Uprooting and Grounding: Migrant Gardeners, Urban Food Cultivation, and Cultural Wellbeing

Abstract

There has been a proliferating interest in the restorative effects of outdoor environments, such as gardens and plots, on people’s wellbeing. As well as critically engaging with the claimed salutogenic benefits of food cultivation, our sociological inquiry suggests the need to go beyond the established dimensions of physical, mental, and social wellbeing when examining narratives of wellbeing in relation to gardening and health. Drawing on interviews with gardeners from a variety of migrating backgrounds in the north of the UK, we explore how being in a garden or plot, growing crops, and consuming and sharing these connects those who have migrated with memories and sensory experiences from different times and places. ‘Growing foods from home’ has deep meaning for participants’ sense of self and identity and contributes to what we call cultural wellbeing. This places wellbeing at the interstices of past and present, where current ways of gardening link family practices, sensory experiences, cultural memories, and traditions. This suggests the need not only to broaden the concept of wellbeing to include a cultural dimension but also to broaden the temporality of the concept, as for migrant gardeners the past and present are woven together through memories and contemporary practices.