The community garden experience < our experience

OUR LEARNINGS

What we have learned from the closure of Sydneys two Eastern Suburbs gardens

What lessons can we, as community gardeners, draw from the closure of Sydney’s two best known community gardens? The lessons of the campaign to save the UNSW and Waverley gardens is that networking and creating a presence for your garden is important.

Lesson number one: Put effort into building relationships centred on the community garden.

Creating productive links with local government (especially sustainability, waste and environmental educators), educational institutions, health and nutrition interests, arts groups, community education providers, local Permaculture, seed saving and gardening associations, the local media and the garden’s neighbours builds a constituency interested in the continuity of the garden. Networks reinforce security of tenure.

Lesson number two: Develop skills in advocacy

Do this so that relationships can be nurtured, local government and other interests lobbied and gardens defended. A little media savvy goes a long way when it comes to highlighting the achievements of the community garden and to defending it. Why not ask your local council library about putting up a photo display about the garden?

Learning number three: Develop your community garden into a multiple-use site

If your garden is visually pleasing and safe, then you can invite in other potential users such as those mentioned in learning number one (above). The idea is to layer on uses other than gardening to multiply the social utility of the community garden. More users means more supporters for the garden.

Lesson number four: invite in documentarists

Make the garden available to students and practitioners of documentary photography and video production and to local history practitioners. That way, the garden becomes better known, is written into local history and is recognised for its social values. Invite local media - newspapers, radio, community television, online media - to report on activities in the garden. Appoint a media liaison. An open and welcoming attitude to media producers will help to establish a presence for your garden.

Lesson number five: Build positive links with local residents

Invite them to use the garden for passive recreation, relaxation and for their children to visit, even if they have no interest in gardening. If your garden occupies public open space, such as local government land, a welcoming attitude reduces the likelihood of the community garden being seen to alienate public space from other users.

Offer workshops in compost making, making a wormery, capturing and storing rainwater, cooking, plant lore and uses, ethnobotany, gardening and plant propagation to gardeners and the public. This layers an educational value onto the community garden and provides skills to the community, further reinforcing the social and educational value of the garden.

Lesson number six: Create conviviality

Organise celebrations and festivals that are open to the public to increase the value of the garden as a community place and neighbourhood focus. Equinox, solstice, the departure and return of migratory birds, the turn of the seasons, the fruiting of food plants, participatory planting and harvest festivals and more have been inspiration for celebration by community gardeners.

Music, poetry and book readings (try for local writers too) and seasonal open days are all ways to bring people into your garden and to reinforce gardens as community places. Build relationships with your local writers centre and groups which could use the garden for book launches, readings and presentations.

Invite the local mayor to open the festivals. Make sure the media are there to record it.

Lesson number seven: Make links with local food and urban agriculture advocates

Lonk with allied interests in the community and universities and with organisations such as local Slow Foods and food fairness alliance groups. Offer articles and photos for their newsletters.

Lesson number eight: Be visible and findable

Put your community garden’s story and events on the website of the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network: www.communitygarden.org.au

All of these proposals link community gardens to different interests in the city so as to reinforce their presence as social and productive places and increase their value. It is all about recognising the value of networking.

...Russ Grayson, ACFCGN NSW

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PAGE UPDATED... Thursday, 7 June 2007