Allotment Map 2015
Mapping the Garden of Nowhere in
Particular
I have gardened on an
allotment site in Chingford (London) for 12 years. The extent of my involvement
has varied from a few hours a week to the current and much more substantial
commitment of full weekends, weekday evenings after work and holidays.
The allotment site consists of several full size plots with an
assortment of horticultural facilities and features including numerous raised
beds, mini orchards, an apiary, polytunnels, sheds, pallet built composting
bays and rainwater catchment via large water tanks.
The gardening of the plots is
shared. The allotment site started life in 2001 as part of a small social
project (Organiclea) that aimed to collectively engage people in organic fruit
and vegetable growing (including beekeeping) as a way of revitalising local
food culture and countering some of the ills of contemporary food production
and consumption. ‘Organiclea’ moved, 8 years ago, on to another site nearby with
more space, facilities and potential suited to its ambitious market gardening
goals and social/political and educational outreach.
A group (or small collective)
of 5 or 6 of us now garden the allotment site, using organic methods and
approaches broadly in keeping with those established by Organiclea. We sell
produce surplus to our needs to cover the cost of plot rental, tools, materials
and seed. The produce sales include bags for our work colleagues, and for
Organiclea’s crop share scheme.
The allotment plots are
developing as a whole garden. This is partly as a result of more sustained
commitment, determination and energy by members of the collective. The
allotment garden is a dynamic environment; an emanation of myriad interacting
natural cycles and processes as well as our gardening interventions –
determined as they are by the vicissitudes of our lives within and beyond the
bounds of the garden. The garden represents a complex relationship between
presence and absence. How this relationship can be mediated or communicated
about is central to maintaining a sense of communality, cooperation and
belonging in/to the garden. This need for communication and connection, in
terms of the shared endeavour, continues to be challenging. A delicate balance
between owning, and belonging to, the site operates in and between the minds of
the gardeners.
The matter of ownership and
belonging is very much a part of the dialectic of land and an
allotment/allotment site embodies many of the truths, opinions and contradictions
of that matter and in particular how and why societies enable access to land
for growing food. A presiding thought as to how and why I garden the allotment
is that the gardening is part of cultivating and nurturing something for
public/communal ownership (rather than private) and this is a way of
contributing and belonging to a community. Contemporary pressures on the land
may make this a rather Utopian sentiment.
That motivation, gardening for
the next gardeners, involves a host of demands, questions and conditions
particularly in relation to the skills, knowledge and understanding of
gardening and how these tenets are applied. The garden embodies in a moment the
sum of all the gardening activities to that moment but how evident might the
various processes of the gardening be?
One of the potential
contradictions of the sharing of an allotment concerns what an individual (or
collective) is at liberty to do within that site and how various obligations
and responsibilities are perceived and responded to. How does a very strict
regime of rules and regulations infringe upon an individual, or small
collective, sense of liberty? What is lost by the imposition of oppressive
uniformity and conformity? What is at stake if given a freedom to do whatever
you will? Common sense exercised in gardening may mean that a discrete
transition of the allotment gardeners will not hinder the (continued?)
productive and creative cultivation of a specific plot. Assuming common sense
(whatever that is) may reduce the gardening to a merely technical and
mechanical activity, as much as any interaction with those myriad interacting
natural forces will allow for that reduction. That act of assumption may also
ignore the ideas, values and consciousness of the gardeners and the garden. So
what can we do to act on a sense of responsibility to the allotment
garden? Should I/we e.g. keep an
accessible record – a story or history - of what we have done on (to?) the
allotment garden?
Our record keeping has been
haphazard and inconsistent. I have not yet succeeded in creating and keeping
what I think is an accessible and working map of ‘our’ allotment garden. Many
of the details of the plots making up the garden are in my head and the heads
of the other gardeners. The absence of an accessible map makes for something of
a virtual garden that may be lost easily with our departure. A garden map may
not just be a practical tool but also something that reveals the various garden
consciousnesses and how the loss of the virtual might also be a loss of
something of the reality of the garden. The map serves to express the garden as
a no-place – a nowhere - Utopia.
My contribution to the 2015
Field Report is about the mapping of our allotment as, ‘The Garden of Nowhere
in Particular’. I sketched a map from my memory of the allotment site – making
up the map as a place of 100 or so distinct elements e.g. raised beds, a
polytunnel, a pond ……. The sketch of the site as a collection of parts was made
within the specified A5 landscape format of the field report book. I isolated
each part/element of the whole map to give each element its own page. The
position or location of the elements within the A5 landscape window is the same
as those on the whole map. Overlaying all the pages, if they were transparent,
would restore that complete view of the allotment garden. Each page became a
frame in a simple minute long animation.
My conceit in this process is that each field report
participant/recipient will receive a part of the allotment garden map and that
there will be, potentially, another collective awareness of the allotment
garden that exists but nowhere in particular.
Field Report pages posted 8th January 2016
Comments
Post a Comment