Horticulture as history making

Depopulation has become a landmark transformation across different rural areas, one that is often accompanied by collective experiences of abandonment, crisis, and deprivation. On the Azores archipelago, Portugal, people encounter demographic decline as a disorienting loss of familiarity with their environment and especially their horticultural plots. Azorean depopulation, then, is best framed as a spatial phenomenon. Islanders describe their gradually overgrowing land as laden with historical representations, moral principles, and modes of selfhood. At the same time, they lament that it is already lost. Activities in decline-affected gardens, such as growing, tending, and harvesting crops, are tinged by this historical consciousness and are hence particularly “dense” in meaning. Since horticulturalists know that their land is lost, yet continue to cultivate it, their efforts concretely effect a shared historical condition of deterioration.