On Gardening in Community

By Alexis Marsh, Pleasant Street Community Garden Coordinator

My gardening is rooted, like so many others, in my memories of my grandmother. I don’t have the amber-tinted memories of her teaching me to prune tomatoes or helping her weed; just of playing nearby while she worked in her yard in rural Manitoba, 20 minutes outside of my hometown of Winnipeg. Nothing forced, just here when or if I wanted to participate.

I didn’t have a palate for vegetables as a child, though my parents loved dining out and trying the vast selection of cuisines that Canada, a proudly multicultural country, holds. Through their curiosity, I grew up eating pancit, dim sum, doubles, jerk chicken, perogies, holopchi, injera, spanakopita—flavors and experiences that have made me connect good living with a preference for good eating. I simply never want anything less than an interesting, exciting, and delicious meal ever again.

But gardening is more than the promise of a delicious meal—that I came to through a longing for beauty, for a break from the incessant pull to be on my phone. Seeing a garden online made me want to find one in real life. Made me want to make one, choose plants, create a space of my own.

At home in Over-the-Rhine, the clearest way to do that is through a community garden. I didn’t realize til I bought and renovated a building with my partner, Dan Dorff, that we were gentrifiers. That our presence in the neighborhood was a part of a history of racism, classism, and anti-urban bias that slowly pushed people out of the neighborhood between the 60s up to even today, as services, livability, and safety declined and city service funding went to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. It has made real estate relatively accessible to developers and investors while raising rents or pricing out families that have lived here for generations. OTR is still a neighborhood that favors the experience of suburban visitors over long-time residents that have sustained this neighborhood through alarming civic neglect.

A friend passed on a book called Palaces For The People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. It details the benefits of community gardens: creating beauty, giving access to good food, but also helping people grow. The book cited a study that showed the presence of green space reduced the aggression of people toward their partners and children. And I saw my own anger, impatience, frustration at the many (many) challenges we face today. And I wanted that de-growth.

So much is growing in my neighborhood: development, real estate, tax base, density, growth, growth, growth. I see the harvest going to a few folks who own most of the equity.

A garden grows something for everyone: our bodies, our minds. And it feels like meaningful action to temper a feeling of powerlessness. Sue Stuart-Smith details this in her book The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature. In it, she quotes the enslaved mathematician Thomas Fuller, who said: “Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there.”