Recreation, cultivation and environmental concerns: exploring the materiality and leisure experience of contemporary allotment gardening

ABSTRACT

Allotment gardening has been identified as eco-leisure and associated with an ideological commitment to nature. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews and observations of the materiality of allotments, this study explores the enactment of allotment gardening as leisure. Findings demonstrate tensions and complexities in this leisure experience. Firstly, it shows that allotment gardening entails both the experience of freedom and enjoyment and a contrasting sense of duty. Secondly, the study suggests that the freely exercised activity of the individual plotter is negotiated within a dependency on the social structures of the allotment community. Thirdly, the study indicates that ecological orientations amongst plotters are expressed through gardening practices rather than articulated as ideologies. Finally, it demonstrates the potential of a material and consumption perspective in explorations of how both environmental concerns and/or materialism is practised through everyday leisure. Overall, the study contributes to multi-faceted understandings of motivations for allotment gardening and dynamics in the garden as a project of self-fulfilment and care for nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Allotments
• gardening
• eco-leisure
• nature
• leisure meanings
• material culture

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully thank the participant plotters for showing around their gardens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest to report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jette Lykke Jensen

Jette Lykke Jensen is assistant professor in Design Culture at Department of Design and Communication at University of Southern Denmark, Kolding. She holds a PhD in Design Culture and in her research examines design and leisure in order to explore the material culture of leisure.

Elin Brandi Sørensen

Elin Brandi Sørensen is associate professor in Marketing at Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management at University of Southern Denmark, Kolding. She holds a Ph.D. in consumer behaviour and her research focuses on consumer identity and consumer well-being.