LIVING IN A WEEDY FUTURE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 90

'plants are perhaps no longer often thought about in terms of their capacities and
behaviours' (Hitchings, 2007: 372). For Ginn (2008), animals and plants are both
active participants and subversive agents in the colonial landscape of Aotearoa New
Zealand, the context in which Barker (2008) discusses contemporary agency and
changeability of gorse and its management.
The relevance of considering plant agency in more detail in this chapter is that
if we want to understand weedy landscapes as complex co-productions between
human and other causes, it is important to consider how people attribute agency
in their lives with weeds. It is my intention here to illustrate how and in what
circumstances gardeners attribute agency to plants.
The backyard garden study
The original project was a large study of 265 backyard gardens and their 330 owners
(some couples and family groups participated). Most of the fieldwork was carried
out between 2002 and 2005, a period of intensifying drought in southeastern
Australia. The sample population comprised 122 backyards in Sydney, 119 in
Wollongong, and 24 in Alice Springs, in areas that spanned the socioeconomic,
demographic and ecological variability of each city area. About 90 per cent of the
sample were households with detached house and garden, the remaining 10 per
cent being apartment or unit dwellers with small courtyards or balconies. For
further details of the study and its methods, see Head and Muir (2004), Head and
Muir (2006), and Head and Muir (2007). Diverse types of engagement with nature
and the garden were sought in the study; some backyarders identified as passionate
gardeners, while others strongly identified as non-gardeners. As background it is
relevant that the study population bears out other research showing that the most
popular types of garden in Australia include exotic plant species, alone or in com-
bination with natives (NPWS, 2002; Zagorski et al ., 2004; Trigger and Mulcock,
2005). Committed native gardeners - the ones we called the 'purists' - are a
demonstrably minority group. Most participants were comfortable with the hybrid
reality of combinations of native and exotic plantings, with affection for their
different attributes.
The agency of weeds and invasives
Weeds are commonly defined as plants that are in the wrong place, and that do not
belong because they are not native. A large body of scholarship now shows that
concepts such as 'nativeness' tell us more about human categories than anything
inherent in the plants or their evolutionary processes (Gould, 1997; Bean, 2007;
Davis et al ., 2011; Head, 2012). So the point of my argument is not to focus on
different definitions of what belongs or does not, but rather to examine the range
of practices towards weeds. Backyard gardeners like Lennie, Kris and Mira each
define weeds differently, but their practices have certain things in common. More
broadly, I will show that some practices towards weeds match up with definitional