Plants, Presence, and Impermanence: Creative Historicism and Meaning-Making in Heritage Gardens

Abstract

Impermanence is an inherent characteristic of plants and gardens. It simultaneously defines them and complicates their conservation and representation. The thesis will explore how impermanence is handled and experienced in gardens as a heritage tourism encounter, using original field observations, interviews, and archive research. This involves three key areas of observation which bring original insight to traditional garden history discourse: How the practices of garden heritage tourism impact the relationship between the garden visitor, the garden, and its plants. How change brought about by impermanence is interpreted as part of the garden visitor experience. Identifying how our understanding of garden heritage experience would be supported by a broader field of garden heritage studies.

This original research will show that the current experience and presentation of heritage gardens risks promoting ‘plant blindness’. Generic perma-season prettiness results in reduced botanical engagement and a concomitant reduction in heritage significance. Furthermore, the relationship between the visitor and the garden is part of heritage’s meaning-making process and without mindfulness and attention being facilitated in the garden experience their function and value is further eroded. As a primary case study, Kelmscott Manor, Home of Arts & Crafts pioneer William Morris, is a garden that presents the potential to enact ideas of how we might creatively engage with the natural world and how people in the past have done so.
Change is part of the practice of heritage gardening though is largely absent in the visitors interpretation materials, leaving the visitor with the belief that the garden is a visibly unchanged doorway to the past. Presenting this conflict of understanding through the field observation research makes an original contribution to our knowledge of the detrimental impact this has on our relationship with heritage gardens and the visitor’s perceptions of their authenticity.

This research takes a broad transdisciplinary approach to the increasingly vulnerable position of plant-based historic gardens and the need for their inclusion in a broader field of heritage studies. It places the visitor central to the heritage, with a focus on participatory meaning making and interpretation. Along with the necessity of continual creative input for garden heritage to recontextualize what we have come to consider as ‘authentic’ in heritage gardens.

The damaged relationship between people and plants is prescient in this time of climate disruption. The research highlighted in the context of the pandemic, that when faced with crisis the population leaned in to their more-than-human relations. This reaction placed greater emphasis on visiting heritage gardens, some of the few remaining places where we could interact with the vegetal world and re-learn our historic connections. Research was focused on the case studies: Kelmscott Manor, Sissinghurst Gardens, Charleston Farmhouse, and Oxford Botanic Gardens.

Date of Award	28 Jun 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Marion Harney (Supervisor) & Robert Proctor (Supervisor)