The Garden

Guest Editors: Sarah Besky (Cornell University, sb2626@cornell.edu), Kasia Paprocki (London School of Economics, K.Paprocki@lse.ac.uk), Austin Zeiderman (London School of Economics, A.Zeiderman@lse.ac.uk)

Southern Cultures, the award-winning peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, encourages submissions from scholars, writers, and artists for a special issue, The Garden, to be published Fall 2027. We will accept submissions for this issue through November 1, 2026.

This special issue explores the southern garden magazine as a lens through which to consider the region’s entanglements in broader histories and geographies of colonization with and through plants. Imperial connections link the South to people, places, and plants far beyond it, and we welcome submissions with an expansive view of the region.

We invite authors to address how extraction, dispossession, theft, and violence undergird the aestheticized spaces celebrated in garden magazines. Such publications organize ideas about nature, domesticity, aesthetics, identity, and order, combining up-close images of ornamental beauty with news and features from curated private and public gardens, opulent country homes, and coastal estates. Interspersed throughout are lifestyle articles, food and drink stories, destination pieces, celebrity profiles, fashion and interior design sections, and images of hunting, fishing, and shooting. The garden magazine renders the imperial connections that brought the garden into being palatable and pleasing.

In this special issue, we’ll look beyond the gloss to examine how garden landscapes (and plant life) are inescapably imperial—the plants featured were wrested from Indigenous communities, the stately homes once housed former slave owners and traders, and the regional recipes call for ingredients made accessible through colonial occupation and plantation production, migration, and global exchange. Because garden magazines assume a racialized, classed, and gendered readership, contributions should engage with the naturalization of difference.

This is a creative experiment in which form matters. We welcome submissions that riff on magazine features, as well as scholarly articles, creative nonfiction, memoir, interviews, photo and art essays, and shorter feature essays. Topics can include but are not limited to:

·  Tourism and travel destinations, such as plantations, country houses, or gardens

·  The art of plants and empire in the South

·  Interior/garden design or “lifestyle” pieces

·  Alternative atlases and/or mapping of southern plants and empire

·  Fashion/style/clothing

·  Food and drink

·  Expert interviews/biographies (e.g., southern gardeners or landscapers)

·  “Invasive” plant species

·  Public and private gardens and memory

·  Landscaping (labor and practice) and class in the South

·  Radical gardening (e.g., guerrilla gardening, antihunger gardens, Black-owned gardens, garden commons, and differently-abled garden spaces)

·  Feminist approaches to and/or queering the southern garden and plants

·  “Green space” and city design

·  Seed collection/preservation

·  Plants as markers of regionalism (e.g., coastal plants, inland plants, Appalachian plants)

·  Public history/historic sites, gardens, museums

As Southern Cultures publishes digital content, we encourage creativity in coordinating print and digital materials in submissions and ask that authors submit any potential video, audio, and interactive visual content along with their essay or artist’s statement. We encourage authors to gain familiarity with the tone, scope, and style of our journal before submitting. For full submissions guidelines, please click here.