (7). As a result, “gardening, gardens, flowers, planting have frequently been a terrain for ideological struggle”(Taylor 9). Activist gardeners, whether their gardens are readily visible to the public at large or not, project their work for the examination and judgment of others to promote their aims. Writing in

2010, Johnson notes: “more and more North Americans … are planting edible food gardens. Some are doing it for the simple pleasures of productivity. Others are making more declarative, political, social, cultural, and economic statements”(6-7).

Describing an urban gardening neighbor in California, Carpenter writes admiringly “if you’re Willow, you might … Create a farm in a city lot, sell produce on a corner, show urban kids where eggs come from. Plant in the cracks of the city”(61). Carpenter met Willow through gardening, and they later wrote a book together about their shared passion: “urban farming is a way for people of all income levels to eat fresh, local, organic food”(Carpenter and Rosenthal xi-xii).

Finley says in his TED talk that “kids of color are on a track that’s designed for them

… it leads to nowhere”(8:17). All of these gardeners see a connection between empowerment and what we eat.

Allen articulates the direct link between oppression and food. “I believe that equal access to healthy, affordable food should be a civil right – every bit as important as access to clean air, clean water, or the right to vote”(Allen 7). As a

127 result, his activism spans community food security and repairing the damage history has done to the relationship between African Americans and food production. “I realized that by bringing farming and fresh food to the city, I could play a part in healing a painful rift in African American history between its agricultural past and its urban present. I could help to rebrand farming as something that could be entrepreneurial and black-owned rather than something associated with and slavery”(Allen 206).

The gardeners in this chapter seek to repair the relationship between urban life and living landscapes. All express and support the humanity and importance of underserved and disenfranchised people, while bringing disparate members of communities together through food and land. The rhetorics performed here may have produced results that include books and documentary photographs, but in every case, the primary text is the three dimensional, living, evolving, unpredictable, landscape itself.

Johnson observes that guerrilla gardeners “scout the urban landscape for neglected sites and intervene…. Gardeners without land find land without gardeners”(157). In Growing a Garden City, Gita Saedi Kiely, a 2nd Street Community

Garden member, articulates the desire to reclaim unutilized public space: “we had an adjacent weed-infested dirt lot just staring us in the face. It was forgotten city land”(Smith 59). Describing Tolmers Square garden, created in the mid-1970’s in

London, McKay writes of “the importance of this new community action space … being a garden: an open-air, visible, accessible, statement of community action – a green corner plot of shrubs, lawn, flower beds, decorated with bright wall paintings

128 – an attractive space of cross-generational congregation, from children’s playground to fund-raising jumble sale stalls – a public demonstration of transformation – an on-going work of environmental concern, inscribed with demands and expectations of future (gardening) activity”(180).

Nick Wates, who has written and collaborated on a series of histories of

Tolmers Square, describes how in Tolmers Village prior to the garden, “there was nowhere for kids to play, nowhere for old people to sit, no trees, no gardens, and nowhere to hold community events”(144). The local TVA took note of a site “empty since the war when the original houses were bombed” and asked the company who owned it if the community might make a garden there (Wates 145). When the request was refused, the TVA decided to make a garden there anyway. Wates notes that “squatting empty property was … the major form of direct action”(144). In addition, “The legal position over squatting vacant land (as opposed to buildings) was not clear … In theory the occupiers would be committing a civil offence of trespass, but the police could do nothing unless any vandalism or nuisance occurred”(Wates 145). Furthermore, “The TVA’s lawyers thought it unlikely that the owners would take any action, especially if public opinion could be galvanized”(Wates 145). The day before the planned occupation, the organizers prepared press releases and distributed leaflets and the following afternoon, a large group of community members carried away trash, built and painted a picket fence, and had no trouble from the local police (Wates 145). Tolmers Square Garden was born. To consider gardens clean-up efforts, or beautification projects, in other words, does not read deeply enough into their purposes or effects. As I argue

129 throughout this work, a garden can develop purpose through its effects, so the intention of a project does not necessarily contain the communicative potential of a garden. Landscapes must be studied as complex combinations of rhetorical elements, including the response of their audience and participants over time.

Gravel writes about the Atlanta Beltline and other public projects as “catalyst infrastructure”(141). “Our primary goal,” he explains, “is … to create opportunities for people to lead the kind of lives that they want”(Gravel 161). Activist landscapes are vital to such an undertaking because, according to Gravel, “when infrastructure is done well, it compels others – hundreds, possibly millions of people – to create a better life for themselves”(161). Gravel identifies infrastructure as an element that provides people with incentive and opportunity for living differently. “While new infrastructures might also create beautiful landscapes or make convenient connections, their central purpose is to compel people to bring their city to life”(Gravel 161). Gravel’s repeated use of the word compel illustrates the activist quality of his urban planning: a combination of deliberate purpose and awareness of the effects of material change on individual and community behavior.

We don’t automatically associate infrastructure with nature, and Gravel ties this disconnect to bad decisions municipalities have made in urban planning.

Among his examples of catalyst infrastructure, Gravel describes the influence of

New York City’s High Line project, a long-shot idea that persuaded city planners and spawned a movement. “Neighborhoods across the region have been scouring their back alleys and forgotten corners to find any obsolete infrastructure or otherwise abandoned space that might be repurposed for transformative effect”(Gravel 145).

130 It is interesting to note how many of these infrastructure ideas foreground nature.

“There’s the 3.5 mile QueensWay in Queens that proposes a multiuse trail and greenway. There’s the Harsimus Stem Embankment across the Hudson River in

Jersey City, which envisions a six-block-long nature walk and wildlife habitat”(Gravel 145). On the Lower East side, “visionaries have invented ‘remote skylights’ to draw sufficient natural sunlight into an abandoned subway terminal to permit photosynthesis in plants and transform the space into the world’s first underground park”(Gravel 145).

In Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates project, he explains the potential of the front yard to challenge the rigid customs of domestic landscape and transform how people live. While lawns are not an element of infrastructure, their ubiquitousness compels householders to conform to that particular landscape custom (as discussed in chapter 2), and, contrarily, the rejection of this custom may provide the incentive and opportunity for change that Gravel advocates in urban planning. Haeg writes,

“The garden stories presented here, with all of their challenges and rewards, are intended to reveal something about how we are living today and to offer you some inspiration to plant your own version of an Edible Estate. By attacking the front lawn, an essential icon of the American Dream, my hope is to ignite a chain reaction of thoughts that question other antiquated conventions of home, street, neighborhood, city, and global networks that we take for granted”(8).

As with so many examples in my work here, I cite Haeg’s writing about his project. But the text he published is secondary to the digging and planting and finally photographing of front yards that are three- dimensionally present in the

131 lives of their creators and their community. “If we see that our neighbor’s typical lawn instead can be a beautiful food garden,” Haeg argues, “perhaps we begin to look at the city around us with new eyes. The seemingly inevitable urban structures start to unravel as we recognize that we have a choice about how we want to live and what we want to do with the places we have inherited from previous generations”(8). It is not his book to which he entrusts the spread of his ideas, but to the landscape texts he has helped people create in front of their homes.

Decades before the better-known projects of Michael Pollan, Barbara

Kingsolver and others, Joan Dye Gussow was growing the bulk of her family’s fruit and vegetable requirements on a suburban lot in the Northeast. Gussow wrote in her 2001 book, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader, that “the impulse to make such a demonstration grew out of my conviction that we all had to relearn our dependence on the land”(175). Gussow writes, “We engaged in this self- reliance experiment to show that seasonal, local eating can be feasible”(107).

“Much of what had happened as my husband and I searched for a last resting place short of the grave was a continuation of my effort to live what I preached – that bringing food-growing closer to home might be the only thing that could assure the world enough food forever”(Gussow x).

Barbara Kingsolver, in her memoir of a year of self-sustaining family gardening, writes: “It is not my intention here to lionize country wisdom over city ambition. I only submit that the children of farmers are likely to know where food comes from, and that the rest of us might do well to pay attention” (8). Writing in

2007, Kingsolver echoes Gussow: “We hoped to prove – at least to ourselves – that a

132 family living on or near green land need not depend for its life on industrial food”

(22).

Carpenter writes of her neighborhood in Oakland California, known as

GhostTown, “the neighborhood had a whiff of anarchy – real anarchy, not the theoretical world of my former roommates. In the flatlands, whole neighborhoods were left with the task of sorting out their problems” (12). Of her gardening transformation there, Carpenter writes, “In Seattle, my mostly hidden freak flag had been being a backyard chicken owner, beekeeper, and vegetable gardener. I got off on raising my own food. Not only was it more delicious and fresh; it was also essentially free. Now I was taking it to the next level” (12). In GhostTown,

Carpenter gardened on a vacant lot next door to where she lived, and, after a few years, “recognized that I was descending deeper into the realm of the underground economy” (12). “I felt ready for what seemed like the next logical progression”

(Carpenter 12), which was, in her case, raising animals for food: first fowl, then rabbits, then pigs, all in the inner city.

Of the link between food and politics, Jennifer Cockrall- King writes:

“Revolutions happen for a reason. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and yet, paradoxically, they are undernourished at the same time. Hunger is a growing problem not just in faraway places but right in our hometowns, with demands on the services of food banks and other hunger-relief programs reportedly increasing by double-digits annually”(19). Cockrall-King argues that the industrial food system is a

“catastrophic failure,” resulting in the inequity that “one billion people are overfed while another billion people go to bed hungry every night … We have more than enough

133 food, but those in need get too little or the wrong kind of food”(19). Cockrall-King investigates urban food-growing projects around the world in an effort to document the options to industrial food, and how many people are involving themselves in these alternatives. In this global context, every food garden, whether self-consciously so or not, is a political act.

Slotnick explains: “community supported agriculture is where a community of people band together to support a farm, but the PEAS Farm also worked the opposite way. We agriculturally supported the community” (Smith 11). While it is necessary for individuals who can’t or don’t wish to grow food to understand and invest in local food so that it remains an option, we can’t let ourselves think of farmers as merely vulnerable enthusiasts in need of rescue like an abandoned puppy. They may someday stand between urban dwellers and the abyss. “Food security,” Slotnick explains, “meant two things. One, people would have access to food. They would know they could eat tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Two, the production of food would be similarly available. The way we produced food now would also enable us to produce food in the future”(Smith 7).

As I have tried to show in this chapter, landscapes are host to a range of activist rhetorics. They illustrate communications about disenfranchisement of all sorts, be it lack of access to shelter, green space, safe play, or food security. Spaces that might seem, by their mere description, entirely positive, or at least innocuous, are contested, threatened, at best unsupported by public policy and at worst regularly destroyed. The makers of gardens who understand the deep politicization of property, nourishment, and access to education that empowers the poor (as well

134 as everyone else), are best prepared to defend against such threats. Those who can harness the tremendous visibility of landscape texts, their social qualities, and the reach of their ability to meet social change goals have greatly increased their rhetorical scope.

135

Chapter Four

Greening Composition: Rhetoric and the Study of Place

You will move into the garden as into the ‘otherness’ of an unknown place. - Russell Page The Education of a Gardener

This chapter seeks to develop generative connections between the rhetorical, activist qualities of gardens and themes in composition theory and pedagogy. I have argued that composition is ready for an ecological turn, not only in the methodology of its analysis of writing, or in the subject matter for its texts, but in its critical focus.

I suggest that we must explicitly include horticultural texts in our critical frame, and teach students to read and interpret landscapes as cultural work with important effects. Gardens offer a material site and a metaphor by which to broaden our understanding of rhetoric and composition, and to increase the rhetorical archive and opportunities for scholarship. Furthermore, reading gardens rhetorically provides a framework for theorizing some of the toughest aims of composition: ethical development and social action.

It is my intention here to meet the impulse, (increasingly apparent in the writing of humanities scholars) to address the network of social, economic, and ecological concerns that accompany climate change. I have argued for an expansion of our definition of texts to include material sites that are host to both climate- related problems and their solutions; I have suggested that by recognizing the rhetorical potential of landscapes – gardens in particular – we expand the repertoire of activist discourse. In this chapter, I will attempt to articulate the bridge between

136 those aims and the practical teaching of composition in the university.

Gardens are both a valuable metaphor and more than a metaphor. In my own life the garden is a literal composition through which I express my environmental values and commitments. It also serves as a site for exploration of my ideas about rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. It is from gardening that I have really come to understand the collaborative agency involved in rhetorical creation, the messy, busy unpredictability of audience, and the evolving, unstable aspects of purpose.

The question I have investigated throughout this project is how to replicate the combination of emotional-social-intellectual experience I have in the garden while encouraging students to grapple with complex systems of academic and civic participation and communication. Though drawing parallels between gardens and composition has left some of my questions unanswered, I am convinced that from the study and practices of gardening we may draw useful lessons for instructing college students in the ways of writing. I am also convinced that gardens offer a way for composition to deliver its rhetoric of social justice in the public sphere while simultaneously performing the values we promote.

Gardens, especially the food gardens to which I have devoted the majority of my pages, have the potential to increase food justice; transform places we live and work for the health and well-being of all (human and nonhuman) who occupy them, provide sustainable, rewarding, and healthy economic options for employment, and form a key piece of environmental conservation and protection in the places where

137 human beings are most densely concentrated. Gardens can do all of this while eloquently communicating, like living billboards.

However it is not my aim to transform composition into a course in botany and horticulture, nor, as I will explain below, is it really necessary that composition instructors incorporate the natural world. It is my intention to encourage a recommitment to the origin of the work we ask students to do, which can, and often does, become a mechanical, impersonal, disassociated practice of rhetorical art. I believe that the study of rhetoric – extended to include the rhetorics available in the material living world - can instead be a balm for the soul, a fresh strategy for exploring and addressing the problems of our world. Why not?

Missing Places

I worked for many years in public schools, where, even when there was very little money for clean facilities, technology, or infrastructure as basic as tables and chairs, there was opportunity for students and teachers to infuse the sites of learning with some personality, some lingering marker of the individuals who worked there. Even when I shared classrooms with other teachers, I could leave indications of myself, and of students, in the rooms; books and other belongings remained from day to day to anchor us in the continuum of our experience together.

Furthermore, teacher and students alike had a responsibility for the space in which we worked. We kept our area neat and clean, because educational funds for janitorial staff in public schools are very limited. These elements of teaching and learning - continuity and responsibility - are absent in the spaces of composition

138 instruction at the university.

While I understand the practical reasons for this fact, we have long operated as if the effects of this state of affairs are inconsequential to our task. Perhaps they are not. While money is a factor in furniture, lighting, and other design and aesthetic decisions, the shabby appearance and lack of comfort in the humanities building at the university where I study and teach reflects a belief system that excludes and undervalues place, with its attendant materiality and the embodiment of the people teaching and learning there. These values elevate the importance of the mind above the experience and environs of the body.

Our inattention to college classrooms is important because it echoes other inattentions to public space, to community space, to a shared responsibility for the places upon which – to varying degrees – we depend. It could be argued that one of the implicit lessons we teach in academic life is detachment from place. We operate as if the site of learning does not matter, and, as Owens points out, “The local places that students and staff and faculty go home to … remain largely invisible, supposedly unrelated to the activity of the academy, despite mission statement rhetoric about serving community and helping students become responsible citizens”(70). It seems possible, even likely, that various efforts and commitments our field has pursued have been frustrated or less than fully actualized by this missing piece. Of our lack of knowledge about the places our students and colleagues live Owens asks,

“What impact does this detachment have on one’s teaching? One’s profession? One’s students?”(36).

139 What Owens describes as “detachment” takes many forms in academic life. I have mentioned the spaces of learning, but the materials of learning are also a culprit. I am certainly not alone in regularly assigning texts out of their place: Xerox copies, PDFs or links devoid of their original context comprise the bulk of my assigned reading. While we, the instructors, have built an awareness of the look and often feel of the journals, magazines, websites, books, and newspapers from which we draw materials for study in our courses, students frequently have not. The words we use for the containers from which texts are obtained are often unfamiliar to them, as are the arrangements within such containers. I have been repeatedly surprised over the years to find that students are struggling to make a New Yorker cartoon fit with the nonfiction essay they are reading.

Owens’ critique also implicates academic discourse, calling it “a placeless discourse: the constant flow of monographs and articles and papers, so many composed as if by disembodied entities detached from any specific locale”(36). If our primary task in composition has been to acclimate students to academic writing

- both the reading of it and its production – this scholarly aloofness from place is self-perpetuating.

In rhetorical education, as it is presented in composition courses, we rarely attend to the place in which our activity is sited, the situation in which it will be consumed, or the place toward which it is directed. Even composing that last sentence is challenging. We know that someone is expected to read the words we arrange, but the location where the reading will take place is not a factor in our rhetorical calculations. How place attaches writer to reader, its relevance to the

140 communicative bridges built by pathos and ethos, these are not subjects for consideration in the style manuals and composition readers I have seen. The student writer is expected to imagine the reader she or he seeks to persuade as only a disembodied mind. Not a person in a chair, or on a lawn, or in a train. No growling stomach, drooping eyelid, sleeping child.

I perceive a relationship between longstanding approaches to writing instruction and a hesitance, reluctance, or downright resistance on the part of many composition students. I think it is possible that through the encouragement of scholarly attachment to place we can reanimate rhetorical study in student imagination. This effort can take an infinite variety of forms: it is not necessary that all composition instructors incorporate the natural world. But the lessons my own gardening offered, in combination with insights I drew from other gardeners, have informed my ideas for acquainting composition more closely with place.

Josh Slotnick, PEAS farm director, says that students working on a small farm

“belong to each other, to the place, and to the activity.” He explains that working on a farm allows you to realize “that you are necessary”(Smith 14). Though I have struggled mightily in my own varied classrooms to persuade writers that their work is worthwhile and valued, and while I have polished my argument that the skills I promote have use in other situations, I am sure I have never assigned composition projects that allowed students to feel that their labor was necessary.

If attending college is an articulation of ambition, a commitment to the future, it is worth noting also how often place represents that future. We talk to young people about the place they hope to work and the place they want to live.

141 Aspirations often take the form of locations: New York, L.A., Atlanta, Chicago. There are powerful links between place and the skills we hope to impart to undergraduates in composition, links that we can maximize to improve student investment and increase the opportunity for their learning. Dobrin writes:

“Ecocomposition looks to engage place as rhetoric, that is ecocomposition sees … composition as activity and rhetoric as environment” (Ecocomposition 22). In this combining of elements sometimes viewed as distinct, we increase the chance that students will discover how and where they are necessary, and through that discovery, how and where their rhetoric is necessary.

Dobrin argues for “the opportunity for students and teachers to participate in, react with, and relate to their surrounding environments and to the organisms that they encounter in those environments. “Ecocomposition is a participatory discipline,” he writes, “it requires hands-on living”( Ecocomposition 18). Though

Slotnick and Dobrin advocate participatory learning from different roles and circumstances, their similar call highlights the deficit of such hands-on activity in many composition courses. Ecocomposition, and the rhetoric and activism possible through engagement with landscapes, are activities inseparable from physical place.

Yet besides courses in which place-based pedagogy is at work, place is considered optional in the teaching of composition, if it is considered at all.

Treatments of Place in Composition

Dobrin’s essay, “Writing Takes Place,” contains the line: “We write our places and in turn our places write us”(Ecocomposition 18). Framed in this way, place-

142 based composition is an experience of self-discovery, connecting the individual, the environment, and the practice of writing. Not only connecting, in the sense of a private, individual, enclosed circuit of learning, but developing simultaneously a deeper appreciation for the interaction between self and place in order to see how the individual takes part in and is formed by the larger world. Dobrin’s choice of words, “our places write us” is not in the past tense, but suggests instead an ongoing collaboration.

Nathaniel Rivers describes this in terms of “rhetoric as cultivation,” suggesting we define rhetoric as “a means of social, biological, and environmental persuasion by which we cobble together both ourselves as a species and the places we inhabit”(17). Donehower, Hogg, and Schell note that most composition readers seeking to embrace diverse perspectives focus on race, class, gender, and ethnicity, omitting “identities tied to region, place, and geography”(156). This tendency to omit place is a pervasive cultural trend, and our replication of it in our pedagogy and our theory has serious unintended, unstudied consequences for our students and our shared world.

By contrast, attention to place in the college composition course has the potential to ground the individual, connect members of the learning community to one another, and build a base awareness necessary for understanding and taking on the challenges to place in the world beyond the university. Owens has found that exploring their place of origin helps students cope with the anonymity of the college experience (36). He also values the opportunity this type of writing offers for providing students a subject about which they can “speak with authority”(Owens

143 36). I know from experience that even well-planned and sincere efforts to build community and engage students in a classroom are challenged by the many demands on the brief time we share, and by the pressure writing instructors feel to set expectations and establish a tone of serious work in a course that many students struggle to define or value. Yet as I have pursued the perfect recipe for galvanizing students as writers and committed intellectual peers in my composition courses, I have found that investing myself in their self-assurance and their pre-existing knowledge improves attendance, attention, support for the work of other students, critical thinking, and the quality of student writing.

Reynolds identifies the challenge of studying a sense of place (120) but I find, too, that through this alteration of frame each piece of composition and rhetoric instruction is refreshed. Haraway proposes that nature is “a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician’s place or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is, strictly, a commonplace”(159). Nature’s very ordinariness, perhaps, has allowed academics in the humanities to neglect it; as a result we have forgotten the scale of its importance. She suggests: “We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory. As topic in this sense, nature also reminds us that in seventeenth-century English the ‘topick gods’ were the local gods, the gods specific to places and peoples”(Haraway 159). Nature, as Haraway observes, is so essential to human experience that it organizes our communication, facilitates our capacity to remember. Yet while we have let industrialization and technology lull us into thinking the natural world is a servant, a vacation, a wallpaper, its role in writing

144 assigned to poets and the too-long bits in John Steinbeck novels, it has slipped further from our lives, our discourse, and our memory.

Throughout this project I have included the words of gardeners, writers, and teachers who claim that we need nature: that our bodies, our intellects and our communities depend on relationship with this feature of the world that exists - sometimes unrecognized or unattended - at the core of our humanity. Louv writes,

“The postmodern notion that reality is only a construct – that we are what we program – suggests limitless human possibilities; but as the young spend less and less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically, and this reduces the richness of human experience”(3). Explicitly returning physical places to rhetorical instruction can serve to reconnect students to the richness of their surroundings, and can, in turn, enrich their emotional and intellectual involvement in rhetoric – a commitment that is part of growing up and an essential part of citizenship.

Of the deep importance of the ‘topick gods,’ Haraway writes: “We need these spirits rhetorically if we can’t have them any other way. We need them in order to reinhabit, precisely, common places – locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly, enspirited – that is, topical”(Haraway 159). This reinhabitation of place is what I argue is possible in composition. “In this sense,” Haraway concludes,

“nature is the place in which to rebuild public culture”(159).

Learning to Dwell Through the Study of Place

In this chapter I will consider ways that composition can include the study of

145 place and why it should do so. Education has collaborated in the forgetfulness that displays itself across our decisions: from our grocery carts to our lawns, from our urban planning to our national environmental policies. It is entirely possible to use education, composition courses specifically, to remember, rejoin, reinhabit lives in tune with nature before it’s too late. Haraway claims an intimate tie between rhetoric and place, a relationship essential to the quality of public life. Through one, we can teach the other, for mutual, and communal benefit. As I explore the connections between place and composition instruction in this chapter I will argue for an altered frame in our instructional practices.

I suggest that we turn our rhetorical study outward, emphasizing rhetoric as connection, as service, as a collaborative form of persuasion dependent upon reflective observation. This outward-looking emphasis diminishes the magnitude of student identity in the formula of our attention. Owens frames the composition course in terms of personal growth: “we can envision composition studies as environmental studies – not as an offshoot of ecology but as the study of one’s immediate and future environs … so that students might explore how their identities have been composed by such places and vice versa” (6). I suggest that instead of foregrounding student identity in our vision of the course, we amplify observation of the role an individual plays in the complex system of geography and community. There are plentiful opportunities for insights about the self available through this approach; the difference is the core goal. Rickert writes that “an ambient rhetoric opposes the rather entrenched idea that we all have ‘worldviews,’ or different ways of seeing the world dependent on the cultural or ideological lenses

146 through which it appears. An ambient rhetoric attends to ways of being in the world, whereas such being, while it can certainly cultivate a sense of worldviews, cannot rest there”(xvi).

Norton and Goldblatt argue for Linda Flower’s vision of a turn toward the rhetoric of public engagement, citing Flower’s recommendation that we utilize “‘the local, intercultural publics of community literacy by circulating new models of dialogue across difference’”(49; emphasis added). In order to accomplish this,

Norton and Goldblatt suggest that “WPA’s and other students of composition/rhetoric to apply their experience and knowledge to endeavors outside of the writing classroom in collaboration with scholars from other disciplines and people who do not earn their living in schools”(49). I would encourage the rhetoric of public engagement to involve the rhetorical analysis and production of landscapes and other public sites. The study of gardens as locations of public rhetoric can highlight the value of literacies available outside of the academy – precisely those local, intercultural literacies mentioned above. Outdoor environments are literally outside of the academy; their analysis and production is a mode that may be uniquely well suited to equalizing collaborative discourse.

Teaching composition through the study of place is not an effort that must by necessity remain localized. In the chapter, Toward a Sustainable Citizenship and

Pedagogy, Donehower, Hogg, and Schell write that students can “transfer their knowledge of one place … to reinhabit another”(Rural Literacies 187). If we are to ask students to perform this transfer, however, we should first provide opportunities to access and develop the knowledge of local places they do possess.

147 Reading landscapes requires a defined and practiced critical literacy. Both the rhetorics of local places and their connection to the systems of the rest of the world, be these economic streams, waste, water, air pollution, labor issues, toxins, etc., must be learned; a process of critical exploration of place must be learned, for reinhabitation of other sites to be thoughtful, purposeful and responsible.

Dobrin explains the intellectual link between rhetorical instruction and place by noting: “the rhetorical construction of Florida affects what my students see when they see the environment”(Ecocomposition 16). Dobrin’s observation is useful in two ways: rhetorical analysis of the constructions of Florida will help students understand how their perceptions are influenced by what they see, hear, and read.

It also underscores the importance of teaching students to form conclusions through first-hand observation in order to carefully assess notions they might otherwise be persuaded to adopt.

There is more to do with a study of place than simply improve student compositions and critical thinking. Rickert explains the deep interrelationship of rhetoric to place in terms of dwelling: “Rhetoric accomplishes its work by inducing us to shift … how we dwell or see ourselves dwelling in the world. Rhetoric does not just change subjective states of mind; it transforms our fundamental disposition concerning how we are in the world, how we dwell”(xiii). Rickert’s explanation emphasizes the material quality of intellectual understanding. The world and the self intersect, exist in relation to one another. Rickert describes the physicality of rhetorical work by involving it in relationship with community and site, writing, “I use the term dwelling here to mean how people come together to flourish (or try to

148 flourish) in a place, or better, how they come together in the continual making of a place; at the same time, that place is interwoven through their dwelling practices”(xiii). Rhetoric is not merely an intellectual concept in this framework, instead, persuasion does embodied work amid material circumstances.

How do we teach an understanding of rhetoric that transforms the qualities of mind and character? How do we teach rhetoric that is meant to work in necessary relation to place? In Why We Garden, Jim Nollman argues that “Gardening encourages a hands-on complicity with local nature. I call the perceptions that inform this participation a sense of place”(2). Nollman identifies perception as the precursor to information. Gardening, Pollan writes, “is a painstaking exploration of place; everything that happens in my garden… teaches me to know this patch of land more intimately”(63). The part this intimate knowing plays in rhetorical practice is one of the elements of persuasive composing the study of place can contribute to our field. Pollan goes on to note: “My garden prospers to the extent I grasp these particularities and adapt to them”(63).

Intimacy involves a relation between actors. Nollman observes: “gardening books… set out to demonstrate the myriad ways a gardener can act upon a garden.

This book prefers to stand that relationship on its head by imbuing gardens with a life and purpose all their own”(5). Nollman’s point, that garden articles and books imbue the gardener with all the agency, can be applied to much of rhetorical instruction. The rhetor is granted both power and responsibility for deciding purpose, understanding audience, choosing the moment, and performing the communicative act. Nollman suggests “redefining gardening, not as control, but as

149 nurturing – a nurturing participation with the natural processes of place”(5).

In City Farmer, Johnson includes an anecdote about a meeting of a organization called Yes In My Backyard. Yes In My Backyard is a program through which people with underused backyards make their space available to gardeners who need a piece of land. Johnson writes that what was expressed most often “was a yearning for something missing or lost”(60). Composition, occurring at the start of undergraduates’ college experience, and combining students across disciplines, is in a unique position to facilitate recognition of what students yearn for, in order to encourage their belonging in academia and in public life.

Botanist-ecologist Stan Rowe identifies the basis of this yearning as the

Western philosophy that separates nature, self, and art. According to Rowe: “when these things are closely examined, a network of binding connections and interrelationships is discovered; the trinity is one” (71). Rowe argues that the division serves a hegemonic purpose. “An un-human spiritless world of Nature is necessary to sustain belief in autonomous people and also to justify … despoliation of the separate other-world”(73). The division Rowe identifies is reinforced through countless scholarly and cultural practices. “The resulting alienation,” Rowe claims, “reveals itself in uneasiness, in a restless search for roots in the past and for directions to the future to give meaning to the here and now. Reestablishing ties with the ancient dwelling place, the Home Place, is a largely unrecognized but widespread preoccupation”(73). As we have detached ourselves from direct dependence on the landscapes around us and the accompanying knowledge and pleasure they offer, we have lost a route to human purpose and connection.

150 Scholars throughout this work have written from various perspectives about this disconnection and the necessity for its repair. This is what I understand Haraway to mean when she suggests that we must find another relationship to nature (158).

“Dwelling,” Rickert writes, “is an attunement that can generate various kinds of knowledge, in particular a knowledge of how the world gives back… or how the world transcendent of human thought and power is integral to how life takes shape”(27). The world to which Rickert refers is not only the natural world, in the sense of a garden; his ambient rhetoric includes all the parts of the world that touch us as human beings. It is not that we have to literally garden in order to put these insights to use, instead, we have to relate to our environment as a gardener does, no matter what our subject. Pollan writes: “Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place” and describes gardening as, consequently, “an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery”(64).

Owens’ definition of sustainability pedagogy could be described as an effort to teach students to dwell. “Educators,” he writes, “have a responsibility to help students resist the cynicism and hyperboredom of contemporary consumer culture by discovering the kind of self-worth that comes from being “ amazed at one’s local worlds”(Owens 69). Slotnick describes the contrast between the image of the university as an “ivory tower isolated from its surrounding community” and the student farm (Smith 4). At the PEAS farm, “course work is valued not just as a formal learning exercise or a letter grade,” Slotnick explains, “but also for the vital nourishment – tens of thousands of pounds of fresh local organic produce – it provides to people in need”(Smith 4). Tim Ballard, Youth Harvest Director at PEAS

151 farm observes: “there was a disconnect for the kids between what they were doing and where the efforts of their labor would go. Meanwhile there was a real need within the senior population for fresh produce”(Smith 164).

At PEAS, the work students do has a tangible outcome for the broader community. PEAS student Cori Ash tells Smith: “In every job I was producing real things I could put my hands around. Pulling carrots or picking kale, I felt something bigger than myself. A good life will include work that feels necessary, and if everybody’s got to eat, someone needs to grow food”(23). What participants at the

PEAS farm learn, about themselves and their locality, occurs within a purpose bigger than they are. The study of place, the relationship among rhetoric, place, and people, can help us access this purpose for students.

“Collaborative literate action,” write Donehower et al., “is the best hope of ensuring a sustainable future for rural communities – collaborative action undertaken by a variety of stakeholders, rural, urban, and suburban, on issues of common concern such as sustainable systems of education, economic development, and environmental policies” (Rural xii-xiii). All of our students are stakeholders in some community and all of those communities face interrelated challenges. The study of place in the composition course may pale in comparison to physically composing in landscape forms or conducting experiential learning courses outside of campus boundaries, but Owens finds that “students are genuinely interested in learning about each other’s communities”(36) and the place-based extension of subject matter may be the most practical first step toward engaging with the world beyond the classroom. The study of place in the composition course provides an

152 opportunity for connection across diverse situations as well as a chance for critical and productive analysis of differences.

Johnson’s description of the Advent Lutheran Church garden in Toronto illustrates how differences can become a shared resource, binding a community and increasing the value of its projects. “With twenty-six different language and culture groups in the parish, immigrants and refugees from around the world make up the majority of the Advent Lutheran Church garden’s plot holders, and the food they grow is equally diverse,” she writes (120). Place, while intimately tied to our identity, is also a relatively defused aspect of the self, an element both individual and common to all.

Pastor Mills describes the effects of the community garden to Johnson:

‘There has been a real shift for the church, a change in our fundamental self- understanding - this is everyone’s land, not just our own.’ ’’ Mills tells Johnson that working the land has influenced the church theology: ‘This isn’t a theology that’s separate - this is a theology that grows out of common acts of living together’”

(Johnson 122). The very real and pressing challenges to place in our times require both place-based literacies and enduring, productive communities that function beyond college writing classrooms. Seeking “to explore the relationship between the spatial and the social”(86), Reynolds advocates “attention to dwellings – the places we most intimately or frequently occupy – and to dwelling, as a way of being in the world that helps us re-imagine acts of writing and theories of composing”(140). The way of being in the world that individuals involved with the

PEAS farm and Advent Lutheran Church describe is one that extends beyond the

153 time period in which the course occurs, and beyond the individual to a community of shared values.

Approaching Rhetorical Places in Composition Pedagogy

My experience as a composition instructor, tasked with assigning undergraduates to increase the intellectual complexity of their writing, has often been that students produce critical prose that is decontextualized, shallow, unsatisfactory to read and unsatisfying to write. Even when they perceive writing as a skill they believe they should improve, students regularly approach the composition course as a bitter pill, not an opportunity for discovery, pleasure, and self-actualization.

I make these claims primarily, but not exclusively, based on my own direct experience teaching composition after more than a decade as a writing teacher to students from the age of twelve to sixty-five. Over the course of almost two decades

I have investigated writing as a writer, a teacher, a mentor to other teachers, and a student of writing pedagogy. While it is treacherous ground to suggest that we have a universal problem in the discipline, I feel it is safe to say there is widespread dissatisfaction with the methodology of writing instruction among teachers and students alike. Teachers of undergraduate writers know that students often engage reluctantly with research materials and processes, struggle to incorporate research sources into their own prose, and arrive at conclusions neither original nor surprising. To put the matter bluntly, students are not consistently researching, reading, thinking, or writing in a way that provides them with a deep learning

154 experience. Of course this is not true in every case, and many creative, committed writing instructors provide composition courses that accomplish all of the above.

My intention is not to critique students or writing instructors but to recognize a dysfunction that affects us all. This being said, all of my assertions may be assumed to stem from my own failings and stumbles over the years.

Over time, I have noted how different the lives of the undergraduates in my classes are from my life when I first went to college. In the short term, many students juggle commutes and jobs, and their academic work is threaded with long- term financial worry. The idea I held of undergraduate life as recently as five years ago when I left public school teaching to return to graduate school was already well out of date. I imagined undergraduates with time to reflect, with obsessive interest in learning for the sake of learning, students whose long afternoons included reading and deep conversation. I have found, instead, young people whose lives are stressed and distracted. I want the work we do to teach them about composition, research, critical thinking, and experiential learning, but I also want to provide an experience in contrast to their daily lives. I want to give them a space of productive rest. This, like so much of what I have written in these pages, is inspired by the garden. Working on the garden is physically hard, sometimes even painful; the tasks I set myself can seem, at times, hopeless or impossible, but I almost always approach it with eagerness, because I so often step away from it feeling deeply restored.

Baraton writes that “the traditional function of the garden, of all gardens, even the Garden of Eden, was to nourish their inhabitants, and although the

155 seventeenth century saw the appearance of purely ornamental gardens, it did not escape this rule”(157). The nurture provided by a garden extends beyond the maintenance of the body through food to a more complex form of sustenance.

Baraton explains: “It is revealing to see how fast people walk down the street on

Paris’s Rue de Rivoli, and then slow down and take their time as soon as they set foot in the Tuilieries’s gardens. This is a sign of a garden’s marvelous capacity to give us, if not happiness, then at least rest” (166). In chapter 2 I noted Harrison’s claim that “compositional arrangements” can “secure the limits necessary to human repose”(Gardens 43). My own garden is sited on a busy road, yet instead of the road imposing itself on the garden, I feel that the garden extends my home, pushing away the passing cars.

I am hopelessly in love with the idea that the intellectual and physical labor of composing could offer undergraduates the experience of gathering around themselves that which would otherwise be dissipated (Harrison Gardens 43).

Harrison is not referring to inactivity, but finding protection in form. I turn to gardens, because I know they can provide me both a rhetorical outlet and this almost mystical sustenance. Baraton identifies an additional reason why this might be so: “In contact with nature, we know we must take care of it: pruning, weeding, planting – our work breathes. In a society filled with lifeless materials, it is particularly beneficial to know one is caring for the living”(167-8)

How can we translate the idea of cultivation – so natural in a garden – to the work we do in composition courses? Reynolds writes that learning to dwell can help students avoid the tendency to “neglect the consequences of the

156 material”(140). She is primarily concerned with these consequences in terms of

“the actual locations where writers write, learners learn, and workers work”(3).

Composition courses can take on the consequences of the material in terms far beyond those consequences for writing. Perhaps it is much less important to care about the material consequences for writing than to attend to the material consequences of writing. What are we writing for? Where are we writing for? For whom, and why, are we writing?

Owens recommends that “we must first learn all we can about the environments our students live in … give them opportunities to testify about what is wrong and what is good about those worlds, what they think should and shouldn’t be changed, and we must provide them with a vocabulary with which they might critique their environments”(69). There are two features here I particularly want to draw out. Owen’s phrasing places emphasis on what students already know. He positions the beginning of the investigative work in intellectual material students bring to the research situation. He also, not incidentally, frames the instructor as among those who will be learning.

Owens also points out that we must provide students with critical vocabulary. Locating the known world at the core of intellectual work gives novice writers more stability as they navigate new ideas and terms. The familiarity of sites students know well can be combined with the dual challenges of describing those places and seeing them anew with a critical lens. I recently began a semester of composition with a David Owen essay about the interaction between built environments and human behavior (“Psychology”). Owen demonstrated the

157 relationship between design and action, a relation that we returned to throughout the term as we sought to deepen our understanding of the places students were researching. Owen provided students with a fresh concept that they in turn applied to places they cared about and had observed through other lenses. I used the Owen essay, and others we read, in two ways: in addition to providing new concepts and vocabulary for students to use toward complicating their understanding of place, I used the texts to demonstrate how writers of creative nonfiction use their primary research in combination with other sources. I chose texts in which writers utilized different systems of organization to manage their material, providing students with a selection of templates outside of the high school five-paragraph essay and the strict formalities of academic prose.

Donehower et al. caution that writing about place can connote “only the literal physical space rather than other cultural, social, and material realities experienced within a place”(181). Reading and studying the complex treatments and structures of professional writers is one method for complicating students’ view of their subject matter and their presentation of their conclusions. To get at the complexities of place, including its rhetorical potentials, and to be “amazed,” as

Owens charmingly puts it, students must do more than read and write.

The emphasis of cultural geography on place “makes geography very much a seeing discipline,” writes Reynolds (252). What Reynolds terms “seeing” is an area of relatively untapped possibility in composition instruction. In Field Notes on

Science and Nature, Michael Canfield’s collection of essays by natural scientists writing about their field notebooks, the importance of direct observation to

158 intellectual work is made emphatically clear. Paleobiologist Kay Behrensmeyer writes, “In spite of the expanding virtual world, the fundamentals of good fieldwork have not changed much since Darwin … there still is no substitute for actually being there, walking over outcrops and through time”(Canfield 90). Behrensmeyer notes not only the physical aspect of such research – what the researcher might see, but her phrase “through time” reminds her reader that we think during experiences, providing ourselves with another route to insight. Traditional composition pedagogy has kept students at a remove from “being there” and thus from this form of first hand discovery.

Karen Kramer describes the link between field research and the critical imagination: “Understanding the scientific data we collect also requires being alert to clues about interrelationships that are often outside the initial research problem

… How we record field notes opens or closes us to the unexpected”(Canfield 127).

Framing academic investigation in this way for composition may helpfully defamiliarize the processes of research for students, freeing them from the practice of conclusion-driven research and writing. It is important to disrupt the inclination undergraduates have so often brought from high school to see research writing as a two-sided debate which their research must enable them to win. Unusual materials, modes, and learning sites may help us to revise student understanding of rhetorical practice and purposes.

Bodenhamer, Corrigan and Harris begin the edited collection, Deep Maps and

Spatial Narratives, with the observation that “Humanities scholars are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of geographic information”(1). A deep map,

159 they explain, “is a finely detailed, multimedia depiction of a place and the people, animals and objects that exist within it and are thus inseparable from the contours and rhythms of everyday life” (Bodenhamer et al. 3). It is worthwhile to consider the production of such a text in composition, and it is also possible to seek to arrive at the aims described in written form. A composition in any form that seeks to portray a “finely detailed… depiction of a place and the people, animals and objects that exist within it … inseparable from the contours and rhythms of everyday life” is a challenging way to explore the possibilities of evidence and self-expression.

Reynolds states that it is the task of cultural geography to examine “how places reproduce the identities and power structures of those who occupy them” as well as how social groups or individuals develop senses of place (252). Composition has sought to cover the territory of identity and power with students in a multitude of ways, but approaching these relationships through place remains unusual.

Reynolds observes that “identity and power are reproduced in the everyday, in mundane or ordinary landscapes” and explains that “Cultural geography is the study of how places come to have meaning through acts of the everyday”(252). If we ask students to unearth and communicate these layers of everyday places, we enable them to connect new knowledge to their immediate lives. It seems to me a potentially more powerful experience to discover the complexity of what appears mundane than to admire the complexity someone else has revealed. Furthermore, deep maps, Bodenhamer et al. write, “are not confined to the tangible or material, but include the discursive and ideological dimensions of place”(3). Considering

160 places in terms of deep mapping brings us nearer to recognizing their rhetorical potential.

Bodenhamer et al. argue for the value of deep maps to our scholarship by noting: “For the humanist, space is not only physical space but occupied space, or place, and the concept, like that of time, exists not simply in the real world but in memory, imagination, and experience”(2). Applying these considerations to places of attachment in students’ lives through research, inquiry, and the production of persuasive text can encompass many of our goals in composition.

Shipka writes, “If we are committed to creating courses that provide students with opportunities to forge new connections, to work in highly flexible ways, and to become increasingly cognizant of the ways texts provide shape for and take shape from the contexts in which they are produced, circulated, valued, and responded to, it is crucial… that we not limit the range of materials or technologies students might take up and alter in compelling ways”(84). Multimedia illustrations of deep mapping are one highly complex method of meeting Shipka’s challenge. Shipka’s definition also makes space for the production of rhetorical landscapes sites, including, but not limited to, gardens. These engagements with unexpected rhetorical materials encourage students “to forge new connections”(Shipka 84) that increase their intellectual flexibility and their awareness of the context and circulatory properties of rhetoric.

The study of place in composition, as I imagine it, includes not only field work, the collection of diverse research materials, and the production of texts in a range of forms but also a variety of means for arriving at insight and conclusion

161 – the steps before finalized texts take form. Zoologist Jonathan Kingdon writes, “The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment”(Canfield 159). The “practical utility” of drawing, he continues, is “as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore”(Canfield 159). Alexander and Rhodes argue for “moving beyond composition” to “simultaneous analysis and production, as well as production as analysis”(117). Alexander and Rhodes use photo manipulation as a

“pedagogical tool to provoke critical reflection”(117). These visual modes complicate student perceptions of their material and expand the possibilities for communication of their insights. The practice of production as analysis breaks the linear understanding students often have that analysis is completed prior to the production of their final text.

In a composition course I taught in spring 2017, I asked students to read aloud their description of place to a classmate and then I asked the listener to draw what they had heard. Though students’ drawing skills and artistic confidence were extremely diverse, even the most rudimentary representations offered insight to the writers, reflecting their written description in alternate form. This was a sincere effort by a peer to provide feedback about student writing, without the constraints of peer review that I, for one, have found unproductive in the past. I also asked students to draw their own research site, and through this means, too, students made discoveries about what was important to them and what they had unintentionally omitted from their alphabetic text.

162 Encouraging students to collect diverse research materials and record observations in a variety of modes may facilitate their openness to discovery and surprise. Science illustrator Jenny Keller writes: “My sketches – or perhaps more important, the deep observation that went into making them – also help me understand and interpret other visual references such as photographs” (Canfield

167). Through the interplay of research and composing modes I hope to destabilize an ingrained routine in which students arrive prematurely at a conclusion and thereafter cease to pursue the complexity of their subject. “The creation of an accurate drawing requires a systematic approach, patient observation, an openness to unforeseen possibilities, an ability to regard a topic from a variety of perspectives, a willingness to pay attention to both the exciting and the mundane, and the deliberate setting aside of preconceived ideas,” Keller writes (Canfield 184).

Places in the Foreground of Rhetoric and Composition

Theory in composition and rhetoric has attended more and more closely to the involvement of place in acts of composition and rhetoric, but we have not moved into a position of centering our inquiries and procedures there, or of making place a weight-bearing element of our rhetorical understanding. The habit of disembodying the work of the intellect is entrenched, and with it the devaluation of the spaces and locations in which that work takes place and on which the life necessary for the existence of the mind depends.

Gardens remind us forcefully that place is a location created and tended for a purpose; they ask our attention, our close observation, our commitment. But

163 gardens are only one of the many human-influenced landscapes to which we can turn our attention. We can no longer afford to limit our literacies - alphabetic and new media literacies are not enough for the challenges that face us, and our students after us. We need a renewed attention to place in rhetoric and composition, not to increase enrollment in the humanities or to rejuvenate our writing pedagogy or even because it may be the key to engaging students in critical activism, but because our lives depend on it.

According to Rickert’s concept: “dwelling is possible anywhere, in the city or even in a digital or other realm that challenges current conceptions of

‘whereness’”… “what matters is the how of such dwelling, thought beyond the locus of the personal, the human, or even the local to get at the ambient qualities of a way of life and its consequences for flourishing” (248). I would add that dwelling is necessary everywhere. There is no place in which our manner of inhabiting it is inconsequential.

Our efforts in the field of composition - to build community, to foster responsibility and ethical commitments through the practice of rhetoric, to develop critical frameworks and encourage social action - all are described in the narratives of community gardens. There is a chemistry of purpose and community in these gardens that increases people’s commitment to one another and to the place they share. Schenk writes, “It’s been said that gardens and farms in city neighborhoods can help create a sense of place. Whether you actively seek to construct a community around your farm or watch it develop on its own, you will find that the

CSA you start will make people come together and create a stronger neighborhood

164 spirit”(91-2).

Gardens demonstrate how composing a place can teach students to dwell.

University of Montana Professor Neva Hassanein describes student experience at the PEAS Farm as follows: “It inspires our students to see their peers or people who are not much older than themselves become leaders. It inspires those of us who are older to see this younger generation coming in behind us. Social movements are about a sense of belonging. Those who share certain values recognize that they’re not alone. The farms and gardens link people to this place and to each other”(Smith

34).

The PEAS farm is more than a place that generates community, develops leadership, bonds individuals to a living site and offers young people a sense of productive belonging. The PEAS farm has neither a single author nor a clearly delineated predetermined audience. Instead, the persuasive site attracts. Slotnick explains it this way: “I think the town needed a public farm. People drive by, they walk by, they come here, and they congregate. It’s part of the public sphere and public dialogue and culture”(Smith 15). People, after all, are necessary for the occurrence of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in this circumstance, creates belonging and belongs to those it affects in an unpredictable ever-broadening circle. Gardens and similar sites are opportunities for drawing rhetorical elements toward one another.

In order to reinvigorate the role of rhetorical instruction in public culture it is necessary to make a commitment to place; we must teach students to dwell. This requires attention to materiality as a primary, not a secondary (or absent) source of information, creativity, and purpose. Composition must shift away from an

165 inclination to privilege the narratives instructors bring to the course. We must instead teach students to recognize and observe the material environments in which they live, and without which they have little or no basis for critical analysis and composition.

166 Conclusion

From Gardens to Cities: Teaching Students to Compose the Future

As I write, the subjects of climate change and sustainability, both issues of place, are distractingly topical. Every week there is news about dying coral reefs, species extinction, extreme weather, the murder of activists and journalists around the world, or the effects of war on the environment. In what seems like a parallel universe, the president of the United States proposes to cut the funding of the EPA by almost a third and roll back commitments made by the previous administration to address human contributions to climate change. I am an environmentalist. I see the world through the lens of environmental concerns. But never before have I felt so certain that there is a challenge, now, that simply must be addressed by each and every one of us.

Reporting on the Peoples Climate March, April 29, 2017, Nicholas Fandos writes in the New York Times: “The demonstration’s organizers made a point of casting a big net, seeking to make the case that climate change is interwoven with traditional social justice issues like racial, gender, and economic inequality.” The march brought together “immigrants, indigenous people, laborers, coastal dwellers and children,” all of whom, organizers say, are most vulnerable to the effects of a changing climate (Fandos). Alphonse LeRoy, of the Yankton Sioux Tribe of South

Dakota, told Fandos, “I think first of the grass, plants, animals, eagles, birds, fish – without water, nothing will survive. This isn’t just important for me; it’s important for everybody” (Fandos). As an environmentalist and a compositionist, I can’t help

167 but see how these two central strands of my life intertwine.

Richard Louv begins his book, Last Child in the Woods, with the observation:

“Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience nature has changed radically. The polarity of the relationship has reversed. Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment – but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading”(1). I have suggested here that human beings have become divided from place in general: cars and screens have numbed the people of the modern world to their environments, with dangerous and damaging results. Louv writes: “This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child – and adult – development”(2).

We pay an intellectual price for our lack of awareness, and, specific to this work, a price that has whittled away at the vitality of our rhetorical instruction. I also claim that - outside of the classroom - innovative rhetorical activity is available all around us, if we know how to recognize it.

In chapter 4, I outlined some elements of a composition pedagogy that foregrounds material places as subjects for research, critical literacy, and the production of three dimensional and living texts. In this chapter, I would like to zoom out and consider how the intersection of composition and place might have an impact on communities beyond the university. “How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes – our daily lives,” Louv writes (3). The response to nature, both

168 in its traditionally understood forms of woodland, meadow, streambed, and planted field, but also in terms of its occurence in cities, can be taught and encouraged in the humanities, along with other valued literacies.

According to Wiland and Bell, “though cities cover only 2 percent of Earth’s surface, they already consume 75 percent of the planet’s natural resources”

(Foreword). Landscape literacy, with, as I will explore here, particular attention to environmental choices in urban space, is a vital investment in the collective future.

Wiland and Bell write: “as our cities now function, they harm both the people within them and the ecosystems that surround them … over the next several decades, human activity in the world’s cities will either sink the planet, or save it”(Foreword).

Richard Register puts it this way: “As we build, so shall we live. The city, town, or village – this arrangement of buildings, streets, vehicles, and planned landscapes that serves as home – organizes our resources and technologies and shapes our forms of expression”(5). Register, an urban planner, recognizes the relationship between environment and communication, indeed he notes the agency of place in persuasive relation with human beings.

When I think about how to design a composition course that responds to the contemporary moment, meets student needs for a clearly articulated pragmatism, provides experiential learning, brings research into the course in concrete ways, and, most ambitiously, unites students in an ethical engagement with a community both present and future, I imagine a curriculum in which place is studied through the lens of urban landscapes, threaded with the understanding that urban, rural and suburban regions are interdependent. I envision a study inclusive of everything

169 related to the built and lived environment, from furniture design to transportation infrastructure, food supply to pollution, economics to recycling. I imagine a course in which students apply a critical literacy to everyday public environments, and articulate that literacy in collaborative and individual three-dimensional compositions designed for or created in the public sphere. I imagine cooperation between undergraduate students in the humanities and urban planners, landscape designers, farmers, gardeners, biologists, psychologists, and engineers. As the lived environment shapes our forms of expression, so our forms of expression shape our lived environment. Thus, I imagine a course in which we not only reactively learn what we can do to live sustainably, but in which composition students form a core of generative innovation at the university.

Thoren observes that “Infrastructure, postindustrial sites, vegetated architecture, urban ecology, and urban agriculture have each been discussed individually and extensively as movements in the profession or society, but not as expressions of a common situation”(11). In this chapter, I argue that composition should take the lead in connecting the humanities with these expressions of our common situation: parks, gardens, schools, museums, health care facilities, the design of housing and transportation arteries, energy and water supply systems.

Johnson notes: “We’re entirely comfortable with the idea of the rural landscape as a working landscape … The city, on the other hand, is a landscape in which the land is little more than backdrop or platform for activities that aren’t intrinsically connected to it and don’t grow from it”(46). Investigation of the causes, effects, and rhetorical implications of these beliefs has practical, social, and intellectual benefits.

170 In chapter 4, I argue that the practices of observation should play a more central role in composition. As I hope I have made clear, the vitality of research, as opposed to the rote practice of collecting source material, is one of my central priorities in composition. If we only succeeded in convincing students that scholars are embodied, that academic research stems from the material world and returns material effects to the world, we would do them a great service. Ideally, of course, I would like to apply observation to a much broader canvas.

Composition pedagogy that incorporates place, with attention to students’ observational skills, can supply students with an enriched awareness of the complexity of their lived environment and increase their ability to apply rhetorical concepts to their own texts, but also, possibly, counter the experience that Haraway describes as “a comprehensive homelessness, the lack of a common place, and the devastation of public culture”(160). Johnson writes that our nomenclature, combined with what I have been labeling a lack of landscape literacy, influences how we perceive urban environments. In one example, she notes that “the term ‘vacant land’ … is, in fact, a misnomer”(Johnson 71). “Usually considered a problem in economically depressed urban areas,” she writes, “the land exists as a resource precisely where fresh, inexpensive and readily accessible food is most needed. The solution is thus contained in the very term used to describe the problem: vacant land is… available”(Johnson 72). Johnson demonstrates here that inattention to places permits inaccurate and discouraging uses of language.

Applying an informed landscape literacy to available land in cities offers countless benefits, from increased food production and equality in areas of dense

171 population to a different emotional and social experience of city life. How we perceive cities influences how we live in them, how we feel about them, how we treat them. It is depressing to understand vacant land as blight, but as Johnson suggests, “if we repeat and remember – vacant land is … land – the lens through which we peer at it can change, and the view with it”(80). Rickert argues that “the work of attunement” is “necessary for making home possible”(248). We can improve student attunement through the study of rhetoric and the practices of composition, and thereby address the homelessness to which Haraway refers.

Johnson’s framing of unused urban land provides a neat example of the intimate relationship between language and perception. Both of these features of persuasion are essential to the understanding of rhetoric as a conscious practice and an influential feature of daily life. To know how we ourselves are persuaded is more central to happiness than to grasp how we might persuade others. If we believe that grocery stores are the only source of food in cities, and air conditioning the only means to be cool, living responsibly seems like it will require sacrifice and discomfort. If, however, we alter how we see and name our lived environments, we will in turn transform the possibilities we can imagine and understand how there might be pleasure and satisfaction in making informed choices about the manner in which we inhabit the world.

Rickert argues that “we have to do more than transform our relation to nature … for this suggestion problematically implies that after we do so, we could remain who we were”(252). Many proposed solutions to environmental problems fail to take this insight into account. Because change is packaged as a piecemeal,

172 individualized affair, it is less successful, and fundamentally less appealing. I think this creates what environmentalists of my generation interpret as apathy in college students. Young people are capable of simultaneously believing in climate change and doing nothing whatsoever about it. Rickert explains that we cannot “stay within our way of life yet somehow reorient ourselves to a ‘nature’ that remains exterior to albeit supportive for us”(252-253). Adjusting our relation to the world will take close, critical, analytical, reflective work – the sort of work scholars and teachers in the humanities are trained to provide. Along the way, we can model the difficulties of such a fundamental cultural adjustment, because, of course, we are not in an ideal relationship to the natural world ourselves.

If we reorient young people to the material world in composition we can revitalize their understanding and practice of what rhetoric does: connect the pieces of life into a whole. What Rickert calls “ambient attunement”(253) is a practice, and like all practices, it must be taught and supported; it must become habitual.

Attunement is not an existing practice for most of us, it is not an automatic part of growing up. Most people lack this awareness, this practice. It is not by chance that our cultural behaviors, our design for education, the attention we pay to the environments of learning, do not readily lend themselves to the attunement necessary for sustainability. It is not really surprising that even the most determined, passionate and creative educators struggle against student resistance and boredom in required composition courses when the framework in which these courses occur by its very nature undermines our collaborative commitments.

Wendell Berry writes: “It is readily evident, once affection is allowed into the

173 discussion of ‘land use,’ that the life of the mind, as presently constituted in the universities, is of no help. The sciences are of no help, indeed are destructive, because they work, by principle, outside the demands, checks, and corrections of affection”(What 115). Berry suggests that affection is necessary for the understanding and responsible action education attests to pursue. “Without a beloved country as context, the arts and the sciences become oriented to the careers of their practitioners, and the intellectual life to intellectual (and bureaucratic) procedures. And so in the universities we see forming an intellectual elite more and more exclusively accomplished in procedures such as promotion, technological innovation, publication, and grant-getting”(Berry What 117). Berry argues that we must have the context of “a beloved country” in order to arrive at a stable academic standard (What 117). For example, in his explanation of the way to make a farm road, he writes: “Such work requires not only correct principles, skill, and industry, but a knowledge of local particulars and many years; it involves slow, small adjustments in response to questions asked by a particular place. And this is true in general of the patterns and structures of a proper human use of a beloved country, as examination of the traditional landscapes of the Old World will readily show: they were made by use as much as skill”( What 121). While our students do not have

Berry’s “many years” to respond to the “questions asked by a particular place,” I suggest that composition can be an occasion through which we prepare them for responsible use, for ecological observation, for making connections to the narrative that weaves human life into the complex and endangered landscape of other living things.

174 I imagine that the word “affection” could trigger alarm in composition teachers. Emotion, as Laura Micciche observes, is often strictly confined to the

“emotional appeal” in the teaching of composition, operating “as tacit shorthand for manipulation, excess, and irrationality”(xiii). On the contrary, she argues, emotion is “a valuable rhetorical resource … central to how we become invested in people, ideas, structures, and objects”(Micciche 1). Harrison suggests that “boredom indicates … blockage of care”(Gardens 156), providing an animated understanding of care as an experience that ought to move and produce. Micciche explains that there is a distinction between “the study of emoting … and that of rhetorics of emotion, or emotion as a performative that produces effects”(1). Berry describes the presence or absence of love, as in “a beloved country” as directing action toward one or another outcome, and he specifically chooses the uncommon pairing of intellectual life and farm work to demonstrate the effects that result without affection. “To liberate people from care,” Harrison writes, “is to deny them self- realization”(Gardens 168). Furthermore, it limits their usefulness in practical relationship to their environment. These thinkers identify emotion as an essential, working ingredient in intellectual activity.

It must be among our tasks to facilitate care. Harrison contrasts understanding the earth as “an inexhaustible inventory for human consumption” with the “vocation of care that turned human beings into cultivators of the mortal earth, as well as cultivators of our mortal modes of being on the earth”(166).

Without care, it could be argued, we can only use the places around us, rather than maintain them. He writes, “ human happiness is a cultivated rather than a consumer

175 good … a question of fulfillment rather than of gratification. Neither consumption nor productivity fulfills. Only caretaking does”(Harrison Gardens 166). It is clear to me that the young writers in our composition courses are deeply immersed in opportunities for consumption. I think what we ask of them is production of rhetoric without the ingredient of caretaking. By Harrison’s assessment, this is equally empty.

Caretaking, as Berry and Johnson demonstrate, requires observation; we must know what is needed in order to provide it. This action is more complex than mere doing, as it involves an emotional responsiveness. Rickert ties dwelling to materiality through care, writing: “dwelling is a way of life conditioned by things of the world. It is distinguished by a practical attunement of caretaking”(246). Within its definitions, the word dwelling contains residence, or home, as well as thought.

How often do we approach writing as a form of home, as a dwelling? How might we better induce writers to inhabit writing, to seek home through thought?

Moore, Mitchell and Turnbull recognize that “[T]he basic needs of living creatures – to breathe, to eat, to reproduce themselves- are joined, for most members of most species, including the human one, by the need to dwell, to inhabit some piece of our world”(Preface). The occupation of defining, defending, and sometimes extending our domains, Moore et al. explain, “has been celebrated and perfected with words and shelters and monuments, and, in some specially favored times and places, with gardens, where the streams, and trees and flowers of the fields and the rocks of the mountains, have been collected, or remembered, and ordered into an extension of ourselves onto the face of the earth” (Preface). All of

176 these activities are persuasive, rhetorical. We compose to define ourselves, to ourselves and upon the world.

It is not enough to write. Maybe it has been enough during other times in modern human history, but in the present moment the ‘things of this world’ demand care. It is not enough to practice rhetoric. We must practice it. Slotnick says:

“change has to come not just because it’s needed, but because we’ve finally begun to understand that there’s something in us that needs to nurture and provide” (Smith

14). This is a rhetoric that meets our obligation to participate and satisfies our deep craving to be necessary.

“Dwelling places us in the insight that rhetoric, being worldly, cannot be understood solely as human doing and that persuasion gains its bearings from an affectability that emerges with our material environments both prior to and alongside the human, ” Rickert writes (254). Learning to dwell, then, is work that transcends research, grammar, and personal narrative, seeking a connection through past and present that binds the writer in a responsible, critical attachment to place. In What Are People For? Wendell Berry writes of the land in Henry County

Kentucky where he lives: “Of virtually all this land it may be said that the national economy has prescribed ways of use but not ways of care”(What 110). The distinction Berry draws between use and care is at the center of a critical pedagogy of place that addresses exploitation, and its counterpoint - sustainability. “We need to try to understand the long-term economies of places – places, that is, that are considered as dwelling places for humans and their fellow creatures, not as exploitable resources”(Berry What 111).

177 Berry equates the sustainable management of environments with a similar concern for human beings. In our focus on the development of students’ skills, be those critical thinking or writing or research, we are at risk of overlooking the long- term project of self-actualization. We are at risk, perhaps, of neglecting to cultivate the practices of happiness. “I am thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people, places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts, ”Berry writes (What 113). Through attention to place in our pedagogy we can help students discover the best uses for the rhetorical activity that is central to every human life. In composition, we have a dual opportunity to utilize the study of place. On one hand, we can work to develop student literacy in the rhetorical qualities of landscapes and other lived environments. On the other, we can work to increase student commitments and capabilities with regard to their own places of origin and places of care by explicitly marrying literal places to intellectual work. Place, in this scheme, is the relationship between rhetoric and care.

If we teach students a rhetoric of caretaking, of cultivation, dwelling becomes

Reynold’s “practices”: an ethic for living. It is not a matter, then, of remaining as caretaker in one place, as Berry does, or of gardening, but instead a matter of recognizing and inhabiting each place in a way that respects its capacity for sustainability.

In Jennifer Fosket and Laura Mamo’s study of sustainable communities, they found that “[A]n ethic of care was in ample evidence at all of the sites we visited and is a significant ingredient in the formula for successful sustainable living. An ethic of

178 care means that people are able to think beyond their own needs” (167). Thoren cites the philosophy of art critic Miwon Kwon, who has argued that “digging into sites, metaphorically, conceptually, allows us to connect to places with ‘relational specificity’”(Kwon qtd. in Thoren 13). Kwon argues, “‘Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks’”(qtd. in Thoren 13). Thoren’s project presents examples of a trend in that indicates “movement away from passing intimacies, quick engagements with distant sites, and toward local, specific, contingent, and enduring designs – indelible social marks”(Thoren 13). It is perhaps overambitious to expect the production of indelible social marks in undergraduate composition, but there is a middle ground between enduring texts and the “passing intimacies” undergraduate courses, including composition, so often contain.

Johnson claims that when we cultivate food we are also “staking out territory for an expanded notion of what our cities might be”(12). This suggests that we always know that to be our purpose in advance. Like many of the elements of my accidentally rhetorical garden, such was not the case for me. Instead, the cultivation of food in my urban front yard expanded my notion of what my city might be, and should be.

“Cultivation,” observes Johnson, “grows a lot more than just food. It signals loud and clear that a place is looked after – that someone cares”(130). This is the rhetorical work of the farm. The farm persuades that it is a site of care. Whether this is its explicit, or primary aim, or not, the place performs this rhetorical action.

179 Composition can be an environment for expanding notions of place. “Perhaps the most radical decision that educators can make,” Owens suggests, “both pedagogically and artistically, is to remain convinced that they and their students can literally reconstruct their local worlds for the better”(19).

Throughout this work I have applied descriptions of the effects of gardening to the possibilities I envision for a composition pedagogy with place at its core. The examples and metaphors garden writers provide are irresistibly rich. When Moore et al. write, “[W]e can gather our resources, (however meager) onto a site (however small) to construct a clarified fragment, a vision of an ordered world, in a garden”(79), I see Margaret Morton’s images of transitory gardens in New York City, the gardens of poor women in South Africa, and the opportunity to frame the brief, intense labor of a college semester into something clear, enduring, and purposeful.

This composition need not be a garden, or any landscape, to meet the conditions of cultivation, of caretaking a fragment of ordered world.

“By moving to big metro areas,” Wiland and Bell write, “we forgot that we are obligated to each other and our surroundings. We assumed we had no control over our environment and, therefore, no role to play in preserving or enhancing it”(17).

Our undergraduates face a daunting world, brimming with economic, social, political, and environmental challenges. At the same time, they possess the means for withdrawal into the contained landscape of their screens. I have argued here that in composition we have an opportunity to reunite students with their obligation to each other and to their surroundings, and, most importantly, that by doing so we will provide them with enduring supportive connection to a community that

180 includes other people and their environment. The assumption that we have no control, and no role to play, is a loss to both the individual and the community.

Furthermore, it is a loss with incalculably enormous costs.

Louv identifies a severance of the public and private mind from our food’s origins (19) as one effect of a long-term trend. From the 1940’s through the 1960’s, he writes, “the study of – an intimate science predicated on the time- consuming collection and naming of life-forms – gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C.”(Louv 41). Platt, Rowntree, and Muick describe a similar change distancing environmentalism from immediate, tangible individual concerns, writing: “the focus of the new environmentalism shifted from the city in the 1960’s, to the nation in the 1970’s, and to the planet in the 1980’s, with a consequent weakening of advocacy for traditional urban planning”(21). I am advocating a study of composition and rhetoric that explicitly attends to this divide, repurposing our assignments and course goals with an interdisciplinary, critical, and restorative agenda.

At the local level, environmentalism is expressing itself through a burgeoning interest in gardening and food. We can look to these trends for information, but we are not confined within them. “Across America,” writes Tanya Denckla Cobb, “the grassroots food movement seems to be arising from a common feeling that we have lost our center. Across our nation, we see spiritual restlessness, children disconnected from nature, people disconnected from each other, a proliferation of

181 foods that fail to nourish either body or spirit, and a lack of community, neighborliness, and relationship”(9). Gardens, especially those that serve a community, address these absences and disconnections in modern life. Tim Ballard,

Youth Harvest Director at the PEAS farm explains the intersection of young people who have recently come through the criminal justice system with environmental studies students: “The teens work side by side with the students to become an integral part of the farm. They’re part of something that’s clearly of service to the larger community in which they live. This helps provide them a sense of a shift in identity from one that was just troubled or in trouble or taking from society to one that is giving back” (Smith 160-61). Aaron Brock, Former Missoula Food Bank

Development Director adds, “Whether it’s college kids, staff, or participants in the

Youth Harvest program, when they come to the food bank and load food and stand next to the folks in true need who are taking it home and are grateful for it, they see how the fruits or their labors make the community better. There’s something profound about discovering having something to give”(Smith 204).

I wish that my composition courses helped students discover they have something to give, indeed I would be satisfied to know I have helped students discover the connection between the contribution they hope to make in the world and my offering of language. Rickert writes: “in arguing that rhetoric is ambient, I am claiming that rhetoricity is the always ongoing disclosure of the world shifting our manner of being in that world so as to call for some response or action”(xii). If we can persuade students that their being in the world calls for response, calls for action, we have established a reason for their compositions.

182 “[P]lanting a food garden might seem like an act of miniscule proportion, laughably obscure in the grand scheme,” writes Johnson. “But hope is the defining and guiding force that sends shovels into soil. We garden for the future. And what is hope if not nourishment for an idea of what the future might be?”(Johnson 6). I have argued for attention to these elusive, perhaps immeasurable qualities in our vision for composition courses: affection, care, profundity, because I understand them to be productive of hope, and I think students need hope in order to manage the unique challenges they will have to face. Johnson writes that planting edible food gardens is participation “in a transformative gesture toward a different future”(7). Returning places to our pedagogy seems to me, a gardener, to gesture toward an inevitably different future. Harrison claims that gardens demonstrate a

“craving in human beings to transfigure reality” (40). Gardens are not the only form such transfigurations may take. But since we guide student compositions, we make a choice about how we seek to engage them each time we construct a syllabus, choose a theme, or explain an assignment. We direct their gaze.

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