Community gardens have developed in many urban and rural landscapes, providing resources and riches beyond the splendor of carrots and dill, sunflowers and squashes. 

My first experience with community gardening happened largely by accident: I needed a place to spend spring break during my sophomore year at Brown University, and an excursion to Philadelphia presented itself.  I and six other students would spend a week at the Village of Arts and Humanities, a nonprofit outfit that focuses on revitalizing North Philadelphia, in part through their community garden.  Philadelphia is divided into distinct neighborhoods, and the north side struggles: crime is a regular part of daily life, schools are often overcrowded and unsafe, and unemployment rates are high. But the Village, as it is affectionately called, doesn’t cite alarming statistics about the neighborhood it serves, choosing to focus on the positive, encouraging the transformation and growth of North Philadelphia through action and involvement—acts that go hand-in-hand with gardening, too.  

On the corner of Warnock and Cumberland Streets, the Village maintains a community garden; Village staff and volunteers, young and old, plant, cultivate and harvest their crops: squash, carrots, tomatoes. In other parts of the neighborhood, Village workers clean lots to make way for fantastic sculptures, and they paint huge, vibrant murals on the sides of old buildings and garages, and they lay grass seed on otherwise bare earth.

 
On my first day in the garden, I dug right in, preparing the soil to plant cucumbers and carrots and built a fence to surround the garden to keep out any stray animals looking for a snack, or any visitors beyond the hours when the garden is open to the community.  A few days later I went back to school to finish the spring semester, but the garden continued to grow.

When I went back the next year, I ate the carrots and cucumbers I helped plant. And I got to work again, planting twelve trees around the four edges of the neighborhood park, named Fotterall Square. Using rented jackhammers, we cleared openings in the concrete and put down trees from Home Depot that remain there today.  

These were surely small acts on my part; there are people who have been working with and at the Village since it was founded in 1987. But so began my curiosity in community gardens, which are key characters in urban revitalization; their presence, their influence and the possibilities they present will be explored in upcoming posts.

David Gooch, who helped to run the garden at the Village for several years, says that while it was sometimes hard to get people initially interested in the garden, there was an “enormous sense of community around the shared environment” once people were involved, and that there was a general sense of optimism that the garden and the other Village projects cultivated in neighborhood residents; the garden became a place of “great interactions”, he says, as people felt the impact of improving the appearance and atmosphere of the neighborhood.   This is one of the biggest triumphs of community gardens: they leave people--and people leave the gardens--with a sense of possibility and purposeful change, as well with an essential, physical sense of a job well done.  Gardens’ progress is tangible, and sometimes, very tasty.  I left the Village feeling a strong sense of friendship with the near strangers I’d traveled down with, for we’d worked together, sweated together, served a common purpose.   Gardens give us a place to go back to, a place to watch as it grows, and sometimes, we, and our communities, will grow with it.