The community garden experience < our experience

SYDNEY'S COMMUNITY GARDENING EXPERIENCE

Story by Russ Grayson. March 2000 - updated August 2001.
This article was originally produced as a summary of the history and benefits of community gardens in the Sydney region.

IN SYDNEY, community gardening is a movement on a distinct growth curve. The number of community gardens has grown from one in the mid-1980s to around 15 today.

The gardens range in size from the large to the miniscule - from the few square metres of the old Wolloomooloo Community Garden to over 60 square metres at Randwick Community Garden.

Why garden?

Ask them why they garden and you are likely to get as many different answers as there are gardeners.

You discover that people want:

• to grow fresh herbs and vegetables
• to meet others
• an antidote to stressful jobs
• to obtain healthy, organic food
• to get in contact with nature.

Importantly, there is a love of food and cooking.

Gardens - allotments and shared

Community gardens can be classified on the basis of how the gardening is done.

Take a walk through Randwick Community Garden in the eastern suburbs and you find families and individuals at work on their own allotments. Descend the terraces of Angel Street Permaculture Garden and notice people sharing the work. Here, there are no individual allotments.

In shared gardens participants:

• share the work
• share the harvest.

In an allotment garden it's different:

• each member has a defined area of land
• the individual or family is responsible for their area and has exclusive rights to harvest whatever is grown there.

Few allotment gardens are without shared or communal areas. Even allotment gardeners share produce.

Until the opening of the Waterloo Estate community gardens in the late-1990s most Sydney community gardens were shared. Now the split between shared and allotment is about half and half. Most Melbourne gardens are allotments like those found in widespread in Europe, the UK and the USA.

Over time, gardens may fluctuate between shared and allotment as has happened at Waterloo Community Garden and, in 2001, at Waverley Community Garden in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

Glovers Garden the first

In April 1985 Glovers Community Garden became the first of its type in Sydney. It was was started by people from a local community centre. Glovers was not the first in Australia, however. That privilege goes to Nunuwading Community Garden in Melbourne.

One of the pleasant things about Glovers is sitting in the shade of the Celtus tree on a hot summer afternoon, drinking tea and enjoying the relaxing ambience. Not far away, a couple gardeners might working leisurely among the vegetables and herbs or heaping up mulch around one of the young fruit trees.

It is the flowers which visitors notice at Glovers Garden. They are dotted all through the place - points of red, yellow, pink and white reminiscent of some French impressionist's painting. Glovers is biologically diverse and visually pleasing.

The garden occupies a north-facing slope in the grounds of the now disused Rozelle Hospital in Sydney's inner west. During its high point, the gardeners spilled beyond the chain link fence to terrace the steep upper slope. Later, declining participation saw the abandonment of that area to invading kikuyu grass and a few stubborn pumpkin vines.

Like all community gardens in the Sydney region, the garden's own green waste is composted to provide the fertiliser necessary for the growth of fruit and vegetables.

Significantly, the garden served a therapeutic role for patients in the hospital.

Growing an idea at Angel Street

It wasn't until Sptember 1991 that Sydney got its second community garden. That was Angel Street Community Garden, located in a disused corner of the grounds of a high school in inner-urban Newtown.

After the gardeners obtained permission from the site owner to garden the site, they terraced the sloping land into vegetable beds and planted them out. Next, they tackled the flat land, calling on the assistance of South Sydney City Council to break up the thick layer of concrete once the foundations of a building. That space now supports mixed vegetable cropping and, in a corner conveniently close by, a number of large compost bays. Through council, the Environmental Protection Authority funded the installation of metal signs carrying instructions on how to manage the compost.

Angel Street grew out of the disappointment of the organising group, known as EarthWorks, at being refused permission by South Sydney City Council to establish a city farm on the then-new Sydney Park site in neighbouring St Peters.

For most of the garden's existence, horticulturist Leith Mansell and teacher Tamara Bligh have been the core people, and, like all community gardens, participation has varied considerably.

Enthusiasm and decline in Eveleigh Street

Around the same time as Angel Street made a start, Sydney permaculture designer Bronwyn Rice was contracted by the Melbourne-based International Women's Development Agency to design and stimulate interest in a community garden in Eveleigh Street, Redfern.

Better known to the Sydney public as the location of confrontations between Aboriginal residents and police and for its drug use, the Eveleigh Street garden attracted use by local Aboriginal women and as a training venue for landsape work skills fro Aboriginal men.

The garden persisted over the years but by late 2001appears to be largely in disuse, perhaps as a result of the redevelopment of Eveleigh Street.

A decade of gardens

The Angel and Eveleigh street gardens were the first of a spate of community gardens which grew in the Sydney region during the 1990s.

The pocket sized Wooloomooloo Community Garden, opened in 1992 and situated below the eastern suburbs railway viaduct, was started by an enthusiastic horticulturist. At its peak, the garden was an oasis of food behind a chainwire fence.

Unfortunately, the area around the garden was used by drug users who discarded their syringes in the adjacent park. As participation in the garden declined, South Sydney City Council made use of the site as an education venue to train people in community composting. Later, council rezoned the open space for development and in the year 2000 built a new, larger Wooloomooloo Community Garden in nearby Sydney Place.

Another community garden made its appearance in inner-urban Sydney in 1991. That was Waterloo Community Garden at the rear of the Raglan street Uniting Church.

Waterloo Community Garden came into eistence thanks to the enthusiasm of Rhonda Hunt, then a community worker with the church. Rhonda later went on to work with South Sydney City Council as a community waste eduator; part of her role involved the training of and liaison with the municipality's communtiy gardens. Through council, Rhonda set up the South Sydney Community Gardens Network to take a coordinated approach to community gaardening in the local government area.

An eastern suburbs focus

Sydney's eastern suburbs have been a geographic focus for community gardens. In the late 1990's there were three gardens in the region. This had been reduced to two by 2000.

Randwick Community Organic Garden came into existence one Saturday in late May 1994. The gardeners, a bobcat and driver and truckload of soil donated by Randwick Council turned up at 9am to start work. By 3pm the mandala garden and six allotments were in place.

Occupying an area of Randwick Community Centre, the design of Randwick Community Organic Garden formed the project of a permaculture design course held at the centre. By the time the course had finished, the community centre manager had become enthusiastic about building the garden, so the designers went to work. Soon, people living along Bundock Street had joined and the garden grew to fully occupy available space within a couple years.

Randwick Council also made a small grant to put in a couple taps. This ended the practice of carrying buckets of water from the community centre building, a labouious task.

Garden at the university

In January 1995 Pacific Edge was working with the Students Guild at the nearby University of NSW on the design and construction of the UNSW Community Permaculture Garden.

At around 10 x 20 metres in size, the university garden has survived periods of neglect during exam and holiday times. Those problems were overcome by rostering people over the summer holiday break when the weather is hot and dry and gardens shrivel in the heat.

The UNSW garden has attracted a small number of non-student participants and has been redesigned to include more fruit trees and perennial vegetables and herbs, leaving only a small area for the intensive cultivation of annual vegetables. The thinking behind this has been that, with the variable participation characteristic of students, the garden would be more sustainable if it were less maintenance intensive.

UNSW community garden has proved successful as a training venue for community college organic gardening courses, permaculture courses and workshops.

A big space with few community gardens - western Sydney

Chester Hill is a working class suburb in western Sydney. It's one of those sprawling settlements of modest, detached houses which spread westward as Sydney expanded in the fifties and sixties. Community services took a long time coming to some of those suburbs, but now, Young Earth represents a new type of community facility in western Sydney - a community food garden.

The garden was originally coordinated by the enthusiastic Alesia Bourner who derived a part time livelihood from her efforts.

Like Habitat and Harmony Community Garden in Belmont (in the Hunter region) and Randwick Community Organic Garden, Young Earth was initially supported by the local community centre. Alesia's work has seen a difficult corner site turned into a food producing garden in which local people have become involved.

The western region has seen little community garden development although there has been sporadic attempts to set up gardens - before Young Earth the only community garden in the region had been St Clair Community Garden, a venture lasting several years before it faded.

Support from institutions critical

A characteristic of community gardens in western Sydney is their association with government and institutions such as the NSW Department of Housing and local councils.

This has come about in part because community workers have pushed community gardening for its community-building role among their client groups, most of whom are in the low-income demographic. As a result, western Sydney's community gardens have largely resulted from a welcome cooperation between institutions and social work professionals.

In 2001, a group of community workers from the western and south-western suburbs created Gardens for Western Sydney, an informal group seeking to stimulate the development of gardens in the region.

Gardening the mountains

The Blue Mountains is an elevated sandstone plateau dissected by steep, deep valleys carrying fast-flowing streams. Most of the area is a huge national park and wilderness area that is visited by bushwalkers, mountain bikers and rock climbers. The small villages and towns are located on the ridgetop along the route of the Great Western Highway. Residents of towns like Laura and Katoomba feel a clear sense of place.

Katoomba is just over an hour's train journey from Sydney. It is home to Katoomba Community Garden, a large (by sydney standards) area that has been developed on council land once used as a horse paddock. A small orchard of apples, well suited to the cooler, temperate climate of the mountains was planted a few years ago, a mudbrick shed, cob oven and pergola built, rainwater tanks installed to collect rain falling on the shed roof and vegetable gardens established.

The late-1990s - selloffs aand new developments

The years eading to the end of the decade saw the start of Bundeena Community Garden on the southern edge of the metropolitan area and Willoughby Community Garden on the northside.

Willoughby has never grown into a large garden, attarcting only a few local families. A couple years after it was established, its tenure was threatened when Wiloughby Council decided to sell off the public open space on which the garden had been built for apartment development. The potential threat of loss of open space stirred public resistance.

Secure of tenure is a big issue in community gardening. There is nothing like a threatened closure to discourage gardeners.

That was proven when Randwick Community Organic Garden - and the community centre of which it was a part - was to be sold off by the Department of Defence (it was an old naval warehouse depot) for redevelopmen as medium density housing.

The Defence Department planning consultant found soil contamination on the garden site but the gardeners could not learn whether the soil was contaminated sufficiently to make gardening a health hazard. Some suspected not and thought that the finding was used to dislodge the gardeners.

Randwick Council fought the development plan on other matters in the NSW Land and Environment Court and won, leading to a redesign of the development. Council in 2001 indicated that they would support the development of a new Randwick community garden.

Community gardening the housing estates

The late-1990s brought something new to Sydney - community gardens in Department of Housing estates. Cook Community Garden, then Solander, just across the street, were the first gardens built at waterloo estate. Another followed shorlty after.

The gardens exemplified the potential for positive outcomes when bureaucracies cooperate - in this case, the Department of Housing and South Sydney City Council. A few years later a community garden opened at the Department of Housing estate in Riverwood in south-western Sydney and another - the Bidwill Community Vegetable Garden - in the Mt Druitt area on Department of Housing land.

In Campbelltown, a satellite city to Sydney, the development of Claymore Community Garden has formed part of the rehabilitation of a housing estate from social degradation to civility.

Perceptions: community gardens for poor people only?

With community garden development catching on among housing estate residents in both Melbourne and Sydney, with the gardeners reliant on support from state government housing authorities and local government and with community work professionals using community gardens as social strategies, could there develop a perception linking community garening with low-income housing estate residents in particular and with poverty in general?

Such a perception could alienate the city's more affluent demographic from community gardening, position it as a solution for low-income people and link it with the welfare sector.

As yet, there is no sign of that this is happening and community gardens in more affluent areas, such as those in Sydney's eastern suburbs, are used by a diverse demographic.

Gardens as educational venue

You can tell when there's a workshop in the gardens. People walk around, stopping here and there to investigate a plant or to pick up a handful of soil or mulch to feel and smell. Sometimes, groups of people can be seen moving compost from bay to bay, carrying out soil acidity tests or taking the temperature of a compost heap.

Community colleges, TAFE horticulture classes, the EarthWorks waste minimisation training program, permaculture courses, the Seed Savers Network and a variety of other entities have used the city's community gardens as educational venues.

While some gardeners want to do nothing more than grow vegetables, for others, education is a key activity in making community gardens into multifunctional places.

Taking on an educational role has effectively increases the number of people who have a stake in the gardens and has underscored their validity as an ecologically sustainable and socially beneficial uses of public open space.

A role for councils

Local government has been the major institution involved in assisting community gardens. Councils were instrumental is the establishment of Randwick, Waverley, St Clair, Wooloomooloo, Katoomba and the Waterloo Estate gardens.

State government involvement has so far been limited to the commendable assistance provided by the NSW Department of Housing to the Waterloo Estate and Riverwood gardens and to the Department of Education with the Angel Street and Bundeena gardens.

For councils, the realisation is growing that community gardens:

• create the opportunity for social interaction
• increase a sense of community
• provide an avenue for positive interaction with local government
• improve natural and social environments in the city
• promote healthy diets and lifestyles.

It is for these reasons that more and more local government bodies see community gardening in a positive light.

What about religious institutions?

There are currently only two gardens in the Sydney metropolitan area that are on church land - Waterloo Community Garden behind the Uniting Church in inner-urban Waterloo and the vegetable gardens on the Holy Family estate in Emerton, in the city's south-west. Yet, the churches own a considerble body of real estate. Add the city's Buddhist temples, mosques and synagoges and Sydney's religious real state grows even larger.

The reason why religious institutions have not developed community gardens is, in part, because:

• there is no demand for such a landuse in churches and synagoges in the more affluent suburbs
• some churches do not sit on a large enough block of land.
• apart from institutions such as Holy Family (the site of one of the Mt Druitt Food Project community gardens) and Waterloo Uniting Church, the religious institutions do not count food security and nutritional health among their social welfare activities.

In the late 1980s/ early 1990s there was a small community garden on church land in the inner city. This was probably the first instance of church owned land being thrown open to the public for use in food growing.

Led by existing examples of community gardens on church land, this clearly offers a path for innovative community workers associated with the church or other religious institutions. It would also put to productive use land presently serving little pactical purpose.

A valid landuse?

Virtually all community gardens in the Sydney region are on public land, in most cases on land owned by local government. A smaller number exist on state government land. Curiously, there is only one garden on church land - the Waterloo Community Garden.

Access to land is not usually a challenge to aspiring community gardeners. When it is a factor, such as in the case of the proposed Waverley Community Garden and in the late-1990s proposal for a garden on public land in Epping, the issue is usually focused on resident concerns about the alienation of public open space.

The evidence, however, is supportive of community gardens. They occupy only a comparatively small area, leaving the bulk of the land for continued access by the community. In some cases, gardens are not fenced off from their surroundings and non-gardeners are welcome to use the space.

The precedent for granting use of public land for specific uses has been set by sporting clubs and other bodies. Frequently, the land allocated to community gardening has been derelict or disused open space, such as Angel St and Randwick.

Community fears

Sometimes, other factors may keep community gardens out of an area.

When a community garden was proposed for a site in Glebe, for example, locals opposed it because of fears over:

• noise
• parking
• odour
• vandalism.

While incidents of vandalism have occurred and while parking is always a problem in the congested streets of inner Sydney, none of the resident fears have proven to be major problems.

Community building, therapy, learning about natural systems, access to nutritious food, socialising, education and recreation are the many uses of community food gardens in the Sydney region.

It is these factors, and the opportunity to integrate the gardens into local government programs, that give community gardening a positive social role in a city in need of innovative solutions to its many problems.

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PAGE UPDATED... Friday, 1 March 2002