Aligning migrant–plant temporalities: Making homes in urban gardens

This article explores how migrant gardeners from Turkey make homes and mediate experiences of displacement, settlement and belonging through multispecies collaborations with plants in urban contexts based on ethnographic research in Germany and the Netherlands. Our focus is on the temporal negotiations at play: how migrants navigate memories of past landscapes, adjust to present climatic and ecological conditions and cultivate aspirations for the future through the rhythms and materialities of plants. Here, plants serve not only as conduits of nostalgia but also as active companions in the everyday labour of homemaking. The sensory and laborious dimensions of gardening anchor migrants in embodied memories while also grounding them in new environments. Yet these processes are far from seamless. Migrants and plants face the challenges of adapting to unfamiliar seasons and changing climate conditions together, prompting inventive strategies to care for plants and sustain gardens across temporal and ecological disjunctures. In doing so, migrant gardening contributes to the transformation of urban natures – not only through the introduction of new plant species but also by reconfiguring urban spaces as sites of relational and affective life. We argue that these entangled human–plant temporalities reshape ‘home-city geographies’, revealing how migrants remake urban environments not only with and for human communities but in active and ongoing dialogue with more-than-human others in temporal registers.