Hannah Höch’s material output and illicit activities during the Third Reich included growing plants prohibited by Nazi horticulturalists while burying artworks banned by the fascist regime in her garden. With Höch’s clandestine activities as our point of departure, we will investigate the garden as a site where regulatory control and political resistance are both played out, where oppressive and transgressive behaviors simultaneously take place, and where political ideology is staged. While the English word garden, a noun that refers equally to kitchen gardens, orchards, and palace landscaping can be etymologically traced to the thirteenth century, it doesn’t emerge as a verb meaning ‘to lay out and cultivate’ until the 1570s. This expansion of the term—from noun to verb—is related to the rapid enclosure of public lands in England and the project of European expansion. As Sylvia Wynter shows us, the ontological distinction between Man and nature takes hold of the imagination during this time, brutally impacting the way people understand notions of cultivation, culture and place, as well as our relationships with plants and with each other. In short, it affects our every understanding of being in the world. It was through the cultivation of plants, animals, and an enslaved labour force, transported from one part of the world to another, that European settlers brought about a change so violent and vast it has been described by geographer Alfred Crosby as comparable to the cataclysm of an asteroid impact. This cataclysm, which continues to unfold under racial capitalism and its systems of ownership and extraction, is intricately bound up in ideas about culture and aesthetics. In this class, we will consider different aspects of the garden to think through the contradictions that emerge from these conditions. We will situate ourselves within a larger discourse on art and ecology to interrogate the way land, plots, and gardens are racialized and gendered, as well as the garden as a site for underground survival and sustenance. With an emphasis on contemporary researched-based artistic practice, as well as artists’ gardens like the one one queer British filmmaker Derek Jarman created at Prospect Cottage, we will engage with seeds as archives, oceans as affective fields, and compost as metaphor and method. In addition to Höch and Jarman, artists under review include Maria Thereza Alves, Candice Lin, Precious Okoyomon, Michael Rakowitz, Cameron Rowland, and Alex Tatarsky.