The yields of the garden: an ethnography of community gardening, growing, and green social prescribing in the North of England

Abstract

This thesis explores community gardening and growing practices in a region of the North of England, with a particular focus on their potential to support wellbeing. The study draws on fourteen months of ethnographic research at growing sessions facilitated by small Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations, some of which aimed specifically to support members experiencing mental ill health. The project investigates the experiences of members, practitioners, and organisations; the nature of gardening and growing locally; and the place of health and wellbeing in these sessions, amid the recent national and regional expansion of green social prescribing practices. This
interdisciplinary exploration is informed by the literatures growing around concepts of affect and place, rhythm and social practice, therapeutic landscapes, and medicalisation.

The gardening spaces are conceptualised as assemblages, constituted of people, plants, horticultural materials, creatures, food and drink, and environmental and meteorological elements, brought together in complexes or clusters of practices. Building upon understandings of therapeutic landscape experiences as contingent and varied, I illustrate a range of different kinds (and outcomes) of garden encounters, as connections made with and through people and place. While attentive to nonhuman agencies, I emphasise the work and care required to create and maintain these places
and communities. This research draws upon literatures exploring the choreographing and
engineering of atmospheres and assemblages, which I advance with insights into these practical, emotional, and attuned labours in community gardening settings: the corralling of elements, a balancing of atmospheric qualities, and the tinkering and negotiation of rhythms multiple. These regular meetings of people in place became part of members’ routines. Many members established rhythms of weekly participation, offering motion, anticipation, company, and purposeful movement, that were conducive to feelings of wellbeing. Several of the gardening and growing projects were distinctively enabling, developing particular therapeutic affordances as communities and places grew through them. I apply and expand the concept of therapeutic third places to articulate this
distinctive constitution and orientation, with a particular emphasis on flexibility and purposeful activity in the projects.

Acknowledging the therapeutic and more-than-therapeutic potential of community gardening and growing spaces, this thesis explores the role that these sessions might play in health ecologies. These sessions can be highly valuable, particularly for people experiencing ‘low level’ mental ill health. However, their ability to provide appropriate support is related to the wellbeing of the whole health and healthcare ecology within which they are networked, and the resourcing that is available to facilitating organisations. In recognising this interdependence, I affirm the place relationality of therapeutic landscape experiences, and advocate for broad, networked, ecological approaches to relationality within the therapeutic landscapes literature.