Cultivating Home: Preserving Intergenerational Knowledge in The Chinese Food Garden

Abstract

The home food garden is more than a space for food production; it is a space that fosters memories and continually grows to intertwine with collections of personal stories. With a focus on personal and familial experiences, this research traces the exchange of gardening knowledge and practices across three generations of my family: my grandparents' farmlands in Guangzhou, China, their gardens in Scarborough after they migrated to Canada, my parents' garden in Richmond Hill, and my own garden in Cambridge.

When my grandparents and her children lived in Guangzhou, cultivating food was deeply ingrained in their daily lives and was the main source of their diet. The gardens developed by each following generation became a point of connection to our ancestral roots. Drawing on theories of rhizomatic thinking and viewing the garden through the lens of ancestral plants, I base this thesis on the garden and follow my family’s migration to understand our agricultural heritage as it has been passed down, lost, or adapted to fit into host cultures.

Learning from Atelier Bow Wow's approach to ethnographic research, I conducted interviews with collaborative drawings and gardened alongside each family member to gather information on the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. In Ontario, I had the opportunity to garden with my family. To ensure participation at each step of the gardening process, the collaborative gardening began with this year’s growing season in March 2025 and ended in October 2025. I visited my grandparents’ and parents’ garden at least twice a month and documented it through photography and videography. From these interviews and gardening together, I identified four categories to analyze the collected data: Water, Soil, Tools, and Cultivation. To translate my family members' memories and knowledge into visual representations, informed by the spatial research of Huda Tayob and Jan Rothuizen. This research is presented as a series of four interconnected drawings, each related to one of the four categories. Each series of drawings is further dissected into the three different generations, highlighting what knowledge was passed on, what knowledge was forgotten, and what was reinvented to fit the new societal norms of the diaspora.

The final proposal synthesized the research into a design for my current garden space, as an attempt to reintroduce lost or unused knowledge while integrating values of the host culture. The purpose of this research was to further understand how the garden functions as a space for the Chinese diaspora to create a sense of belonging and preserve cultural identity across generations. It was also an opportunity to explore how migrant identities were constructed through food practices as a means of actively engaging with and adapting to a new landscape and cultural practices.