About community gardens

An evaluation by Russ Grayson + Fiona Campbell - April 2000

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RELEVANCE

The growth of community gardening over the past ten years indicates that more people, community organisations and government instrumentalities see community gardens as relevant to public needs.

The mid-to-late 1990s brought:

• an expansion in the number of community gardens in the Sydney region (and elsewhere in Australia)
• an increase in the number of enquiries to the Australian Community Gardens Network from people and organisations interested in establishing community gardens
• an increase in media coverage of community gardening the entry of government institutions into community gardening.

This trend has continued into the new century.

Social aspects

Observation and informal discussion with participants suggests that the relevance of community gardening has as much to do with social considerations as with food production. Community workers have told me that their primary interest in community gardens is not access to food or nutritional health, but as venues for developing a sense of community.

The value of the gardens as social venues surpasses their role in reducing family expenditure on food or providing access to food for their families. Although these roles have been proposed by people concerned for the wellbeing of citizens on social welfare, the comparative abundance and cheapness of food in Australia reduces the potential for such roles.

Social reasons for participation in community gardening disclosed at Community Gardens Network meetings as well as informally include:

• meeting people
• forming friendships and working towards common goals
• community gardens as family-friendly places
• establishing social bonds that contribute to a sense of community.

Cultural relevance

The cultural relevance of community gardening is evident through the participation of different ethnic groups in community gardening: at Sydney's Waterloo Estate community gardens, Vietnamese, Russian, Indonesian, Australian and those of other ethnic origins garden together at Melbourne's Fitzroy Estate community gardens, Hmong and Vietnamese garden together, while the nearby Collingwood estate community garden is dominated by Turks the Claymore community gardens near Ca,mpbelltown, NSW, are tended by a large group of Tongans and formed part of a resident-led rehabilitation of the socially and economically troubled suburb.

I addition to an ethnically-focused cultural relevance, community gardens foster their own social culture of cooperation and shared responsibility. This culture grows from a community gardening experience that includes the need to share responsibility for the management of an area of land, to solve common problems, to start and keep the garden going.

Relevance to an improved urban environment

As functional landscapes, community gardens are relevant to urban environmental improvement because they bring derelict land into productive use, regreen streetscapes and increase wildlife habitat.

Native plants

While plants grown in community gardens are primarily the exotic species we rely on for our food, some gardens incorporate a small number of native plants, including Australian bush foods. The potential for this, however, is limited by the small size of most gardens.

Exotics carry out much the same environmental services as do native plants - producing clean air, filtering water, providing habitat and diversity in addition to providing food. In this way they contribute to improved environmental conditions.

Relevance to biodiversity

The use of non-hybrid vegetable seeds by some community gardeners serves a valuable role in the preservation of agricultural biodiversity. The seed is obtained from commercial seed companies such as Eden Seeds, Greenpatch Seeds and Diggers Seeds and from the Seed Savers Network, a membership organisation.

Like the biodiversity of natural systems, the diversity of the food plants we eat has been drastically reduced throughout the twentieth century to the situation where it may be more threatened than that of natural systems.

The Seed Savers Network, Australia's major community-based food crop biodiversity organisation, views community gardens as potential centres for seed saving and exchange.

At present, this is held back by:

• a low level of horticultural skills among community gardeners
• lack of opportunity to learn seed saving skills; there are too few potential trainers and no funded training programs
• the need to focus on obtaining land for gardening,on garden establishment and on learning basic horticultural skills among new gardeners unawareness of the work of the Seed Savers Network among community gardeners.

Gardeners at the UNSW Community Permaculture Garden have shown most interest in seed saving and exchange. They collect their own seed for replanting and are members of the Seed Savers Network.

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PAGE UPDATED... Monday, 14 January 2002