Winter’s Muted Garden

This essay on a garden in winter is the third essay in the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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What does a garden become in winter? How does winter—with its muted colors and snow-covered surfaces—alter the sensory conditions through which we encounter gardens?

It’s January. Cold settles in my hands and limits contact. It creates a layer. Mittens add another. Touch is mediated and constrained. These layers form a barrier between my skin and the world. Texture changes. The air feels sharper and drier. Scents fade. Cold air slows the movement of odor molecules and dulls my sense of smell. What remains is the smell of cold itself, as if winter narrows the olfactory landscape and mutes the diversity of scents found in warmer months.

Snow also quiets everything, extending this sensory narrowing, absorbing sound. What I hear most clearly are my own footsteps, the crunch of snow under my boots. I move more slowly, as the snow creates resistance underfoot.

With the leaves gone, the garden reveals itself through the fence. Standing outside it, I notice what summer usually hides. The metal grid is fully visible, and the space reads more clearly from the sidewalk. Branches emerge from small piles of snow. Wooden stakes remain, with only traces of plants attached. Snow covers a large compost area, forming small mounds. A few children’s toys lie scattered nearby. Nothing seems to have moved for a while. There are no footprints in the snow.

Winter opens the garden to the eye but keeps it inaccessible to the body. Unlike the garden in summer, I can see inside without entering, but I still need a key to go in. That does not change with the seasons.

A Site of Meanings

Winter alters my sensory access, but the fence alters the meaning of what I perceive. Beyond sight, perception emerges through sound, touch, and embodied experience, equally shaped by how the body encounters and moves through space. How I see, hear, and feel the garden from where I stand informs my perception of it, shaping what it becomes to me.

Gardens, like many places, carry both collective and individual histories. The meanings we give them emerge from an entanglement of memories, relationships, uses, expectations, and absences. In dominant imaginaries, gardens are often framed as spaces of cultivation and productivity, places where something is grown and taken from the soil. As art historian Judy Bullington shows, this understanding echoes a longer Western tradition in which the garden is associated with the ordering of nature and the cultivation of civilization, entangled with colonial imaginaries of “planting” order in new territories.

Within this framework, gardens are read as places where life appears through human presence and intervention, through movement, sound, and social participation. If vitality is measured through these signs of human activity, winter inevitably reads as absence, as a pause, as an unproductive season.

In autumn, the soil is prepared for the next season. Garlic is often planted so that its roots can settle before winter, allowing for stronger growth in spring. Some parts of the garden are covered before the cold sets in. People return with the spring. Yet during this so-called pause, life persists beneath the surface.

Under the snow, soil organisms remain active while decomposition continues, and transformations take place out of sight. Microbial and fungal symbioses sustain the garden but withhold the signs of life we are trained to notice. This is especially true from where I stand, outside the fence.

When vitality is measured through growth, productivity, and human presence, other forms of persistence are harder to register. The fence sharpens this condition. It does not simply separate the inside from the outside, it organizes perception.

From this threshold, the garden becomes legible primarily through what can be seen, while the relations that sustain it remain out of sensory reach. Winter thus turns the boundary into a perceptual device, one that reflects an anthropocentric ordering of the garden, framing what counts as life and what recedes into the background. In this way, winter makes visible the limits of the signs through which life is usually acknowledged.

Rethinking What Counts as Life

Following anthropologist Anna Tsing, the symbiotic collectives that compose life call for an “art of noticing” rather than a more immediate recognition of what we are trained to perceive and attend to. The living world is never singular or self-contained but is always inhabited by microscopic forms of cohabitation. As biochemist Margaret McFall-Ngai writes, “All animals, plants and fungi have their own unique microbiomes of tiny beings with which they live.”

Anthropologist Natasha Myers, drawing on Marisol de la Cadena’s notion of the Anthropos-not-seen, reminds us that Anthropocene stories are also stories of attention. They foreground certain forms of life while allowing others to fade into the background. What disappears is not only ecological complexity, but entire ways of living-with that exceed human-centered measures of vitality.

Rethinking what counts as life requires attending to how these erasures are produced and sustained in space.

Across the Fence

I wonder, what does a boundary, like the fence, protect, prevent, or render unseen? How does access shape our relation to the living? And on what regimes of visibility does ecological attention depend?

The boundary here produces a world. The fence determines what kinds of relations with the garden are possible. As infrastructure, it is a force which continuously alters the garden’s world, woven from multiple stories. Shaped by infrastructures, histories, power, and representational frames, these stories express a plurality of ways of inhabiting the garden, where heterogeneous relations (human and nonhuman, past and present) intersect and sometimes conflict. In this sense, the garden is a pluriversal space, where different worlds come into relation and negotiate what it means to live together.

These questions also speak to the entanglement of nature and culture, asking what counts as life and under what conditions it becomes perceptible. Ways of knowing are never detached from the relations through which they emerge.

As in many gardens, where plants, paths, and relations are arranged in response to ecological conditions in ways that shape movement, what becomes perceptible depends on position and the relations that structure the space. From my position outside the fence in winter, knowing is shaped by cold, distance, and division. I see more than I touch and perceive without entering. The grid comes into focus first. Snow reveals certain structures (stakes, supports, a small shed), even as the usual divisions of the plots—each assigned to an individual gardener—are softened beneath the snow and recede from view.

To see, then, is not simply to observe what is already there, but to participate in the making of a world. As feminist studies scholar Donna Haraway reminds us, what can be seen is always conditioned by situated positions and the apparatuses that render the world perceptible. Some forms of life exceed capture, escaping the very frames that claim to make them visible.

What becomes perceptible through an image, a boundary, or a particular point of view, is always partial, a way of seeing that organizes life as much as it reveals it. In other words, knowledge emerges through situated encounters, while it also participates in ordering what is seen, said, and attended to. This dynamic takes form in the 35mm photographs I have taken, where I notice and narrate the garden.

Photographic Narratives

In the photograph titled “What exceeds the frame of seasons. A superposition,” I have staged a superposition of winter and summer. Plants appear to press outward, leaning beyond the grid, taking space at the edge, as if the garden were always exceeding its enclosure. The winter photograph was taken from outside the garden, while the summer one was taken from within, during a moment of borrowed access, accompanied by someone who held the key.

Yet nothing in the image makes this position immediately visible. It can be read as if it were simply showing the garden’s interior, as if life were contained within the fence. However, it also suggests overflow: plants pressing outward, exceeding enclosure, and unsettling the very distinction between inside and outside.

The photograph multiplies the garden’s possible meanings and participates in creating its narratives. It invites interpretations that inform how the viewer understands and imagines the garden and its ecosystem. What, then, does the photograph protect, prevent, or hide? What forms of life does it foreground, and what relations does it leave outside the frame?

More-Than-Human Actors

Winter alters the relation between the garden and its beholders. From behind the fence, the garden registers the street, the passersby who linger or continue, the birds that leave traces in the snow. Winter appears as an actor in the garden, reshaping the conditions of encounter. In doing so, it draws attention to the multiplicity of actors (human and nonhuman) who move, inhabit, or are held at the edge of this boundary.

Cold stiffens my fingers as I take the photograph. The image is marked by this encounter, by breath in the air, numb hands, and the season’s altered tempo of both urgency and stillness.

This place never means the same thing for everyone. Each person carries different histories, lenses, and attachments. These perspectives accumulate in layers. The garden moves through them, holding collective and individual memories. My photographs, my words, my attention are all part of the garden’s becoming, one more situated story through which its world is sensed, framed, and told.

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Featured image: in Québec City Photo by author, January 2026

All other photographs were taken by the author outside a community garden in Québec City. Shot on 35mm analog film, they were taken from behind the fence, focusing on what becomes visible through it.

Émilie Gervais is a doctoral student in sociology at Université Laval (Québec). Her work explores shared gardens as spaces where care, cooperation, and attention to the living world are practiced and negotiated. She looks at how everyday acts of gardening reshape relationships between people, plants, and the environments they inhabit. Contact.