Relating to nature, food and community in community gardens

ABSTRACT

This paper sheds critical light on the motivations and practices of community gardeners in relatively affluent neighbourhoods. The paper engages with community garden, alternative food and domestic garden literatures, to understand how people fit food production into their everyday lives, how they develop relationships to plants and how these in turn shape relations between people in a community group. The paper draws on participant observation and semi-structured walking interviews conducted at three community gardens in Sydney, Australia. The paper concludes that to fit community gardening into busy lives, people strategically choose plants with biophysical qualities that suit personal as well as communal circumstances and objectives. The paper shows how community is relationally constituted through the practices of growing and sharing food. Tensions might arise through the practices of growing food on communal and private plots and the taking and giving of food, but it can also encourage people to reflect on community food production and on their roles as individuals in a community group.

KEYWORDS:

• Community gardens
• food production
• sharing
• human–plant relations
• relationality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Lesley Head and Leah Gibbs for their generous support and advice. Thank you to the participants who contributed their time and thoughts towards this research. I also wish to thank Charlie Gillon who commented on a previous draft, and two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped me improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number FL0992397].