Community Gardening seems pretty self-explanatory to me. Land held in common for the common need. In reality, the concept is a bit more nuanced. CGs have different looks and functions depending on where they are found around the world. Our American version, like most things American, seems born of a conscious idealism blended with a pragmatism of the moment. Because moments change and gardens are an ephemeral art, this current resurgence of Community Gardening is not so much the culmination of a continuous historical line as the latest strand, one more thread in a loose web of fits and starts that includes: The Potato Patch Farms of the 1890's, the Thrift Gardens of the Depression, and perhaps the best known of the public gardening efforts, the Victory Garden.
But the Victory Gardens, like their antecedents, were passing; they quickly turned from providing 40% of the nation's produce back into lawns, or were ground beneath the wheels of an expanding postwar economy and population. Wheels figured large in everything that followed. The last century was the Age of Cars. I'm sure that more than anything else, Victory Gardens turned to asphalt.
It was cars that pushed expansion out from the city center, leaving urban buildings and neighborhoods abandoned in their wake. The new mobility and its aftermath shaped the physicality of the present stage of CG, which takes its philosophical underpinnings from the social movements of the 60's and 70's. These gardens have tended to be smaller and more urban than what came before. They are described through a language of inclusion and identity. Their environmental contribution is extolled. Their virtue is a return to lost community, a social understanding that is nativist in its most aboriginal sense. This is the commons so long ago lost. While Flit (Now with more DDT!!) was used to chase pests from the Victory Garden, most CGs of today are run organically. It is this growing interest and acceptance of the logic of organics and the recognition of the importance of local foods and farmers that has propelled CG from its crunchy roots into the forefront of public discussion.
Thirty five years ago The Omnivore's Dilemma would just have been a Hippy screed, mentioned in the same breath as The Secret Life of Plants. It would have been talked about over reefers and beer, not considered worthy of NY Times best seller lists, or of being debated in Congress with the Farm Bill. But it seems that when it came to food, those crunchy granola-eating freaks were spot on. (Actually not far off in that plants-being-able-to-talk thing either. A Google search on plant communications leads to boringly scientific articles distressingly free of groovy interludes with eastern mystics. Present-day researchers never seem to hook plants up to lie detectors, either.)
Now that the agriculture industry thinks there is more to be gained by studying organics than by poo-pooing it, the research is beginning to pile up. Organic foods are healthier and organic soils are more productive. Plants grown organically are more resistant to pests and disease.
The agribusiness establishment has continued to ignore the obvious fact that organic growing is better for the environment; their reasoned response being that it doesn't matter, because the world's population can only be supported by "conventional" agriculture. A twenty-year study out of Cornell finally puts the nail in that coffin. It seems we can have our cake and eat it without quadrupling cancer rates among children and turning aquatic creatures into hermaphrodites.
The CG group I belong to, Capital District Community Gardens, is one of the oldest from this new age of CG, with 47 gardens scattered across three counties. I have only seen a handful of the gardens, but even among them there is great variation. Each CG, like all gardens, is an expression of place, which is what I will talk about in my next post: "Where." Are you sensing a theme?
