“Community” Doesn’t Always Mean “Kumbaya”
How conflict in a community garden can teach us to put down our egos and pick up our shovels
By Emily Frost of Denver Urban Gardens
Originally Posted on Barnraiser.us
I love telling people what I do for a living.
“You work for Denver Urban Gardens?! That must be the best job ever!” I can see in starry eyes their ideas of what my day-to-day looks like: moseying about my community garden plot, tenderly talking to tomatoes, squatting to help a worm wriggle back into the compost pile, watering my neat rows of organic veggies and catching up with a fellow gardener over homemade rhubarb pie whilst also pruning back the new espalier experiment along the grape-draped-fence, a sun-scorched and wisened scarecrow eavesdropping as we chat casually about the best way to amend soil or how to prepare a sunchoke cassoulet.
If only I were paid to do that. If only that’s what community gardening actually looked like at all.
The reality of it is this: though I do love most of what my job entails, in practice it actually looks more like talking to people instead of plants (and let me tell you: plants are far better communicators), answering emails instead of calls of the wild, and getting my hands dirty in other people’s drama instead of in the compost pile.
Drama? In the community garden?
Yes, in heaps to rival zucchini in late August.
In my experience of working with community gardens and gardeners, I have come to realize that our first blush categorization of “community”— as touchy-feely, happy, peaceful, lovey-dovey, kumbaya, carefree and easy — is a far cry from the sordid reality. In actuality, community gardens are unique and dynamic spaces that provide an ideal backdrop for rumor weeds, arguments, coup d’etats, seeds of distrust, and scandal.
In my time with DUG, I have handled all varieties of garden conflicts. Some of them actually stem from tomato plants that are too close to a neighbor’s plot, or accusations of produce theft, or lackadaisical gardeners not participating in community work days, which is what most folks think of when they hear me mention “conflict in the community garden”. More often than not, though, conflicts result from good people trying to do good work and perhaps going about it in a less-than-good way.
A longtime gardener puts signs up on the compost bin in an attempt to keep out weeds that have gone to seed, but it is read as a hostile and passive aggressive act against new gardeners. A new steering committee starts implementing lots of big infrastructure projects, and doesn’t understand why the other gardeners aren’t willing to help out. A screaming match ensues after a child is scolded for running through someone’s strawberry patch. Someone plucks rotting produce from another’s plot in an effort to salvage the food, without checking in with that gardener first. These are all issues of good intentions gone awry through miscommunication.
At Denver Urban Gardens, we encourage people to make decisions based on what is best for “the whole of the garden”; to give others the benefit of the doubt; to value every gardener’s unique voice; and to keep it simple and positive. We recognize that we are all coming from different places, but believe that when we come together in a common unity, really special things can happen. We can deepen our understanding of another’s perspective, and, in so doing, learn something about ourselves as well.
This is easier said than done, and as the fearless garden leader wrangler at DUG, I have made my own embarrassingly substantial share of rash decisions without first pausing to widen my lens and take in the whole picture. When I first took over the role of working with our network of volunteer garden leaders, I made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes that resulted in midnight phone calls from community partners to our Executive Director, or angry emails of passion loosed to his inbox but aimed at my head. Once, I made the decision to fire a garden leader without giving him the opportunity to explain his actions. We had received a number of complaints from gardeners about some of his behaviors and choices in the garden. Taking these serious accusations into consideration, I called this volunteer in to ask him to step down from his post. He was rightfully upset and pointed out that my actions went directly against DUG’s values. I did not provide any room to seek his understanding of the situation. I did not give him the benefit of the doubt. I acted rashly and assumed that I knew best based on hearsay. We both left feeling upset and ashamed.
Two springs later, I was outside my home, pulling out last year’s growth from the garden bed that I inherited when I moved into the apartment, just across the street from one of DUG’s community gardens. A man walked by and commented “The garden is looking good!” I turned and recognized him as the former garden leader, the one whom I had so offended and hurt by denying his voice value. I called out to him and reintroduced myself, hoping to extend an olive branch to my former-foe now-neighbor. And though I would not have blamed him for turning and continuing to walk away, instead, he reached out his hand, shook mine, met my eyes, and invited me to come to their garden potluck that Saturday. In fact, he insisted that I come by the garden whenever I liked, and assured me that I would always be welcome. I was overwhelmed with relief and wonder. It was a good day for pulling out old growth to make way for new.
In that moment, I experienced a deeper meaning of community. It is about being willing to show up despite the mistakes and regrets we still carry with us, it is about extending uncommon grace as we come alongside one another, welcoming in rather than closing ourselves up. It is about holding a tension that acknowledges our own baggage while honoring our values, while being able to allow and encourage others to do the same. And it is about patience, allotting the seasons the time they need to render both soil and souls.
Once at an outreach event, a woman, seeing me at the DUG booth, said to me “Oh, I just love community gardens! My husband and I, we got engaged in a community garden.” Delighted by this news, I smiled wide as I replied “That’s so sweet! I just broke up with someone in a community garden last week! It’s the circle of life.”
The truth of it is that community gardens are places for warmth and joy and lifelong learning and cross-cultural connection and warm-fuzzy-happy-feel-good experiences. But I believe that we are seriously shortchanging ourselves if we limit “community” to only the positives. In order to be places of grace, forgiveness, compassion, and understanding, community gardens must also be places for disagreement, confrontation, upset, and misunderstandings. There is real worth in digging in and getting dirty; there is a growth that can only come from friction and fighting and ultimately learning to put down our egos and pick up our shovels, allow ourselves to rest among the weeds momentarily while we remember that it’s just a garden, and then get back to the work of together turning the land—and ourselves—into more fertile soil for planting. That is a real, challenging, and beautiful picture of what community actually means.
