DELIMITING THE STUDY AREA: WHAT IS A HOMEGARDEN?
The location relative to a home, tenure, and purposes of gardens vary in different parts of the world, but some types of gardens are easily recognizable across different cultures.
In the scientific literature on ethnobotanical research into homegardens, the gardens studied are also known as house gardens, household gardens, or kitchen gardens. Their defining criterion is that they are adjacent to the house where their gardener(s) live. These can be urban homegardens (private garden adjacent to a house in a town or city) or rural homegardens (garden adjacent to a house in a rural area [solar in Chiapas, Spanish; Gartl or Gorte in Eastern Tyrol, German; kebun rumah in Kalimantan, Indonesian]).
Homegardens can be distinguished from other types of gardens, such as an urban garden (a garden plot at significant distance from a house in a city— for example, urban allotments in the United Kingdom and Schrebergarten in Austria), a rural garden (a garden a significant distance from a house in an area surrounded by other types of cultivated lands (for example, Kobisgorte in Eastern Tyrol, Germany; kebun ladang in Kalimantan, Indonesia), and other types of gardens, such as parks, botanical gardens, and community gardens.
In homegardens studied by ethnobotanists, the gardeners usually grow fruit, vegetables, herbs, and ornamental plants, primarily for subsistence and for their own enjoyment. But the uses of homegardens vary—some are used for the commercial production of vegetables, while others have only lawn and ornamental species.
Before undertaking a project on gardens, one has to know which kinds of garden exist in the study area. In many cases, one will find gardens of several types. The choice of which types to investigate depends on the researchers’ personal interests, available funds, time, research questions, and hypotheses—for example, whether we need a homogeneous sample (e.g., for the study of the cultural domain of gardening among a specific group of people) or a sample with maximum variation (e.g., a comparative study of different types of homegardens).
In our past research, we used an etic classification of the types of gardens present based on categories such as those listed above, and we decided which gardens should or should not be studied. In Kalimantan, for example, gardens both near the house and at distant rice swiddens were examined as part of an ethnobiological survey of the Bulungan area. Among the Maya in Chiapas, we only examined plots surrounding the homes. In Eastern Tyrol, gardens adjacent to residences were studied, but homegardens of the nonfarming rural population were excluded. In a current project in Lower Austria, we limit the sample further by eliminating homegardens with only ornamental plants, lawns, and exotic coniferous shrubs.
An ethnoecological approach to the study of garden classification would involve preliminary work to elicit and corroborate local categories of ecological representation. These might include a generic category of “garden” and several specific subcategories (e.g., “coffee garden,” “field garden,” “home garden,” “cocoa garden”; Meilleur 1986; Puri 1997, 2001). Once these have been mapped and several examples of each type surveyed, then we can decide which classes to study. Using local classification systems for cultivated areas can make it difficult to make cross-cultural comparisons because different criteria (such as function or geographic location) may underlie contrasted categories. However, local categories may ultimately prove more meaningful in explaining any variation in floristic diversity and gardening practices.
The need to clarify what is and what is not included in a sample applies also to the study of gardeners. In the Chiapas projects, each homegarden was tended by several gardeners, all being members of the family and each performing different gardening tasks. There, we could not refer simply to gardeners but had to make explicit which gardener we were talking about— wife, husband, or female or male children. All people assuming any responsibility and working in the homegarden should be considered as potential gardeners. In the Tyrolean project, we learned that homegardens are the responsibility of female farmers only. Therefore, in Tyrol, the gardener and the main respondent is the female farmer.
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