Seeds of Change: The New Place of Gardens in Contemporary Utopia ( Mars Trilogy ‪)‬

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (1993-1996) opens with an interplanetary voyage, and it is during this flight that the sagas first rear debates over the shape and nature of a new socio-political order are staged. These debates make up a utopian congress of sorts, in which the principal actors argue the social implications of everything from architectural design to just property relations to responsibilities for nature. Yet during these critical moments--when ideological battles are waged and alliances formed--head biosphere-designer Hiroko Ai and her farm crew are, quite conspicuously, absent. Completely absorbed in their gardening, off "in a realm that had nothing to do with the rest of the ship" and its endless political debates, the gardeners have simply left the details of humanity's future to their more politically-minded crewmates (Red Mars 65). It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, when the farm team suddenly and inexplicably disappears from the research base (and the narrative itself) a few months into Mars' colonization; and even more astonishing is the moment of their resurfacing at the end of Red Mars, when we learn that these supposedly "apolitical" gardeners have secretly constructed an underground insurgent movement, and have in fact plotted from the very outset to break away from the "First Hundred"'s experiment and forge an even more radical social alternative. The surprise element, of course, plays off of our customary associations of gardening as decidedly apolitical, escapist, or compensatory. Indeed, within the popular imagination, gardening (by many reports the most widely embraced pastime in both the United States and England today) (1) is not only conflated with the notion of a hobby, but arguably serves as the very apotheosis of "the hobby." In Fernando Meirelles' 2005 film The Constant Gardener, for example, cultivation provides an unambiguous trope for political apathy itself. In the film, Tessa, a social-justice activist decidedly more concerned with "saving people" than tending her neglected and under-watered house plants, uncovers a pharmaceutical conspiracy of global proportions. Mean while, her unwitting doormat of a husband (Jason Quayle), tinkers away in his plot of rose bushes, oblivious to the political corruption that perpetuates the misery and poverty of Africa.