Sustainability as a motive for leisure-time gardening: a view from the ‘veggie patch’

Abstract

There are many definitions of ‘sustainability’, but the term exists within social, economic and environmental contexts, the ‘three pillars’ of sustainability. Although governments, businesses and communities have embraced the concept, there appears to be limited understanding of it at the individual level. This paper reports a desktop survey to investigate the drivers of sustainability that motivate leisure-time gardening in private (backyard) and public (community) gardens. There was little mention of the ‘three pillars’ and they were seldom interlinked. A key element of ensuring sustainable futures is to engage individuals in behavioural change. It is necessary to raise awareness of sustainability in an individual’s everyday leisure activities. Leisure-time gardening is one way forward.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• economic
• social-cultural
• environmental
• gardening

Notes

1. In the literature, ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ are often conflated such that the two terms are often used as having the same meaning even within the same article, or even theoretically incorrectly assigned throughout an article. I believe that in Seyfang and Smith [17], ‘sustainable development’ is more correctly ‘sustainability’ – the paper is focused at the ‘grassroots’ level of society.