Gardening Without a Garden
The Guardian in the UK have recently started up a new topical gardening podcast series with hosts Alys Fowler and Jane Perrone called, "Sow, Grow, Repeat." Last week I was a guest on their second episode on the topic of Gardening Without a Garden.
Until recently, I did not have a "proper" space in which to garden. My first "successful" food garden was grown over 20 years ago when I was a University student living in a house with a bunch of other students. That summer we dug up the small, neglected backyard and managed to grow food without the benefit of experience or having picked up a single book! Obviously there were some serious flops, but there were also unexpected successes. I had absolutely no income for the month before school started up that fall and somehow managed to survive by eating almost exclusively from that garden!
From there I moved into an apartment building with a very hot and unforgiving rooftop deck. Over the 16 years that I lived there I was able, through a series of failures and successes, to get a handle on growing primarily edible crops in pots without the benefit of an outdoor water source. During that time I expanded my tiny urban garden empire by digging up the gnarled and abused patch of dirt that sat between the wall of the building and the street. For want of a better term, this was my Guerilla Garden, and the one we spoke of most in the podcast. I also found space in a small and hidden local community garden, and in my last year there was able to grow in an unused portion of a nearby backyard aka yardshare.
Since then I have moved into a house with a small, bowling alley yard. It is, for the most part a "proper" gardening space, and I will admit that it feels luxurious to be growing in terra firma without worrying about Saturday night partygoers peeing on the plants or tearing out the roses. These days the most damage I can expect when I step out into the garden each morning are a few cat poops and a handful of fruit lost to the urban critters that live here too.
Like many urban dwellers, I don't own the house or the yard. It is a rental, and for that reason it shares a looming sense of transience and insecurity with my previous gardens. I think this is a quality that is lost to the Garden World, especially here in North America where so much of the media is still very focussed on gardeners of a certain, definable class or marketable demographic. That someone could put so much into a space that may be pulled out from underneath them at any moment seems improbable. And yet here we are, growing where we're not supposed to and doing it in what seems (at least from the outside) on an illogical scale. My reasoning is this: I only have this one life to live and I may never own land. I simply must grow plants. As I described in the podcast, it is an impulse. I don't think about it. It is as basic as breathing and eating. I need to do it. As my maturity as a gardener evolves, there are experiences that I want to have. So I go all in, hoping that the rug won't be pulled out from underneath me and that I can handle the heartbreak if it does. And if it does, that I am resourceful enough to eke out a growing space wherever it is that I may land, and that I have the tenacity of spirit to start over again knowing that it too may end in heartbreak.
I think this is, in part, what the Guerilla Garden prepared me for. I experienced countless heartbreaks over the years there, yet whenever I thought I'd had enough and couldn't continue on... I did. I had to get out there again, despite knowing firsthand that anything could happen. I suppose you could say this is preparation for life, isn't it?
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