A garden of one's own
When the cost of living goes up and food gets more expensive gardens become not just nice to have, but an issue of social justice.
UPDATE 01/25: This essay, and clay & ether, has now migrated to a separate publication.
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to a newsletter called Regenerative Futures. Much has happened in the years since I launched this Substack, and after a period of “stuckness” I’m relaunching this endeavour with a new title; clay & ether, where I intend to publish more personal essays like the one below. If you subscribed to Regenerative Futures because you were interested in themes of localism, living in Berlin, regenerative imaginaries and ecology then rest assured these topics will still be intimately woven into this newsletter. I hope you’ll continue to be part of it, but if not I completely understand.
This past summer what I longed for, perhaps more than anything else in the world, is a garden to tend. Sometimes I feel guilty about this, betraying as it does a difficulty in feeling content and grateful for my many privileges. However as much as I try to rationalise and talk myself out of it, the yearning doesn’t go away.
About a 10 minute walk from my apartment there is a fenced off, overgrown area that, in my mind’s eye, could be my garden. It’s not situated in one of Berlin’s 200 Gartenkolonien but on a piece of abandoned land that’s owned by a state subsidiary housing company. It’s in a kind of industrial estate that already has a handful of raised bed allotments on it, and some gardens have already been created on a similar piece of land next door. Knowing about my longing to spread outwards beyond our small balcony, my partner found the phone number for the housing company and called them a few times to ask about it, once tentatively suggesting that the space could be turned into a community garden rather than used by one person or family alone. Every time they say the same thing, that they don’t have time to allocate the gardens and even if they did, there is a waitlist and the chances are not high. We also aren’t able to join the waitlist for any of the three Schrebergarten (allotments) within the vicinity of our apartment, due to the waitlists being already too long.
A thought that’s been swirling around my head for a while is that when the cost of living goes up and food gets more expensive, gardens like this become not just nice to have, but an issue of social justice. Berlin’s allotment gardens were originally established in order the give city people space to grow food. In this essay about growing up in Birmingham’s Caribbean community Lisa Palmer, a scholar of Black British history, writes:
“In this time of economic, political, social and climate crisis, I am interested in asking questions about who has access to land, how and by what means? Who has the right to live on this land, to play and walk on it, to swim in the rivers and lakes on this land freely without fear of trespass or contamination? Who can grow, cultivate and harvest the land, repurpose and reimagine it?”
At the time of writing this I am six months pregnant. It still seems unreal that at this moment as I write this my body is at work knitting together a whole new human, but an embryo is a seed and now it’s established roots in the soil of my body it has it’s way of unfolding. The fluttering internal kicks that wake me up at night are a reminder that this being is coming through me, but is not me.
When I think about the kind of mother I want to be, the kind who gardens is high up there. For a while my desire to become a mother was so intertwined with my desire to tend to a garden that I had to spend a while untangling out the distinctions between them, to make sure I did not confuse motherhood for gardening.
Evidently I’m not the only person who feels this way. In the UK the number of people waiting for an allotment has almost doubled in the last 12 years. Across Britain, hundreds of thousands of applications are sitting on local authority allotment waiting lists, the longest of which are in cities like Bristol and London. In Berlin the Urban Gardening Network and the Berlin Braucht Mehr Gärten campaign advocate for more spaces for community gardening because of the connection to quality of life. Last time I opened Twitter (a rarity these days) my brother had sent me a Tweet by Dr JC Niala, who wrote her thesis on urban gardening. Over 36 months of fieldwork she found that growing plants, a seemingly banal and ordinary thing to do, really does make people happier. Her doctoral research on allotments and guerrilla gardening spaces in Oxford led to a collaboration with Greenpeace, who unfurled an artwork outside the UK’s Department of Levelling Up reading “We the 174,183 demand more allotments”; a reference, I suppose, to the Ken Loach film “I, Daniel Blake”. According to Greenpeace, the government could be enabling communities to tackle food insecurity and the climate crisis now by creating more allotments and community gardens.
Gardening has a longstanding tradition of being intertwined with social justice. In fact the word radical itself means “to grasp from the root.” The connection in my mind between gardening and social justice were first forged one rainy day in the University of Sussex library reading “My Garden” by Jamaica Kincaid, who has written about gardening, colonialism and land appropriation. In an essay for the New Yorker, Kincaid explores how in the garden we perform an act of possession. Gardens are, after all, almost always an extension of private property. “The garden figures prominently in the era of conquest,” she writes. Botanists regularly accompanied colonial voyages to record the numerous plant species they found and how they might be economically useful in various colonial endeavours.
Earlier this year I bought a lavender plant which was reduced in the supermarket only to find that the bees had no interest in it. The plant was neutered, the product of a system which wants to keep plant reproduction under corporate control. Given the complex ways that gardening interacts with our degenerative realities, Kincaid is right when she says “the garden is a heap of disturbance”; not a place to distance yourself from the “painful responsibility that comes with being human”, but a place to grasp things from the root.
As we live through a livestreamed genocide, catastrophic climate collapse and a global turn toward fascism I find the small joy of growing things helps me to stay with the trouble rather than disassociate from it. Perhaps the reason why I’m so preoccupied with the idea of a garden, especially now I am on the cusp of motherhood, is because it feels like a small but tangible act of tenderness and care in a wildly uncertain future.