A dominant characterization celebrates property as a means to attain privacy and autonomy. Drawing on recent scholarship, I compare this idea with a proprietarian perspective, which emphasizes the ways in which private ownership comes freighted with public responsibilities. The garden, I shall argue, reveals both dimensions to property. Drawing from gardening debates over the past century and an empirical survey of gardening in Vancouver, Canada, I conclude by arguing, first, that the ends of property are more diverse than we suppose, and second, that these two conceptions should in fact be thought of not as incompatible and opposed, but as entangled and interrelated. While judicial and academic evaluations tend to rely on a binary view of property, so that privacy and propriety seem to live in different spaces, my findings suggest a more fluid cohabitation.

Two competing schools of thought have emerged to explain how the Montgomery bus protest of 1955–56 brought about changes on the city's Jim Crow buses. The dominant explanation attributes the changes to the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association. A second interpretation emphasizes the critical role of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the state and local bus segregation laws. This essay prooides a third explanation: that these two strategies–the boycott and the litigation–interacted, each shaping and reinforcing the other. Each strategy war a critical part of the struggle, but neither brought change by itself. This essay argues that the two strategies of the Montgomery protest created a synergy that was the key to bringing about changes on the buses.