Environment
Crops and Robbers
By Michael Harris published Oct 1, 2009
Community gardens, designed to feed the multitudes, now benefit the larcenous
City folk long to know the value of the tired green Earth. Within Vancouver’s concrete limits, there are now 51 parcels of land given over to community gardens; that’s 2,750 plots of dirt claimed by yoga instructors, out-of-work realtors, and graduate students who are earnestly engaged in an escape from their individual civic stresses. What began as a war measure morphed into first a petit-bourgeois pursuit—the vegetable patches lining Sixth Avenue, say, tended by Kitsilano residents in oversized sun hats—and then into something less twee, with several gardens consuming downtown acreage, some immediately abutted by the city’s dirtiest, most crowded streets.
Twenty dollars per annum (and over a year on the wait list) secured me my own plot in downtown’s Nelson Park. “Just don’t plant pumpkins,” said Abigail as she gave me my orientation. “They smash pumpkins.”
That’s not all “they” do. Every time I garden someone will stop and ask, “Don’t they steal?” Yes, in fact, they do. From my patch, 15 feet by 10: one tomato plant; one purple lily; an entire row of carrots; seven sky-blue gladiolas; and, inexplicably, one medium-sized rock.
Garden thieves are a regular topic in chats over the fence between Nelson Park’s two dozen gardeners. Nora’s English is not so good, but her disappointment was clear as she mumbled “Why? My strawberries! Why?”
“Vagrants!” spat one white-haired woman when she saw the crater where my tomato plant had been. Her theory seemed unlikely—I saw no guilty runaways or drug addicts consuming Caprese salads in the following weeks. No, the perpetrators could not be deduced merely by our downtown locale or the presence of unsavoury types in the area. The truth was more sinister.
As summer plodded on, we began to catch our foes in the act. The very public position of Nelson Park makes the public feel ours is, partly, their bounty on display. People who would never steal a $10 garden gnome from a front yard, who would never pocket a wad of Whole Foods produce, thought nothing of plucking an eggplant that represented five months of care.
One day, while I was harvesting my spinach, a jolly man crouched beside me and began eagerly picking fistuls of it himself. “Isn’t it just wonderful?” he beamed. And I realized that, like a child, he had no concept of the mechanisms by which he profited. He thought, simply, that he and I had been provided for—by Gregor Robertson’s government, presumably. (Taking its cue from Obama and the Queen, our city hall has given 330 square metres of its yard up for gardens.) I didn’t have the heart to chastise him. “Yes, it’s great,” I said, and let him take what he wanted.
