Chris Everingham - Sandhills Community Garden

Personal growth through community gardening ....... or learning to let go

It never occurred to me when I set out to help build a community garden that I was embarking on a  journey of personal growth.  All I was interested in was growing a few veggies!

Ohmmmmm

But growing a few veggies in a very public park in the middle of a public thorough-fare, surrounded by mixed housing estates, was always going to require the cultivation of certain personal attributes  - patience, generosity, tolerance - but most of all, “letting go”  - a letting go of that sense of ownership that is so much part of our culture.

It’s a tricky one, not least because a sense of ownership of the garden also has to be nurtured amongst the locals if they are to regard the garden as “theirs”. So what happens when someone pulls out plants before they are ready - like when some people just can’t wait till a rockmelon is ripe because some-one will get it before them - or worse, when some-one digs up a whole tree and takes it back to plant in their own garden?

For example, a lemon tree that had been nurtured from seed by one of our gardeners disappeared one night.  Imagine the anger and frustration.  We have a great surveillance system operating at Sandhills, surrounded as it is by residents who witness most of what goes on around here, so we were soon told who the culprits were. They were residents of a nearby mental health community dwelling. We learned that they were building their own garden out the back of their house.  So – what to do?

The walk up the hill chanting Ohmmmmm certainly helped, as did the awareness that an all out war couldn’t be won, unless we constructed high concrete fences all around the garden and employed security guards full time.  But some acknowledgement of what had happened still seemed to be in order. So, very bravely I thought, I walked into their house and through to the back to view their garden. Sure enough, the lemon tree was there, along with a number of plants from our garden that I recognised had gone missing. Confronted by residents as to what I was doing there, I told them I had heard they had a beautiful garden and I’d come to offer them some plants from our garden. Well, the atmosphere was dramatically transformed, as was my anger. They never took me up on the offer, but we haven’t lost any plants to them since.

This experience made me think about how letting go can transform emotional states and create a situation where potentially disruptive situations can be worked out calmly. It was a lesson that I find myself practicing often in my role as coordinator of the garden, but also in my life more generally…not that I’m always 100% successful!  Anger doesn’t just have to be expressed. It’s not just a matter of letting it out, but letting the cause of the anger go.  Anger and frustration has to become transformed into something else, something that enhances everyone’s personal growth.  Learning to let go is just one way of doing this and a very useful tool in the community gardener’s toolbox.