Still Places #8 : Building Community
All Text & Images: Dom Galloway | GardenSpace (unless otherwise noted)
Though many gardens are private, bounded by fences or walls, the garden has also long been a place of gathering—a shared ground where human lives intersect. If the private garden is a personal sanctuary, the communal garden is a sanctuary of the many. It is here that people discover what it means to belong, not only to nature, but also to one another.
Historically, shared gardens were often born of necessity. Medieval village commons provided grazing and cultivation for entire communities, ensuring collective survival. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as cities swelled during industrialization, allotments were introduced in Europe to give workers small plots of ground. These allotments provided not only food but also respite from the factory and the crowded street. In both forms, the shared garden bound people together in labour, reciprocity, and survival.
Community Garden - Green Streets Program, Vancouver Canada
Yet community gardens are never just about subsistence. They are also spaces of exchange—where seeds, tools, and knowledge pass between hands, and where stories and friendships grow alongside vegetables. In this sense, the soil is as much a medium for culture as for food. A community garden tells the story of its members: the herbs of one culture, the flowers of another, the recipes shared when harvests are gathered. It becomes a living mosaic of human diversity, rooted in common ground.
In our time, the rise of community gardens speaks to a profound social need. Urban life is often isolating. Neighbours live in ever closer proximity but further apart in interaction. Loneliness has become one of the defining stories of modern society. The community garden answers this by creating a space where connection is not forced but grows naturally through a shared passion for growing. To weed a bed beside another person is to enter into quiet companionship. To exchange tomatoes for zucchinis is to enact trust and generosity. To gather for a seasonal harvest is to celebrate togetherness in its simplest, most elemental form.
The role of community gardens extends beyond personal relationships. They also foster resilience in the face of wider social and ecological challenges. During times of scarcity, they provide fresh food. During weather extremes they help cool neighbourhoods, manage water, and sustain biodiversity. In disadvantaged communities, they often become places of empowerment—where skills are taught, resources shared, and pride cultivated in common achievement.
Educationally, too, their value is immense. School gardens give children tangible connection to the origins of food, grounding them in cycles of growth and care. Elderly members of communities often pass on knowledge of planting and harvesting, becoming living archives of tradition. For migrants, community gardens can be places of cultural continuity, where the plants of one’s homeland are grown in new soil, offering taste and memory across distance.
“Make it simple, but significant.” - Don Draper
But perhaps the most vital role of community gardens is symbolic. They represent, in microcosm, what society might look like when rooted in care rather than competition. The simple acts of sharing water, tending plants, or agreeing on how to divide space are ancient acts. To be effective they become practices in cooperation and mutual respect. Differences of background, language, or belief matter less when hands are in the soil together.
There is something profoundly hopeful about this. In a fragmented world, community gardens remind us that cohesion can be built through simple, everyday acts of kindness and care. A neighbourhood plot may not solve every social challenge, but it models a way of being together that is healing in itself: humble, collaborative, and life-giving.
In the end, a community garden is far more than the sum of its beds and plants. It is a stage for human flourishing, a common ground where belonging is grown season by season. It tells us that the garden is not only a place of solitude but also of solidarity. And in an age where connection is both fragile and desperately needed, this is no small gift.
For more:
Ron Finley, ‘Guerilla Gardener in LA’, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w )
For help to develop garden that support and build your community, contact us today.