Researcher(s):
Zachary Holz
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2011 Completed: May 2012 Go to project site
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In this essay, I try to tell the singular stories of three specialty gardens in Portland, Oregon in historical context as an attempt to see the intellectual, material, and political landscape of America in the last century with greater clarity. By situating my thesis work in Portland’s three major ornamental gardens—the International Rose Test Garden, the Portland Japanese Garden and the Lan Su Chinese Garden—all of which were created during different eras of the last century of American history, I show how Portlanders sought to further the status of Portland as a cultured and competent world-city through the production and exchange of what I call “prestige ecosystems.” Through a study of these gardens, I construct a larger history of Portland’s changing position in the world-order, of Americans’ perceptions of “nature” in urban spaces, and of Americans’ shifting values surrounding “authenticity” in landscapes of tourism and cosmopolitan consumption. From a relatively isolated frontier outpost with very few global connections or markets for its goods in 1900 to a high-tech city home to large multinationals with strong international connections in 2012, a history of Portland’s gardens helps to particularize certain aspects of the changes that have remade the city in the past one hundred years. The stories told about these gardens help give shape to the larger ideologies and concerns of the past, and also help to undermine false conceptual binaries like nature/culture, global/local, modern/premoden, and masculine/feminine.