Community gardens have emerged frequently in times of crisis as alternate sources of food provision, during wars, after natural disasters, and in food deserts, for example. In this light, community gardens – framed as productive, arable spaces – may not seem so distinct from farms, or market gardens.

However, as the purpose of our community gardens extends beyond the immediacy of crisis response, it is that crucial prefix – ‘community’ – that does so much to distinguish it from other agricultural setups. Where the language and values of capitalism are inscribed into the modern farm and the market garden, community gardens are run by and for the community, with neither pure efficiency, profit, nor individualistic self-sufficiency in mind.

In other words, community gardens cultivate an innately anti-capitalist mode of production. Released from the burden of profitability, they are free to become incredibly agile organisations – responding malleably to the needs of the community in question. The actualisation of these politics can take on extraordinarily different forms – experimenting with crops and growing techniques, modifying and adapting their surroundings, hosting interdisciplinary learning programs, collaborating with unconventional practitioners... Crucially, it is in this rich context that community gardens are able to create increasingly rare and valuable opportunities to nurture and share in non-hierarchical knowledge, and open the way to engage in a more expansive and interconnected embodiment of our place within the natural world.

If we, as gardeners, are to help facilitate the community garden in exercising its manifesto, we must first begin to perceive (even if we cannot fully comprehend) the labyrinthine networks that it plays host to. This necessitates that we slow down and ask ourselves to deprioritise productivity in the name of empathy.

Gardening in this way encourages us to breathe in the elements that influence a sensitive piece of land; to attune ourselves to the beings from which it is constituted; to instinctively respond to the movements of the garden; and to concede to the pace of its ecology rather than its economy.

Today, knowledge about the non-human natural world tends to be produced and disseminated via hierarchical, extractive structures – research teams, labs, and universities – where it is so often guided by the values of corporate or militaristic funders. However, when we commune with the land via a community garden, knowledge is instead produced through a continuous, multi-directional, multi-species exchange.

The ‘curriculum’ of the community garden dissolves into the intergenerational histories of fellow gardeners, the conspiratorial whispers of our more-than-human peers, and the unassuming revelations experienced through predominantly practical, yet theory-laden, work. In this decentralised network, we are given the freedom to produce empirical and theoretical knowledge on our own terms, through unexpected means and with unexpected consequences.

By participating in these processes, we recover a kind of knowledge that capitalist thinking tends to obscure; in operating outside of this often-violent framework, we remember how to learn with, rather than extract from our environment. We start to follow its meandering and interwoven paths, listening to the conversations between each living element, and mapping out its networks. We entangle ourselves in what Jason Moore calls the ‘oikeios’ – ‘the relation through which humans act – and are acted upon by the whole of nature – in our environment-making’; which allows us to perceive that we, as living beings, are a constitutional part of this ecosystem.[1] We no longer need to be reminded that we are essential to its flourishing, and it to ours. We know it inherently.

Once we begin to embody this way of thinking, previously opaque connections suddenly become incredibly tangible: the link between changes in temperature and crop failure, the use of chemicals and the proliferation of disease, and how acts of care impact our wellbeing – human and non-human alike.

This change in awareness could perhaps mark a pivotal point in beginning to approach the redevelopment of forms of Traditional Ecological Knowledge such as those discussed by Kavita Philip and Sigrid Schmalzer in their Science for the People article (republished in Issue 11 of IFLA!),[2] as well as a framework which culturally situates and reinforces the importance of such knowledge – the likes of which have long been lost in much of the West. Perhaps it could direct us towards a deeper understanding of why having a word for ‘nature’ serves only to separate us from it – as Nina Gualinga says – in many Indigenous Languages ‘there is no word to separate us from the trees, the land, and the rivers’.[3]

Within this framework, it is clear that the community garden is but one of many sites applying these long-held and known practices, where the untenability of an anthropocentric position is impossible to deny. These spaces provide us with a valuable lesson in situating ourselves within the oikeios, especially when negotiating the rate at which our climate is collapsing. If we can learn to see ourselves reflected in this complex ecosystem – as the community garden teaches us – we may well have a better chance of resolving the damage done.