This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from August 2021 to August 2022 in the Dokšycy district of post-Soviet Belarus. It documents how elderly rural women navigate pervasive state-induced neglect (bezkhaziajstvennasć) through their intricate relationships with plants. The Dokšycy district is a region marked by material decay, social dissolution, and demographic decline. In contrast to this largely abandoned, melancholic landscape, the elderly women’s meticulously kept home gardens stand out with vibrant vegetables and colourful flowerbeds.
Adopting human–plant relations as a central lens, the thesis argues that careful cultivation of home gardens constitutes a profound act of world-making and a technology of self. Gardening practices are not merely subsistence activities but active forms of ethical engagement, offering ontological security and a form of wordless, reciprocal love. The study unpacks three interconnected modalities of human-plant interaction: hliadzieć (attentive looking and care), huliacca (playful experimentation and imagination), and liubić (loving and reciprocal affection).
This thesis is an extended argument for taking seriously the quiet, everyday practices through which life is sustained and meaning is made in the margins. By theorising from the garden, it is possible to discuss agency beyond resistance; to provide examples for thinking about interspecies ethics grounded in lived experience; and to remind ourselves that even in the most “unpromising” of places, the cultivation of a single plant can be a world-making act.
