What’s Holding Back the Community Garden Movement
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The origin story of Maria Sola Green Space, the community garden a few blocks from me, varies each time someone tells it. Oral history lives in flux.
Some of us say a woman named Maria Sola first transformed it from a trash-filled lot, unused since the state demolished the building on this land to make room for the Major Deegan highway.
Others say it was Mr. Sola who took care of the garden, and he named the garden after his wife. Nobody seems to remember his first name.
Where all our current stories align is what happened in 2018.
That’s because it’s my neighbors’ story.
- Jose, who can see the garden from his third-floor apartment across the street.
- Grant the handy carpenter.
- Monxo, who plays the ukulele in a Puerto Rican style that soothes the nerves.
- George the horticulturist, who brings his pet snake to the garden.
- Maxime, who loves to plant roses. (Grant thinks he’s trying to recreate his mother’s rose garden from his home in Uzbekistan.)
They saw the gates of Maria Sola. There was a sign that said “ADOPT A HIGHWAY: BEAUTIFICATION OF THIS SITE BY MARIA SOLA GREN SPACE.”
At the time, the garden was mostly overgrown grass or tall weeds.
The green space was there. But its stewards had either passed on or moved on from the garden.
They swung open the gates and went to work.
In seven years, this group has transformed Maria Sola into what it is today.
Grant built a long table. Maxime planted rose bushes. George planted native ferns, bushes, and flowers. Jose, a retired electrician, installed a solar panel so we can have electricity and music.
Maria Sola, without this group, is still a green space. But it’s not a space where native ferns purify the soil, where bees spread pollen, where monarch caterpillars slurp up milkweed, where food scraps become soil, where neighbors hang out and laugh.
In a newsletter a few months ago, We Need More Gardens, I made the case that what’s blocking us from solving an array of urban health and environmental problems comes back to how much green space we’ve surrendered to concrete.
But this story reminds me of another part of the equation: who’s going to steward the land?
We Need More Stewards
We need to turn more slopes of highways into homes for pollinators, more parking lots into urban farms.
But we need people to do that work.
We Need More Knowledge
Even as more people come into Maria Sola, we often look at each other for what to do.
I see beds overgrown with weeds rising, but I don’t know what to plant or how or where to buy the plants or whether to buy seeds or seedlings or whether a plant needs partial sun or full sun or how often to water it or when it blooms, if it blooms at all.
Maybe it’s our education system, which doesn’t teach us how to forage for food or identify plants.
We need to create our own education, in and out of the gardens.
We Need More… Funding?
New York’s ~700 community gardens operate with volunteers.
Almost every week, when I have the gates flung open, somebody comes in and asks when we’re open.
“We’re all volunteers, so we don’t have set hours. We all chip in when we can.”
I could make a strong economic case to fund community gardens.
For example, New York City spends over $400 million a year just to ship its trash from the waste transfer station to the landfill. Pay community composters to help divert that food waste.
In my beloved Barcelona, a city I often turn to for inspiration about cities, they pay people aged 65 and older to “steward” their horts urbans (community gardens). They have set hours.
There are downsides to paying people too.
When you have a funder, like a government, you can lose that funding if an ecocidal leader takes over that government, which has happened to many of those in New York’s environmental movement this year.
Maria Sola has no money, no hierarchy, and very few rules (that we break anyway).
Our anarchist spirit is a strength and a weakness.
But can we have 1000 more well-cared-for gardens stewarded by knowledgeable leaders in New York City without funding?
The question might be “how can we get consistent funding streams for stewardship, education, and native plants?” Or it can be, “how can we create consistent stewardship?” with or without funding.
We need more gardens, yes. But we need more stewards. We need more of these stewards to have the knowledge and share it. We need a plan to do the work consistently, with or without money.
I don’t know the best route. I don’t have the answers.
But I think I’m getting closer to the right questions.
Pa’lante! (A Puerto Rican contraction of the words “para” and “adelante”)
~David
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