ALH Online Review, Series X 1. Robert S. Emmett ... or ecological vision. Where the garden writers Emmett features surpa
ALH Online Review, Series X 1 Robert S. Emmett, Cultivating Environmental Justice: A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 246 pp. Reviewed by Judith Richardson, Stanford University In tracing how an eclectic subset of gardener-writers from the 1930s to the 2010s anticipated and promoted environmental justice movements emerging in the late twentieth century, Robert S. Emmett’s ranging, deeply thoughtful book, Cultivating Environmental Justice, does more than invite new consideration of the sites and texts it features. It also energizes us to look with new eyes at gardens and writings we may have encountered outside the book, to unearth the social and environmental politics that run beneath them. Take, for instance, a small gem from 1872, Gardening by Myself, by Anna Warner, who after her father’s financial failure in 1837 lived into a spinsterhood of limited means with her sister, Susan Warner (author of the sentimental blockbuster, The Wide, Wide World) on Constitution Island in the Hudson River. Warner’s modest month-bymonth account of her gardening, interspersed with practical advice, anticipates facets that Emmett highlights in his writers: a sense of tender care for her vegetative family (which she often talks about as if they were human beings) that recognizes particularities of need and place; a nascent pluralism, at least insofar as she celebrates the colorful diversity within her garden; a democratic sensibility, not only in her championing of humbler varietals, but also in how she addresses her writing to those who, like her, “do without”—those who cannot afford the latest seed-catalog extravagances, much less a paid gardener. One may even get a hint of double-edged gender consciousness. Indeed, the proud embrace of self-reliance in Warner’s title also registers a necessity born of her socioeconomic marginality. If such seeds are germinating in Warner’s garden book, however, they never fully blossom into a broader social or ecological vision. Where the garden writers Emmett features surpass Warner is, in part, in the degree to which they recognize that no garden (nor any work of garden writing) is an island. Each represents an intersection of biotic, historical, political, and cultural strands. More importantly, Emmett’s writers also build that realization into a question of what it means, and what it could mean, to be a gardener: how thinking and acting like a gardener might cultivate positive change. Against the pretensions of elite gardens whose well-kept hedges screened inconvenient truths of appropriation and exploitation; against a postwar buy-in to suburban culture that measured status by unproductive squares of green lawn; against abstract garden rhetorics that could underwrite conquest or overwrite the wages of industrial capitalists; even against Progressive-era parks movements and a midcentury wilderness-focused environmentalism—against these paradigms and more, the garden writers Emmett spotlights imagined sustainable, mutually beneficial relationships
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2 ALH Online Review, Series X between humans and nonhuman nature while also working to redress inequalities of resource, voice, and risk based on race, class, gender, and locality. The first chapter leads readers on an introductory dash through planting-related thought and practice from the colonial era through WWII, providing spotlights on key interlocutors and practitioners (Jefferson, Downing, Olmsted, Leopold, and others). From there, progressing along a chronological trajectory that zigzags forward from the 1930s to the present, Emmett’s chapters forge conversations between garden writings grouped according to a mix of conceptual and locational foci, from midcentury experiments by exurbanites in postagrarian New England to complicated negotiations with racial legacies in Southern garden writings, to contemporary battles over community gardens in postindustrial cities across the country. Emmett’s subtitle describes the book as “A Literary History of U.S. Garden Writing.” Certainly the book speaks to literary scholarship and stakes, not least as an intervention in genre politics or into the politics of literary value. Like Katharine S. White’s urbane New Yorker column, “Onward and Upward in the Garden” (featured in Chapter 2), which sought (and itself cultivated) literary experience in writing about gardens even as she reviewed seed catalogs, so too does Emmett make a case for the significance of a class of writings conventionally cast as minor. Under Emmett’s “garden-writing” umbrella we find a hodge-podge of forms and texts: memoirs by noted authors including Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and Novella Carpenter; manuals by Old Left radicals in the Northeast (Scott and Helen Nearing) and by nostalgic Southerners (Elizabeth Lawrence); fictional works in which gardening features in various way (Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections); magazine and newspaper articles, works of documentary film, photo-essays, manifestos and ethnographies, along with others more difficult to categorize. With this broad definition of literature, Emmett makes a case for its importance by showing how these writings are not ornamental but crucial to the practical work of gardening for environmental justice. The texts in focus raise historical awareness and help imagine new possibilities. They bring subterranean inequalities and damages into view, and provide records of ephemeral or lost experiments. They enable the transmission of fragile knowledge across generational, racial, or class divides. And whether through humor, irony, or more impassioned tones, they help persuade readers to reexamine attitudes and behaviors. Garden stories, as Emmett sometimes calls them, matter. Though he engages in literary analyses and attends to matters of technique and style, the value of garden writing for Emmett resides less in esoteric aesthetic or formal qualities than in the work it can do beyond the book cover: the ways it crosses into extratextual matters. Emmett’s readings of texts come so imbricated with contexts—
ALH Online Review, Series X 3 political, legal, social, economic, environmental, philosophical, and, biographical—that the reader might be forgiven for looking twice at the subtitle’s designation of a literary history. Emmett’s impressive interdisciplinary reach is crucial to making the book the substantial contribution that it is. Perhaps understandably, this richness, along with an admirable desire to cover all the angles, qualifications, and possible blind spots, can sometimes make heavy going for the reader, or lead to overcrowding (in chapter 3, for example, Emmett keeps deferring a direct unpacking of Pollan’s Second Nature, though Emmett’s ingenious enlistment of Kosinski’s Being There in that chapter’s discussion of “the gardener” is no small compensation). More generally, while one can grasp the logic of the chapters and the overall structure, the book doesn’t completely resolve into perfectly orderly plots, with straight, weedless paths in between. But after all, an allowance for unruliness is only appropriate to the material at hand. Just as gardening itself can be messy work, environmental justice is not a unitary, neatly teleological movement, but a shifting, evolving polyculture of sometimes intersecting, possibly competing local agendas. It is full of twists and potential contradictions. To Emmett’s credit, his view is as often critical and complicating as it is congratulatory. For example, he describes how Southern garden writings—even as they increasingly embrace the work of African Americans, and of women across the color line—remain haunted by shadows of the plantation, segregation, and a still “asymmetrical racialized economy” (118). His intensive unpacking of community gardens reveals how insurgent plantings and grassroots activism in the interest of underserved populations are not only subject to being bulldozed over in the name of private property, but also vulnerable to being coopted as “greenwashing” for gentrification or municipally supported corporate developments, or even harvested as consumable, consolatory “art.” Stories of people taking matters into their own hands can be radically empowering, but can also fold back into ideals of self-reliance that undercut pushes for collective action and systemic change. It is a tangled business. In closing, Emmett invokes the “rambunctious garden” from Emma Marris’s 2011 manifesto of that title. Marris’s garden represents an emerging model of environmental engagement that looks to “save nature” by working dynamically, pragmatically, with what is, embracing hybridity, relativity, openness, and flexibility, not by puritanically or quixotically chasing after some pristine prelapsarian ideal. This is a fitting end for Emmett’s book, which, after all, is not a purist’s literary history. It is less about writing for an ivory tower than about writing for an endangered world, to borrow from Emmett’s ecocritical forebear, Lawrence Buell. Cultivating serious food for thought, Emmett also
4 ALH Online Review, Series X invites readers—whether as critics, writers, or gardeners—to join in the work of bringing an ideal of justice closer to the ground, at home and in the wide world.
