Reaping What You Sow?

"Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there."
--Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

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I guess you could say I am fond of making quotations my pretext. This quotation, also taken from aforementioned random quote bank, made me think of the holistic purpose and consequences of community gardens and community gardening. That being said, I think there is an important primary distinction to make between the garden, and the gardener; and secondarily,between a private and community garden. The definition is contested, and in order to set aside my highly ignorant mental schema of a hippie vegan with dreadlocks harvesting or planting their tomatoes, exploring what it means to garden, generally, and then in a communal context will help to illuminate its urban presence.

Doing a quick Google Scholar search (you've used it, once or many times, admit it), I noticed so much research has been done. First response? Where do I start? I guess I start in realizing that this task is two-fold, if not more. First, to address community gardening as a social and spatial phenomena unique (or maybe not?) to the Urban context. Second, to take this context and apply it to Vancouver. On one hand, this undertaking is very much concerned with gardens, their presence and effect on city landscapes, but also it is an analysis, like all other things urban, on what is unseen, the ideologies and principles that create and sustain these gardens and the intangible legacy of community-efficacy it grows.

In essence, this undertaking is to discover all that is (metaphorically speaking) reaped, from the initial act of when a community begins to sow.

First Step: Make a hole.

Gardens are a form of autobiography.
--Sydney Eddison, Horticulture magazine, August/September 1993

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So, this is a digital literacy experiment that is meant to understand something, anything, about our urban world. I chose community gardens not exactly knowing anything about them, what they are defined as, but simply for the reason that anything with the word "community" and "sustainable living" will inevitably catch on as a buzzword. Simply, It's hip to be sustainable and community gardening is a way that sustainability is practiced.

I know that this will take a form of its own, but I know I want to see the ways community gardens are a strong facilitator as well as indicator of social capital. The Urban Way of Life, as suggested by Louis Wirth, is completely segregated from the rural, and at the surface, it seems that community gardening is a step into the past, romanticized days of agrarian communities.

In the quotation above (which I wholeheartedly admit was taken from some random quote bank about an author and magazine I know nothing about), it suggest that there is something inherent about Gardens, that in a way, it is a reflection of ourselves. I'm sure we can say that about anything we create, hypothetically. But even at this primary stage of collecting my thoughts, it's becoming obvious that there is something uniquely organic (pun somewhat intended) about Gardens that become rooted manifestations of our lives. If Eddison was correct in what he suggests, if gardens indeed are personal autobiographies, community gardens are then, at least to some extent, the city's autobiography, the story we tell ourselves of ourselves.