Cultivating Questions for a Sociology of Gardens

This article is part manifesto for a sociology of gardens and gardening, but it is also a confessional tale of my own uncertainties about how exactly to formulate this new line of research. American sociology has until now ignored the study of gardens as social projects, so I suggest some possible sociological questions, and I review several key works, mostly from geography and landscape architecture, that reveal a range of themes, theoretical constructs, and methods used to study gardens. I also discuss the obstacles encountered in my brief foray into researching two very different spheres of social life: gardening labor and an elite garden.