This note points out and ventures to explain the remarkable absence of both hortus, ‘garden’, and all forms of hortari, ‘urge’, in a poem that seeks to encourage the audience toward the Garden.

This essay examines the representation of young girls in Song dynasty literary and visual arts as period portrayals of an important human emotion: parental love. The literature on doting parents extends far back in Chinese history, but in Song times children become the focus of family manuals, pediatric manuals, and an expanding visual and material culture in which the imaginary lives of children in play are conveyed to readers and viewers. Girls are shown not only active in games with boys but engaged in guiding and supervising the play. Talented girls were praised and adored by Song dynasty parents. Children were portrayed as resolving conflicts among companions on their own, with little interference from adults. Song period art and literature adopted an indulgent attitude toward mischievous behaviors in boys and girls. There developed a conception of family increasingly based on affection rather than the authority of age.

This paper aims to develop a sensory methodological framework to explore older user's landscape experience. Applying empirical experience in Australian aged-care facilities, it addresses a methodological gap in the current literature to help move beyond the current taken-for-granted approaches such as interviews, cognitive mapping, behavioural observation and visual methods. We propose a more holistic method which enables the exploration of older people's in situ environmental experience. The multisensory framework we propose here is based on the first author's doctoral fieldwork experience that took place in two aged-care facilities in Brisbane, Australia. Findings suggest this framework facilitates an understanding of users’ olfactory, auditory and visual responses to the physical environment, and promotes a deeper engagement with the landscape. We argue that this is essential to promoting good landscape design which genuinely connects with older people's needs.

Decolonization influenced the rise of environmental activism and thought in Australia and South Africa in ways that have been overlooked by national histories of environmentalism and imperial histories of decolonization. Australia and South Africa’s political and cultural movement away from Britain and the Commonwealth during the 1960s is one important factor explaining why people in both countries created more, and more important, public indigenous botanic gardens than anywhere else in the world during that decade. Effective decolonization from Britain also influenced the rise of indigenous gardening and the growing popularity of native gardens at a critical period in gardening and environmental history. Most facets of contemporary gardening—using plants indigenous to the site or region, planting drought-tolerant species, and seeing gardens as sites to help conserve regional and national flora—can be dated to the 1960s and 1970s. The interpretation advanced here adds to historical research tracing how the former Commonwealth settler colonies experienced effective decolonization in the same era. This article expands the focus of research on decolonization to include environmentalism. The interpretation of the article also augments national environmental histories that have hitherto downplayed the influence of decolonization on the rise of environmentalism. Putting decolonization into the history of the rise of environmental thought and action sheds light on why people in contemporary Australia and South Africa are so passionate about protecting indigenous flora and fauna, and so worried about threats posed by non-native invasive species.

In this paper we seek to engage with contemporary environmental debates concerning human–nature relations at the everyday level. Our focus is on the domestic or home garden, which we argue is a significant locale for understanding human–nature relations. Secondary empirical data illustrate the growth of gardening and its connections to changes in housing tenure, consumption patterns and the ‘commodification of nature’ by the garden industry. Primary empirical data on the meanings of home and garden (and gardening activities) are utilised to understand the relations between human agency and contemporary human–nature relations. The findings suggest that a variety of social and economic processes encourage utilitarian and consumerist orderings of nature in gardens. But the meanings of gardens are also structured by personal practices, often reflecting relationships with family and friends, that produce complex and personalised connections with nature that illustrate the ambiguity of human–nature relations.