Gardens as multispecies public spaces in Georgian modernity

The Kutaisi “Boulevard” (1848) was the first public “park” in Georgia, and quickly became the social and intellectual center of this small, peripheral Georgian city. Although a physically small, and perhaps from an outsider perspective, unremarkable plot of greenspace, as a greenspace, it became a public place central to the imagining of associated literary publics, and finally, as an infrastructure embodying an aspirational claim to modernity, its by turns dusty or muddy garden paths could also be found fault with as being materially a relatively abject incarnation of modernity, something which was felt to always be better incarnated somewhere else. In these critiques of the garden as infrastructure for “liberal walking”, the dusty or muddy paths of the garden were of more interest than the plants. Although all gardens are centres of what Hartigan calls “plant publics”, for these critics, the multispecies publics of the garden (humans and nonhumans) came to be an additional sign of the abjection of infrastructures embodying a failed modernity.