Over the summer, a meeting in Aberystwyth brought together a dozen people from community gardens and related organisations to share news and ideas. One person set the tone when we introduced ourselves at the beginning: working in mental health, he said, he was new to the gardening scene but wanted to be part of what he called an ‘emerging culture’. A thrill of recognition ran around the circle.
It’s a good way of describing the combination of people, public spaces and gardening that is such a live phenomenon in recent years. As a recent report for the Ceredigion Local Food Partnership (download in English or yn Gymraeg) shows, these growing spaces bring together many things: food growing, wildlife, beauty, social connection, composting, technical knowledge, healthy eating, cooking and therapeutic activity. There is something for everyone.
More than this though, a community garden is a valuable public space. That is, it is somewhere where we can be a person rather than a consumer, and it’s quite normal to talk to strangers. Here there is no corporate branding, no advertising, no clocks or internet to hurry us along, no reminder of institutional control. We don’t have to buy a ticket or create a login to visit. Instead it’s a place where we can experience ourselves and each other as human beings living in the natural world and connect with something deeper.
Apparently, there are bacteria in soil that work like antidepressants when we get our hands in the earth. It’s good to think that nature is on the side of our brain chemistry, but it seems unnecessary. Green things growing, the open sky, a wriggling worm and a splash of ox-eye daisies bring joy anyway, and so does a friendly chat.
This then is the background to the ‘emerging culture’, which I think is worth a closer look. Penglais Community Garden at the university, the one I know best, has created a fluid but lasting community over the last ten years. We have students just learning to grow food, getting excited about their first pumpkins and the miracle that is composting: they collected an award earlier this year. We have university staff and local people who turn up regularly and who also manage the mailing lists, the watering rota and the cropping plans. Others come just a few times a year for a Saturday session, work hard and go away again.
Then there are the visitors. We’ve got to know individuals and families who call by regularly to see how things are doing, and met countless random people who spot something interesting behind the fruiting hedge and pop in – students, their parents, staff of all types, tourists. And there are many people we don’t get to meet, who maybe take their lunch to eat in the patio area or wander around the beds, and tell us later how much they enjoyed the space and maybe picked a few nasturtium leaves to liven up their sandwiches.
We do gardening in Welsh, we’ve hosted well-being sessions for staff and students, people have used us for art classes and picnics, and we’ve run the odd cropping experiment. This year we tried out the triffid-like south American crop achocha. We’ve had people referred by their community psychiatric nurses, who’ve come for a few sessions and left visibly relaxed and happier. Arts Centre kitchen staff have popped in to pick borage, nasturtium and marigold flowers for their salads, and we’ve sold our parsley at the Bwyd Dyfi Hub.
The garden is not without its problems: we have to be on our guard against the local rabbit population and we have a few mystery human visitors who take a bit more than we’d like. Sometimes our volunteer population falls away and the weeds get the upper hand. But we get by, and there’s always something to look forward to.
Recently we have been experimenting with composting food waste from the Arts Centre kitchen. It’s a great metaphor for what we do. Just as pasta and cabbage stalks rot down into rich compost, so the worries which volunteers bring are received and metabolised into labour that creates beauty. Work pressures on staff, threats of redundancy, student loneliness, health problems, the state of the world: all are held without judgement, and we go home with a handful of chard or tomatoes or parsley for our dinner.
Long may our community gardens live, and perhaps we could see even them as incubators for a new form of human culture.
Meanwhile, here are links to podcasts I’ve helped make over the past few years which I think show the ’emerging culture’ quite well:
- one on Aberystwyth University’s WW2 Allotment at Penglais, discussing old and new gardening methods, heritage varieties and the social, spiritual and political power of community gardening
- one on Trefechan Bridge Garden’s water harvesting project
- and also, two years old now, Aber Food Connections, which features Aber Food Surplus, community gardens, apple pressing and the St Paul’s community meal.
And some videos, both in Welsh with subtitles:
- a celebration of community gardening in Ceredigion, linked to the National Eisteddfod in 2022, by Gwledda
- One about Penglais Community Garden, heritage seeds and volunteering, by PLANED
You can see a map of Ceredigion growing spaces here, and download the report.
Main picture: Plascrug growing spaces, where about 100 raised beds are let out by Aberystwyth town council.