'This Little Square of Dirt'

This video is an element of a broader project, my MS thesis for the Department of Geography. That project is a mixed methods approach to studying the role of gardening on the south side of Muncie: maps, interviews, photos, a historical survey, participant observation. This video, which began as a class project for Dr. Tricia Gilson’s course in Visual Anthropology, became another methodological strategy for understanding the place of gardening in the social sphere of Muncie. The narrative is loosely structured into five themes: corn, land, canning, sharing, and neighborhood.Linda and Robert are urban gardeners extraordinaire. They have eliminated all of the grass in their yard (front and back) in order to grow food for their, and others’, consumption. But this film is not their biography, nor is it a gardening how-to demo, though Robert and Linda would be excellent contributors to such a program. Rather, through their words and their yard the film shows gardening as a social and spatial practice intimately tied to multiple scales of economic activity, from the local (sharing between neighbors) to the global (gardening for war, Ball canning jar industry). Histories and possible futures of Muncie, Indiana – their and my home, long ago labeled “Middletown, USA” – are bound up in gardening