ABSTRACT
A social movement lens provided a way of looking at community gardening that went beyond the benefits analysis that has dominated academic writing on community gardening, and enabled me to explore an important but under-recognised aspect of community gardening practice: its role as a form of collective social action. In Australia, community gardens have often been viewed in terms of their contributions to sustainability but have rarely been analysed in relation to wider environmental movements. Anarchafeminists insisted that an anarchist or revolutionary egalitarian politics must transcend the division between public and private by putting its political principles into practice in daily life. In the US, a number of writers have argued that the community gardening movement in that country emerged from the Civil Rights rather than environmental movement, and have focused on community gardeners' work addressing poverty and racism. The term social movement has been applied to everything from religious sects to political organisations, single-issue campaigns to revolutions.
