Susan Jagger is an assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include: environmental education, learning gardens, community mapping, post structuralism and deconstruction, children's participation, and arts-based research approaches. In this article she describes the garden, as a space opened, from a collaboration between the earth, the natural world, and humans' bounding, enclosing, shaping of it that provides a motif for the opening, and exploring of the openings, of the research space and the research. She uses the school garden a metaphor for the cultivation of knowledge, and academic labor and discusses her dissertation and her thought process, and her meditations on children's experience of their own school garden. She describes her dissertation as a complex, challenging page turner, and re-turner.