Garden Inventories

In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging, scholar Mariam Pirbhai looks carefully at the square of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home. From the strange North American obsession with non-fruiting fruit trees to the naming conventions of plants that erase their heritage, she casts a sharp eye on the choices that have shaped our gardens, and our society. Pirbhai considers wildflowers and weeds, our obsession with lawns, the choices in our plant nurseries and even our Canadian dedication to the cottage with warmth and humour. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.