"The backyard garden can be a place a great educational opportunity, but biophobia can lead to decreased backyard biodiversity. To counteract biophobia, personalized ecologies can be explored. Personalized ecologies are simply direct interactions with individuals of other species (Gaston et al., 2023). Understanding people’s personalized ecologies, even in their own backyard, can help create strategies to increase biodiversity (Gaston et al., 2023; Sanders et al., 2018). However, the actual impact that exploring these ecologies has on biodiversity has not been well documented (Gaston et al., 2023).
Often while gardening, organic disturbances such as “weeds” and reptiles will be encountered. These disturbances (“garden surprises”) can sometimes be unwelcome and illicit various negative responses from the gardener depending on their previous lived experiences, normative beliefs, or education. Many gardeners also have stories to accompany their experiences that help illustrate the epistemology of their responses. Quite often these stories contain some sort of misconception about “weeds” or reptiles that lead to their removal from the backyard garden, inherently decreasing its biodiversity. Understanding these epistemologies and normative beliefs can be useful in future gardener education.
The purpose of the study is to explore the personalized ecologies of backyard gardeners and their responses to garden surprises. This information can be used to understand how their epistemological foundations guide their responses to garden surprises. Participants were members of the Master Gardeners program in Mississippi. Researchers developed an educational intervention about flora and herpetofauna that might be found in gardens of Mississippi. Participants were given an initial survey to assess their comfort with and understanding of these types of garden surprises as well as a follow-up survey to find if their views of garden surprises had changed as a result of the intervention. Participants were also given an option to conduct a live interview with the researchers.
This qualitative study utilizes a pragmatic philosophical approach to find if educational interventions can correct misconceptions that may be present among backyard gardeners. Research questions include: · What inherent biases do Master Gardeners have in relation to unwanted surprises in the garden? · How does education about venomous/non-venomous snakes and their usefulness impact the perspective about unwanted garden surprises? · How does education about weeds and their usefulness impact the perspective about unwanted garden surprises?
In total, 70 participants responded to the initial survey, 46 responded to the post-survey, and 20 requested the follow-up interview. Preliminary qualitative results indicate that the educational intervention had an effect on the participants’ garden surprise responses. Misinformation about these garden surprises was prevalent. Place-based knowledge and normative beliefs play a large role in these misconceptions. Biophobia was a common thread and often manifested as fear of reptiles in their gardens or fear of the impact that unwanted plants could have on their garden. Further analysis of the data can lead to a deeper understanding of the link between misconception or misinformation and biophobia. This information can be used to create educational materials for gardening groups to increase awareness of these creatures' garden values."
