The signage says it’s an Aboriginal Garden: pedagogic realities and spatial politics of biocultural diversity in campus landscapes

This chapter examines the pedagogic realities and socio-ecological politics of garden-based learning through the case study of the Aboriginal Garden at Monash University, on the lands and waters of the Kulin Nation Naarm/Melbourne Australia. Grounded in a fieldtrip with upper primary students who engaged in digital storytelling as well as ongoing university teaching practice, the chapter explores how biocultural diversity, sensory observation, and botanical literacy emerge through place-based inquiry. The chapter critically reflects on the layered histories of the Monash University Aboriginal Garden—from its origins in non-Indigenous ethnobotanical research to its contemporary role within a shifting institutional landscape of decolonial aspiration and settler-colonial inheritance. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, including interviews, archives, and pedagogical practice, this chapter critically reflects on the layered histories and spatial reconfigurations of the garden, its contested cultural legitimacy, and the implications for curricula. Through a relational educational lens, it questions how campus gardens might serve as sites of resonance, resistance, and renewal—spaces where human-plant relations, ecological care, and Indigenous Knowledge Systems can be explored, albeit within the limitations of settler-institutional frameworks. In acknowledging both the potential and the paradoxes of these gardens, the chapter calls for an ethically grounded, reflexive praxis that navigates the complexities of teaching on unceded Country.