A few weeks
ago I visited a community garden on 111th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. It had been lovingly tended for a number of
years by two women, Margaret Doyle and Julia Gabriel, who would garden two or
three times a week. In 2011 Julia died
of a stroke and Margaret has since spent a good part of each summer away. The garden was renamed the Julia Gabriel
Community Garden in her memory, but is now largely neglected and ignored. On the day of my visit, the garden was unlocked
and empty, while across the street at St. John the Divine visitors were
enjoying a bit of sun. There is nothing
to encourage the visitor to cross the street and sit in Julia’s shade. No color catches the eye. The garden is dry and dusty. Its two devoted gardeners have moved on and
there are no heirs.
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| Julia Gabriel Community Garden |
This is not a singular
problem. A 2012 article in the New York
Times by Michael Tortorello called attention to the dwindling supply of volunteer
gardeners, despite an increase of interest in food gardens. Neighborhood demographics are changing,
gentrification may produce more or less interest, and the first generation of
community gardeners is dying out. This
varies across the city, for reasons not well understood.
In some cities, and in all European
countries, allotments are more prevalent than community gardens. In contrast to
a community garden, an allotment is a small plot of land made available to an
individual or a family. Large plots of
land owned by a municipality or another entity are divided up into smaller
parcels that are then assigned. There is usually an association overseeing the
operation to which gardeners apply for a plot, pay a small fee, and adhere to
the rules of the association. How the
plot is used is in the hands of the gardener, but must be reserved for only
personal use.
A community garden, on the other
hand, is a single plot of varying size gardened collectively by a group
people. Although the gardens are seen as
engines of community engagement, they are owned by a municipality and governed
by the municipality’s terms of access and management.
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| Southwest Corridor Park |
Boston is the rare city combining
community gardens, parks and allotments in a single stretch -- the Southwest
Corridor Park, a narrow, 90 acre ribbon of public open space. A proposed highway project was successfully
blocked by community resistance, rail lines buried underground, and in its
place a five-mile stretch of tot lots, playgrounds, flower beds, open green
spaces, athletic courts and 150 community gardens and allotments was established.
Many South Enders came from
gardening and farming cultures in other countries. Moving along the corridor you will find
Italian plots with fig trees, French potagers alongside Asian gardeners growing
vegetables vertically on posts climbing to spread horizontally along overhead
lattice.
Boston also has allotments
carried over from World War II, the Richard Parker Memorial Victory
Gardens. The once-abandoned gardens are
now divided into 450 individual plots, used as the gardener chooses. Individual
allotments are fenced and gated, but the larger area is open and anyone can
stroll down the pathways at any time of day and peer over the fences. The Parker Gardens are on publicly owned land
and the city supplies only water; everything else is provided by the gardeners
and their association.
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| A Parker Garden's Plot |
In New York City, Roosevelt
Island works on an allotment system, managed by the Garden Club. The design gives each gardener 210 square
feet, laid out in trapezoidal patterns so that no two gardens are alike. You sign up, get on a waiting list, and hope
for the best. No one seems to give them
up, and you usually have to wait until someone moves or dies.
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| A Roosevelt Island Pathway |
One gardener is a
dedicated pond-builder. One of the earliest
gardeners, he has made extensive use of the debris from the various excavations
and construction sites on the Island.
Large slabs of stone from the wreckage of the insane asylum and concrete
sections of old foundations –- all carried by hand-drawn cart -- have been
transformed into garden sculptures and stockpiled for bleacher-like seats at
his ponds.
The Roosevelt
Island gardens are as distinctive as the gardeners who inhabit the space. Some are meticulous, some are untidy, others
are wild. Some are devoted to vegetable
crops, while some are just places to sit and enjoy other people’s gardens.
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| A Roosevelt Island Plot |
The Garden Club
provides a clubhouse of sorts in a storage shed. Community rakes, shovels and hoes are stored
in bins available to all. A limited
number of lockers allow gardeners to keep tools close by. Twice a year the Club brings in soil and
provides wheelbarrows for transporting.
In both the Boston and Roosevelt
Island examples, city engagement is minimal. Could a version of these
large-scale community garden projects, individually rather than
bureaucratically driven, engage the general public in maintaining neighborhood
parks? Does the accessibility of the
larger area, and the knowledge that these plots are available to all, perhaps
encourage individuals more than the collective approach of the community
gardens with their own built-in local politics?
What is it that gives these gardens
so much more vitality than the average neighborhood park? Are they affected by the demographics of the
neighborhood? By the cultural values of
the times? Should there be a Jeffersonian
principal of home ownership applied to apartment dwellers and renters? Here is your plot, use it as you wish? If volunteers in public parks only get to do
what is assigned to them, what would happen if that paradigm changed? Anarchy or a robust landscape?
All the above is only
the barest outline of what is actually happening on the ground. In the coming weeks Emily Walker,
Outreach Coordinator for New Yorkers for Parks, will be a guest contributor
writing about what it takes to make a successful community garden, and the
subtle shift towards allotments in schoolyards and individual plots in public
housing.
