Keywords: queer gardening, queer ecologies, ecofeminism, film
Abstract
This artistic contribution for this issue of TSQ presents the transcripts and film stills taken from the documentary “Queer Gardening” (2022, 80 min) by Ella von der Haide. The film is a collection of interviews with Queer and Trans Gardeners in North America. It examines what horticultures look like when binaries such as nature/culture, human/more-than-human and body/environment are deconstructed in creative ways. The gardeners talk about their relationships with plants and the land and how these entanglements are shaped by their queerness. To highlight the voices of the Queer and Trans Gardeners, no comments are added to the concentrated interview transcripts.
The following text and images are taken from my film “Queer Gardening”. I'm Ella von der Haide, a gardener and filmmaker from Germany. For 20 years I've been making a series of documentaries with the title “Another world is plantable!” featuring the socio-ecological practices and politics of community gardeners.
Spiderdance © Ella v.d. Haide
About 13 years ago I started to ask myself why I met so many queer people in community gardens? Was it only that I'm biased because I’m queer myself, or is there maybe a more profound connection between queerness and horticulture? I started to ask this question to my gay, lesbian, trans, two-spirited, ect. gardener friends and soon found out, that there is a wide variety of queer horticultures all over.
Queerness was and sometimes still is called unnatural. So queer horticultures challenge this “unnaturalness” and create queer or queer-feminist ecologies. Alternative ecologies are important to find possibilities to engage with and care for the environment in these times of crises. The queer and trans gardeners stay with the trouble, hold a situated knowledge, create cosmologies that hold the potential of hope and show ways to act and how to stay with the trouble.
Filmmaker Ella von der Haide © Ella v.d. Haide
In my film you see what these queer ecologies can look like. Binaries not only of male and female but of nature and culture, human and more than human, subject and objects are getting broken down in and around the gardens. Intersectional perspectives around ability, privilege and decolonial perspectives are touched upon. Gardens are places of ambiguity and therefore a form of queerness. They are nature and culture, paradise and conflict zone. Land use is never innocent. It's connected to colonial histories of agriculture and extinction.
In several trips since 2011 I visited LGBTQIA2* gardeners in North America and collected more than 40 interviews. It was important to me to arrange and discuss the film material with the protagonists to create a participatory film project. In the process of developing the film I was fortunate to be able to show earlier versions at the UC Santa Cruz and at York University, Toronto and to discuss it with Donna Haraway and Catriona Sandilands. Both were pivotal in the development towards a more intersectional perspective. This publication presents a selection of 12 interviews from the documentary. The whole film is 80 minutes long and is available for streaming at Queer Gardening | Eine andere Welt ist pflanzbar!
J. / Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, CA
J. / Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, CA © Ella v.d. Haide
We're here at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California where I’m one of four garden teachers. I’m queer, gender queer.
Queer folks have shied away from staying on the farm, because it's often been a place where they haven't been accepted and now it seems like there's a real movement to of return to this work, to return to the to the land, and to make farming a safe place for queer people because it really is and should be. People want to be farmers. Queer people want to know how to be self-sufficient and to grow food.
I think that it has a lot to do with expressing ourselves. Gardens are places where you can experiment, where we cannot just define ourselves not into rows, but we can have meandering paths in life and have the meandering path through the garden. Being queer is about being fluid for a lot of people which is a great metaphor for how gardens are. Things are always changing, things don't stay the same in the garden. I believe that people also don't stay the same. People are complicated and subject to change and should be able to change and be however they are.
There's a lot of queerness in the natural world that people don't often recognize or think about as queer. If you're not queer, maybe you don't look for it. Like asexual propagation. If you really stop and think about it, that's pretty queer. Taking cuttings from plants and asexually propagating them that's pretty outrageous if you think about that. I think it's really neat. Or grafting different kinds of apple trees onto one tree that's really weird and amazing that you can that you can do that sort of thing.
E. / Hummingbird Farm, San Francisco, CA
E. / Hummingbird Farm SF © Ella v.d.Haide E. / Flower bending CA © Ella v.d. Haide
We are at Hummingbird Farm. It's a collective farm in the Excelsior in San Francisco. The name of our collective is Urban Campesinx. Urban Campesinx is for everyone so the X is to be inclusive, regardless of where we fall in the spectrum. We are acknowledging that queer, trans, two-spirit people are also Campesinx.
This farm is on Ohlone territory. It's their stories and ceremonies that have already blessed the land. It's their relationship that we are just tapping into.
In the collective we're not just using the space for food, we're using the space for medicine, spirituality, organizing. Some of the ways we're organizing on the farm is with queer ecology. Ecology is also a social construct. It's been created by humans to try to explain the natural world but it's a perspective of this elite class that continues to try to maintain that power.
Ecological science in an academic sense has been created and structured by white hetero cis-gendered males. So there was a lot of biopiracy from the Americas, Africa and Asia. There was a need to classify everything and put it into a structure. Carl Linnaeus, who's credited with creating botany, did a lot of this work. A lot of these plants, that came from other parts of the world, are forever labeled by European names. Colonialism has taught us, people of color, to question our own environmental knowledge, our own ecological knowledge, to doubt our traditional food ways. It also implements what we think of as natural and unnatural in regards to homo- and heterosexuality. So as we educate our next generation of youth that work in this space we're encouraging language like pollen producer and fruit producing to give both of them reproductive power without influencing this idea of gender into the flowers.
I've been working on this idea of “flower bending”. It incorporates queer ecology and some Meshika ideologies. Reconnecting with those plant friends and relatives. How we relate and which flowers we choose to nurture is how we will adapt to climate change.
Photosynthesis is such a beautiful thing. How to use that magic of photosynthesis to capture as much of that carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into biomass. What we call weeds, they're actually doing more than most people are at catching carbon. They're doing something about climate change. They're existing and they're resisting. That resilience of these weeds is similar to us as queer people of color who get called the weeds of society.
Some of the things that we're working on in this space is decolonizing some of our flowers. That’s another way how we incorporate environmental justice into our work. These are Cempasúchil. We use the Cempasúchil to honor queer people who have died in detention centers. We are keeping the seeds and the story alive for this specific flower. It is something that we're organizing with but it's also something that is super valuable. It’s how we honor our dead. Especially in this world where there's so much injustice and we continuously get shot at and get murdered, our life tends to be devalued because we're queer, because we're trans, because we're too spirited, because we're people of color.
Last weekend we had a queer two-spirit ceremony here where we acknowledge queer and trans*cestors, who have been influential in our survival, but also just the queerness that exists in nature. It was a reaffirmation that the solutions for survival and climate chaos is queerness.
Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram / KEXMIN field station, Salt Spring Island, BC
Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram /Crab Apple, BC Canada © Ella v.d. Haide Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram on Saltsping, BC Canada © Ella v.d. Haide
My name is Gordon Brent Brochu-Ingram. I'm here to talk with you about this tree behind me which is a pacific crab apple. It is the only North American apple species. This tree was extremely and continues to be extremely important to Salish and other indigenous societies. Historically it was one of the most bountiful of the five or so Salish fruit trees. The fruit was eaten raw or cooked, preserved in cedar boxes in either water or Oolacan grease. I grew up with some of those traditions. If you live on a reservation in Canada, traditional foods are really hard to come by and really precious. The colonial commissions in the late 19th century extending well into the 20th century excluded this knowledge and destroyed many of the traditional orchards.
This leads to a discussion for me when we look at gardening traditions. We look at queer gardening, it’s what's our relationship to decolonization, to decolonizing bodies of knowledge on agroecosystems and of understanding the very different kinds of knowledge and aesthetics and sensibilities that went into cultivating, stewarding and protecting. People don't value it. They associate it with native cultures and native plants and they don't realize how productive and beneficial it is. So the first thing to do is to get it into gardens and to get people talking about it. To have it not relegated to being a minor part of the local agroecosystem.
In many ways those kinds of nuanced discussions of crops have a parallel in finding space for sexual minorities. For example, in this region existed probably 15 languages within a radius of 200 kilometers. There were quite a number of sexual cultures and quite a number of possible forms of homoeroticism. If we're trying to recover knowledge about this tree, to find ways to re-establish it in the landscape. We're going to have to mobilize a range of sensibilities, including queer sensibilities. That discussion has barely begun.
We could look at a project such as queer gardening as a way to develop some more nuanced research methods for listening and looking for the relationships between cultivated plants and the people that cultivate them, including queer people who have often been ignored and devalued and erased in the same way that these plants have been.
L. / Oakland SOL
L. / Oakland SOL (sustaining ourselves locally) CA © Ella v.d. Haide
I'm L. and we're at Oakland SOL, “Sustaining Ourselves Locally”, in our community garden. SOL is a six-person cooperative. We are all queer/trans people of color who share some values around food justice, social justice and environmentalism in a way that feels culturally appropriate for us. We are in an urban, people of color centered neighborhood.
For myself as a queer individual and as someone who identifies as a person of color, it's important to have space and hold space like this garden, where one can heal and rejuvenate and alleviate from all the stresses and not just to feel okay, but to start to feel like I can actually go out and do something now. I can thrive now. I’m in a state where I’m beyond just feeling okay, I can create something. I can reach out and help my community.
I would just say that the garden is queer. You can talk about this in a scientific way. Plants demonstrate and actually have scientific classifications for pretty much an infinite number of genders and also sexualities that work the best way when there is a diversity of those things existing together. We don't consume control. That's very patriarchal and a very western way to look at gardening. We open up a relationship. So if we're planting things that don't grow here naturally, this is not their native environment, we have to be responsible for their care and their nurturing and how they relate to one another and also how they relate to the plants that are already in this environment.
When you enter into that relationship, it's important to have a mutually beneficial relationship and tend to that all the way through. Not just treat land like we've learned to do in this patriarchal abusive way, where land is a product I can just take, take, take as much as I want from and never give back. That’s the pathology of a white supremacist and patriarchal and capitalist society and it translates into how we interact with land. So I do what I can in building my understanding to put a resistance to that and to talk about that with other people who come to the garden.
The garden was a great reflection for me to understand my gender and my own sexuality or why I call myself queer. My fantasy farm was always a citrus and avocado farm. It's part of my ancestral food and I just love avocados. What I learned about avocados was that the flower of the avocado physically switches from a pollen-producing flower, which is more commonly known as a male flower, into a fruit-producing flower, which is more commonly known as a female flower. It actually will physically change its parts during certain times of the day. That to me just resonated and I was like: “I don't just dream of avocados, I am an avocado.”
N. / Vancouver, WA
N. / Vancouver, WA © Ella v.d. Haide
My name is N. and we are at my house in Vancouver, Washington.
Discovering gardening about the same time as I was medically transitioning was a way for me to come into my body and establish for the first time this connection that I hadn't really had. I'd spent 30 years in my head, before I realized that I needed to transition. I always thought that there wasn't a way that I could be good with my hands. Gardening has been such a gift. It has really given me this sense of competence and joy and that I’m a person who can accomplish tangible things.
For me the value of gardening and especially with a queer perspective, is that you always have the ability to learn something. I'm sitting here on the ground in front of potted plants but most of my garden is actually raised beds. It's planning for a continued access as one ages or as one has limited physical ability to reach down. Gardening isn't just something for able-bodied people. Are you in a wheelchair? Do you have a bad back? Yes, you can still garden.
Queerness is a positionality. It’s inherently political because it's this positionality vis-a-vis the normative. We choose to be non-normative. We choose to ask questions. Queerness is that forever two-year-old that's always asking “why?” Queerness is with its questioning similar to gardening. Gardening is an interrogative process. We have a dialogue with the earth with our plants out of necessity. They talk to us. They communicate with us.
I have a couple of rhubarb that are very clear communicators. At the beginning of the day these little rhubarb would start up being perky. Then as the day progresses, they start getting lower and lower. And they eventually just go completely flat on the ground, so you know what the progress of the day is. They're probably my clearest dialogue that I have in the garden. But if you stop and look and listen, these plants, the dirt, the sky, it all talks to you.
E. / Clackamas Community Garden, OR
E. / Clackamas Community Garden, OR © Ella v.d. Haide
My name is E. This is the Clackamas Community Garden. It was started in 1967 and it's one of the first community gardens in the United States.
There's a lot of queer people who garden here. We're using gardens to really connect with that cycle that's already here, that's already been in existence for all of this time and we've kind of forgotten about it. We've forgotten how to live with nature, how to live with plants, how to see the interconnectedness of all these things. We need these gardens. They're almost like temples. They're sacred spaces, like a church or a synagogue, where we come to renew that relationship with nature that we've sort of forgotten, but that's always been there.
Being queer is kind of the same way. There’s always been queer people throughout all of human history. In some ways we've needed to create this new category of queerness to remind ourselves, it's like a garden, to create a safe space where we can examine ourselves and say: “We recognize the authenticity of each other and our differentness and that distinctiveness within the whole field of humans”.
We do two gardens. This is our ornamental garden and it's in an unwanted part of town. We're out on the margins but I think that's often where queer people find themselves is in marginalized spaces. We have a little miniature garden here with some bonsai trees to remind us that there's little things in the world and that our size does not give us some perspective of privilege. It's just another kind of size. There's not a lot of insects in Oregon, but we want the ones that do live here to use the space. Like hummingbirds and bees and spiders and slugs. We want them to be able to live in our space.
Madrone / Intentional Community
Madrone / Intentional Community © Ella v.d. Haide
The spiritual connection between being on the land and the land. There's an interweaving of identities. There was a whole grove of standing dead Madrones that were incredibly beautiful and I was just so moved by those trees, so I took the name Madrone. These trees are companions of mine. I'm so blessed by these trees. They just keep growing. They'll be here long after I’m gone. They are a testament to life.
H. / Queer Intentional Community
H. / Queer Intentional Community © Ella v.d. Haide
I'm H. I’m a musician and a performance artist and a gardener and an amateur herbalist and botanist.
I think of heterosexuality as being unnatural because it's taking all the possibilities of nature and saying “actually, you can only do this one thing”. To me that seems unnatural. It seems like if people were just allowed to follow their true natures, all kinds of possibilities would be an option. So the notion of queerness being unnatural is like a complete mirror image reverse of how I think about it. Instead of applying our super particular definitions for sex onto plants we could actually do the opposite and learn from observing all the diversity of how plants do it. Then you get into mushrooms and reptiles and it's even a whole other insanely huge world of how you could gender or sex different things. I feel like plants are kind of queer in that way. I see eroticism as an experience through the senses that makes you feel alive and that fills you with that feeling of a life force. Ecstatic experiences of being alive through sensation and scent and sight and beauty and things like that. I think that is this huge thing that all humans have access to. And then patriarchy and the whole heteronorm tries to narrow that down to this very limited script that you're supposed to follow to have erotic fulfillment in your life. Queers are already expanding outside of that one little narrow hetero option. It’s not always going to be the case that everyone will be like this, but I think once you're already breaking out of that narrow limitation you have the freedom to now expand your definition of the erotic even further to like: “smelling this flower is practically an orgasm”.
The way that the hetero-nuclear family is a fundamental unit of capitalism and that relates to nature and how that relates to queerness. It is especially relevant with our lives here and how we're living, because we're already challenging that whole idea of family. The way that we take care of each other and the way that we get our needs met and get our resources can be different as well. By building a lot of our own things, growing a lot of our own food, making a lot of the things that we need, bartering with one another all these different ways. The alternative family structure also can come with an alternative economic structure.
I feel like the people who lived here before look out for the land. It's like there's still this sense of ancestry, that other queers are my ancestors, even if they're not my blood ancestors in that way. When this was really taking off as a community was during the worst days of the HIV plague and so it has that significance as far as our queer history. That ethic of care that people have, still reverberates through this community.
R. / Queer Intentional Community
R. Tattoo/ Queer Intentional Community © Ella v.d.Haide R. / Queer Intentional Community © Ella v.d.Haide
My name is R. and we're at a queer intentional land project in so-called Middle Tennessee. This land belonged to the Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee and Choctaw people before white settlers came into this land.
I see gardening as a form of protest in a way. Everything I do is connected to the fact that I’m queer, that I’m trans, that I'm non-binary, that I’m a person of color. Trying to work with the land with more critical analysis of how we've all come here and taking into account that we're all on stolen land and taking into account that chattel slavery happened in this area and what reparations for black folk and indigenous folk look like or could look like.
I found that in my limited experience with queer land projects the majority of them have been white dominated and the majority of people there are white people. I mean, it makes total sense unfortunately, why access is more difficult for folks of color and for trans people especially. It's important to me to be having the conversations about a more critical analysis of these things of access and white privilege and how that's connected with colonization and settler colonialism and all these things that affect all of us. I've been a part of some of these conversations, of trying to redraw these lines with the consideration of how white privilege has affected queer land projects and how they've manifested. Who has access to them and who feels comfortable even going into these spaces. I think there's still a long way to go with that in terms of a redistribution of wealth and of power but I think it's happening. It needs to happen a lot more.
The queerest thing in the garden is the rose quartz crystal in the center. Rose quartz is a stone of love and compassion. It's really beautiful and it's really pink and it's freaking gay. To me it connects the importance to learn more about how to work with the land with my spiritual practice. Especially in a world where queer folks and folks of color and trans folk are being excluded from access to resources and access to land and access to places to connect with the earth. Also being excluded or having to deal with the cultural appropriation of religions and spirituality to the point where it can feel uncomfortable to be in these spaces that historically have come from our very own roots because it's now dominated by white people or been rebranded by mainstream society as this commodified notion of what spirituality even is.
My plant-tattoos have been intentional and a ritual. It's seaweed. These plants grow for hundreds of feet into the ocean bottoms coming up to the surface. They are so rooted but also so completely fluid, moving with the waters, just going with the flow of things and allowing yourself to let go in that way. That was an important theme in my life.
M. / Queer Intentional Community
M. / Queer Intentional Community © Ella v.d. Haide
There was a lot of stuff published that AIDS was a response to overpopulation and these diseases need to come and sometimes clear things out because it's the earth defending itself. These notions that the earth defends itself from undesirable cultures has made it into the environmental movement in the United States. The fervor in which we can take on what we think is right about nature can easily turn into a fervor of a fascistic thought system to control humans so that we protect nature. Even the language we choose such as “invasive plants“ might itself reinforce racist and elitist thought systems.
C. / Earth Roots, OR
C. and R. / Earth Roots OR © Ella v.d. Haide
We live between Oakland, Oregon and Yoncalla in Douglas County in the Umpqua Basin in the land of the Umpqua, Cow Creek and the Yoncalla Indians.
I’m C. the founder of Earth Roots which is a queer, trans, intersex, people of color healing land space. It's a space for us and by us. To be able to do collective healing and liberations and to center us. It's four acres. We are currently utilizing a fraction of it for our living space and our garden. We give a large part of our harvest away. We can only eat a portion of this, so it goes to people who need it because fresh vegetables are hard to come by.
We marginalized people of color experience a very strong disconnection to land through white supremacy, through capitalism, through colonization, through land theft, gentrification. All these different ways that force us out of our ancestral connections to land.
Having a space that you could connect back to nature and create food for yourself, create that abundance that nurtures us, is a really big deal as far as decolonization concerns. So for us to really talk about radicalization, of what does it mean to do collective liberation. Food is where it starts, food sovereignty, food sustainability. How do we make our own food? How do we support the land? Because it's not just nursing us we have to nourish the land.
There's so much privilege that I have with this space, that I have to share it. That’s queer, recognizing our privilege and where our intersectional privilege and oppression is. Think about how we utilized our land for others, who are in the margins. Just because I’m a person of color does not mean that I don't have a certain amount of privilege that I can share with others who don't have that access.
S. and N. / Collective front yard Garden, Portland, OR
S. / Portland OR © Ella v.d. Haide S. / herbal pharmacy / Portland OR © Ella v.d. Haide
In a society and a culture that devalues a whole lot of your identities, growing your own food is a pretty important and good way to fight back. If you go down the block it's lawn, lawn, lawn, us, more lawn, more lawn. So, just in the sense of using queer as a verb, in that resisting or pushing back against or shaking up all of those normative practices.
How much of my queer identity shapes the way that I practice plant medicine, or the way that I garden? I feel like it's a huge part of the way I interact with the world. A huge chunk of your food production happening in your front yard, in a space where front yards are supposed to be these pretty, manicured status symbols, I think is very queer.
Part of the reason we got interested in herbal medicine is that we have queer friends in our community who were poorly served by western medicine. They didn't get basic care that they needed because they were queers. They nearly died over and over again because nobody would do a thorough examination or nobody would talk to them about things.
I’m more interested in plants that are everywhere, all over, easy to identify, under your feet, that you know already. St. John's wort for example. It's not the newest, expensive, fad plant from somewhere else. It's the weed growing in your own backyard or in the vacant lot down the street. It grows on the edge of every roadside around here. It's growing in the cracks of the sidewalk and it ends up being an incredible medicine for pain, for inflammation, for depression. I use the oil constantly for folks who have aches and pains and wounds and hip issues and things like that. Working class folks working in the service industry are going to have more of these wounds and this is a medicine plant that grows on roadsides and ditches, that is easy to access.
S. / Queer Intentional Community, TN © Ella v.d.Haide
About the Artist
Ella von der Haide is a filmmaker, artist, activist and gardener from Germany. She has published a series of documentaries with the title “Another world is plantable!” featuring the socio-ecological practices and politics of community gardeners. She is exploring Queer Ecologies in her films and performances. Her latest performance is called “Queer Love for the Microbiome. A post-anthropocentric circus.”
Citation
Haide, Ella v. d. 2024. “Queer Gardening: Film Stills and Quotes from Interviews with LGBTQIA2* Gardeners about Queer-Feminist Ecologies in North America.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. https://www.tsqnow.online/post/queer-gardening-film-stills-and-quotes