Vaughan Gunson: Common Ground: Garden Histories of Aotearoa looks back to take us forward

The Covid lockdowns, awareness of the precariousness of one's economic situation due to world events, is seeing more of us pick up the trowel. Photo / File

LIFE, ART AND EVERYTHING

I'm convinced small scale farming and gardening is the future.

It's a lifestyle that won't be a big money-earner, but once humanity abandons its fossil fuel addiction — or is forced to — modest-sized and diverse farming practices will be economically and socially viable. And perhaps more than that, absolutely essential to our survival.

It's with thoughts of the future that I eagerly read about New Zealand's gardening past in Matt Morris' recently published book Common Ground: Garden Histories of Aotearoa.

Morris has written a social history of gardening from 1800 to the present, heavy on quotes from diaries, letters and interviews with ordinary, unglamorous, hard-working gardeners.

The beauty of the book is the kinship you realise you have with someone who gardened more than 100 years ago, who battled the same pests and experienced the same gardening joys.

Morris intertwines gardening with wider economic factors, politics, fashions, nation stories, as well as gender and class relations.

Matt Morris' book has three key messages, the first about rapid cultural adaptability and change.

The history is interesting for its own sake. What I sought most of all, though, was an understanding of the past that might help us envisage a sustainable gardening future.

The first positive to take from Morris' book is a message of rapid cultural adaptability and change.

Māori, who were by necessity skilled gardeners before European contact, soon integrated new vegetable varieties and fruit-bearing trees into their gardens.

It's well known that kumara was the staple crop for Māori in the North Island and those parts of the South Island where the tuber would grow.

I didn't know how quick Māori were to start growing potatoes as a complementary or replacement crop.

The more hardy and prolific potato offered a better return on calories for the amount of work required. It was also a crop more easily traded via the country's waterways.

Later in history, during the 1930s Great Depression, many New Zealanders relied on growing their own food if they had access to even a small patch of land.

When faced with new realities, new necessities, new opportunities, human culture can make decisive shifts. That ability will be crucial in the decades ahead.

The second takeaway from Common Ground is that understanding New Zealand's gardening history may help us cultivate an alternative vision of land use and ownership.

Today, land is being parcelled up into ever-larger portions owned by fewer individuals.

Industrial farming for export and the necessary economies of scale, plus the tendency for a capitalist economy to concentrate wealth and resources, has created an agricultural landscape at odds with the hopes and dreams of many European settlers.

The majority who braved a long sea voyage wished to acquire for themselves "a little piece of Eden" that was not available to them in Britain.

For the British government, focused on empire expansion, working closely with the London-based banks, there were other economic and geopolitical goals in mind, for sure.

We can, however, distinguish between the economic forces pushing colonisation and a genuine desire by many settlers to simply be independent small farmers.

As Morris writes, "Self-sufficiency was of paramount importance to the first settlers."

Acknowledging a nuanced colonial history, with all its conflicting motivations, economic imperatives and historical injustices, may actually help us re-imagine gardening and small scale farming once again in Aotearoa.

That's clearly part of Morris' motivation for writing the book. He wants us to see possibilities for the future in the practices and sometimes unrealised goals of people from our past, whether they be Māori, Pākehā or Chinese (established as market gardeners since the 1870s).

The third thing I take from Common Ground is that how you garden can be subversive.

In the 1920s and 30s, composting was punk. It went against the mainstream view, often accepted by town and city councils, that composting was unhygienic.

Groups like the wonderfully named New Zealand Humic Compost Club were formed to encourage "hot composting" techniques.

Since the 1960s, simply growing food on your section was a little radical. It challenged the view that immaculate lawns and beautiful ornamental gardens should be the prime goal of the average middle-class homeowner.

A shift back to planting vegetable gardens and orchards on suburban sections is evident today (though hardly mainstream yet).

The Covid lockdowns, awareness of the precariousness of one's economic situation due to world events, is seeing more of us pick up the trowel.

Digging a vegetable garden in your front lawn or planting fruit and nut trees on your berm is a political statement. One that you hope others will follow. That's how transformational movements grow.

Judging from the anecdotes collected in Common Ground, many Kiwi gardeners over the past 200 years have aspired for a better world and been prepared to work for it one season at a time.