Our Home Gardens

Essay by Laurie Tümer | Jerry Friedman, Editor | 2026

 

For the artist who is a photographer, the home garden is an intimate and private space—photographed by many but rarely exhibited. We thank the artists in the show for sharing their home gardens with us and the photographs they inspire. 

Our Idiosyncratic Home Gardens

The history of the home garden started 12,000 years ago when humans began to cultivate food near their dwellings.1 Fast forward. As industrialization and supermarkets reduced dependence on subsistence gardening for many, the home garden shifted into a space for experimentation. 2 That is reflected in this exhibition where there are many styles of idiosyncratic gardens—what we’ve done with the dirt around our homes.  There is the ‘adornment sculpture garden’ of neon signs and dinosaurs.  There are ‘the vegetable, beehives, and fruit tree gardens’ that provide the artists with food and medicine shared with friends and neighbors and those who don’t have enough of either.  There is the ‘arboretum of old growth trees garden’ tended through persistent drought.  There is the ‘cultivated for photographic subjects gardens’. There is ‘the communing with the ancestors garden’ And there is ‘the fun of it garden’.

My Garden, My Peace

Someone once said to me that their garden was their peace.  We go to our home gardens or look at pictures of them for peace, leaving behind for a time the gruesome news of the day, our to-do lists and worries.  We feel better after fussing in our gardens, looking at pictures of them, photographing them, and planning for them in winter.  We need moments of peace like we need sleep—to reset the brain and clean itself off to keep us healthy.

The Home Garden in Perilous times

In these perilous times, the home garden as an exhibition theme may seem frivolous—yet it is anything but that for those who love their home gardens, tend and photograph them.  We’re living through a crisis where increasingly no one is safe.  At such a time, the home garden is a form of resistance, insisting on growth and beauty. In our gardens and art making, we practice hope, patience, tenacity, and joy—exercising capacities that have always been critical for human survival.  In the garden we plant trees that will fruit in their third year, if ever.  We are thrilled to see the purple Desert Four O’Clock that died back in winter return in Spring.  We put beds to sleep for winter and already sketch on the back of junk mail a better plan for next year based on our successes and failures. 

Tolerating Failure

In the garden and the studio, we fail more than we succeed—you are just seeing the successes.  It is a myth that people are born with a green thumb or a photographer’s eye.  It is only through a repetitive cycle of practice, failure, success, and growth that we come to tolerate the discomfort of failure and passion for these endeavors is born.

Paradise Problems

Home gardens are our versions of paradise, however humble they may be. And with our paradise come “paradise problems.” I first heard this phrase “paradise problems” from a friend who lives in a part of world that sees endless wars, and when I spend too much time poring over seed catalogs, deciding how many packs of Ismay Morning Glory (a light blue flower with yellow stamen to buy and if crimson morning glories might be a nice contrast, I imagine him whispering to me, “What a paradise problem you have here.”  He too has a home garden. 

 

We know we are lucky and privileged to have the paradise problems of a home and a garden.

Covid

About 55% of U.S. households have a home garden; this translates to about 71.5 million households and 185.9 million people. 3 For most, it is a piece of nature they have arranged to adorn their homes—some have a patch for summer tomatoes and lettuce, but most get food from a store.  During the recent pandemic, people across the country turned to gardening as both a practical and emotional response to crisis. With lockdowns, food supply uncertainties, and more time spent at home, gardens became sources of self-sufficiency, comfort, and connection to nature. Seed companies and garden centers saw record sales. 4 The home garden provided therapeutic relief—an accessible, hands-on way to ease stress, restore routine, and nurture life during a period of isolation where over 1.25 million people died, the most of any country and ranking it as the deadliest disaster in the country’s history. 5

 

Our Agricultural Heritages

In New Mexico, there many deep-rooted garden traditions:

Gardening among Native Americans dates back thousands of years and is closely tied to spiritual beliefs, community life, and environmental knowledge. 6 Indigenous peoples such as the Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache developed sophisticated dryland farming techniques that made use of natural rainfall, floodplains with hand-built terraces. The Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash—formed the foundation of many gardens, planted together to sustain the soil. 7 These gardens were and continue to be more than sources of food; they preserve heirloom seeds and provide remedies for many ailments.

 

The garden among Hispanic people in New Mexico has deep roots tracing back to Spanish colonization in the 16th century, when settlers introduced irrigation systems known as acequias—community-managed waterways adapted from Spanish, Roman, Moorish, and Indigenous traditions. 8 Here, the water is coming from the Sangre de Cristo within view. These systems made it possible to cultivate crops such as corn, beans, squash, and chile in the region’s arid climate. Over generations, Hispanic families maintained small household gardens that combined practical subsistence farming, often blending Old World plants like grapes, herbs, and fruit trees with native species. Today, these gardens and small farms remain important sites of tradition, food sovereignty, and connection to the land.

 

African American gardening in New Mexico occurred after the Civil War with the Great Migration which refers to the mass movement of roughly six million African Americans from the rural Southern United States to Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities between about 1916 and 1970.  9 They migrated to escape segregation, racial violence, and limited job opportunities to find greater social and political freedom. Some came to New Mexico as part of homesteading movements.  They found employment as railroad workers, miners, teachers, and small business owners. They brought with them agricultural knowledge from the South—skills in growing vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees in small home plots, often using sustainable practices like composting, companion planting, and seed-saving. This migration profoundly reshaped American cities and culture, influencing labor markets, politics, music, literature, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights and self-sufficiency. In towns such as Las Cruces and Albuquerque, African Americans maintained home gardens as vital spaces for food and cultural expression. Though their numbers were smaller than other groups, these gardens reflected a tradition of independence and connection to the land that remains part of New Mexico’s diverse agricultural heritage today.

 

Anglo gardening in New Mexico began in the mid-19th century, following U.S. expansion into the region after 1848. 10 Settlers brought with them gardening traditions from the eastern United States and Europe, often emphasizing ornamental landscapes, lawns, and imported plant varieties unfamiliar to the arid Southwest. They brought traditions of the kitchen garden, hedges and decorative shrubs for privacy, outside rooms for teatime or play, with ornaments in the garden that have a history from Mesopotamia, Asia, and Europe. Unlike the communal acequia systems and dryland farming of earlier residents, Anglo gardeners typically relied on private wells and sought to recreate the lush aesthetics of their former homes. Over time, exposure to Indigenous and Hispanic practices led some Anglo gardeners to adopt more sustainable, regionally adapted approaches using native plants and imported plants that flourish here like Russian Sage, ice plants, and Rose of Sharon.

Women, photography, and the Home Garden

Men garden as much as women in the U.S., yet I could think of few men to invite for this exhibition whose home garden inform their photographic work or who post pictures of anything that had to do with their gardens on social media.  Could it be that historically women inhabited the domestic sphere including keeping the home garden, chores that were often dismissed as less important than men’s endeavors?  In her new book Crossings, the former Santa Fe Community College anthropology professor Fran Levine argues that women (mostly Anglo) who traveled the Santa Fe Trail were remembered only as the wives of famous explorers, traders, soldiers, or politicians essential to U.S. expansion. 11 Levine contrasts this historical anonymity of these women with the public fame of their husbands, showing how women’s daily endurance and personal narratives shaped frontier life yet their names were largely omitted from official records. By her research of letters, diaries, and overlooked archival sources, she reframes western history to reveal women as central participants rather than footnotes to male achievement.

The Garden Club

The Garden Club was formed in the U.S. in 1903 in response to women being excluded from joining horticultural societies. The Garden Club fostered intellectual growth for women. The Garden Club impacted the American landscape through community beautification and environmental activism. One participant in this exhibition, Sharon Stewart, remembers as a child going to The Garden Club with her mother.  The Santa Fe Garden Club has a history of home and garden tours to raise funds for community projects.

Victory Gardens

As we reflect on the roots of gardening during times of need, the spirit of the Victory Garden offers a powerful lens for our present moment. First popularized in World Wars I and II, Victory Gardens were planted by millions of citizens across the United States and allied nations to ease food shortages to support the war efforts. During WWII, Victory Gardens in the U.S. were supported by the government that circulated pamphlets on how to grow food and deter insects with synthetic pesticides (a boon for that industry).  As men were at war, gardens were sustained largely by women whose labor fed families and neighbors alike. By 1943, an estimated 20 million Americans had planted Victory Gardens, producing roughly 8 million tons of food and supplying about 40 percent of all fresh vegetables consumed in the United States—a staggering amount.12  At the same time, the U.S. government forcibly removed and incarcerated more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent—two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens and they were also given the same literature on how to garden, and garden they did.13  Today, it is gaining popularity for people to turn front lawns into food forests, inviting their neighbors to partake.  These efforts are self-governed and shaped by climate uncertainty, growing awareness about our dependance on our food produced by and shipped from other countries, and the sharp rise in the cost of everything, particularly food. 

We don’t call the food in our gardens Victory Gardens today—none of us produce 40% of our food, but we can see them as a victory for citizens who have been establishing national networks of farmers markets, community gardens, and donating a part of their harvests to those who are food insecure.  There is more education about regenerative agricultural methods and the hazards of synthetic pesticides.  We, the people, are armed with more knowledge than ever before.  Those of us who buy as much local produce as possible appear to be returning to how our ancestors lived 12,000 years ago.

 

 

Citations from ChatGPT, Google AI

1 Encyclopedia Britannica — History of Agriculture
https://www.britannica.com/topic/agriculture/Origins-of-agriculture

2 Smithsonian — Home Gardening in Industrial America
https://americanhistory.si.edu

3 National Gardening Association — National Gardening Survey
https://gardenresearch.com

4 NPR — Pandemic Gardening Surge Reports
https://www.npr.org

5 CDC — COVID Data Tracker
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker

6 Smithsonian — National Museum of the American Indian
https://americanindian.si.edu

7 Library of Congress — Indigenous Agriculture Archives
https://www.loc.gov

8 New Mexico Acequia Association
https://www.lasacequias.org

9 Library of Congress — Great Migration Archives
https://www.loc.gov/collections/great-migration

10 National Park Service — Territorial Expansion Archives
https://www.nps.gov

11 University of Oklahoma Press — Crossings Publication Page
https://www.oupress.com

12 USDA — Victory Garden Reports, 1943
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/06/09/victory-gardens

13 Densho — Japanese American Incarceration Encyclopedia
https://densho.org/encyclopedia/incarceration/