Abstract

Large government-funded cultural institutions have a mandate to serve the entire state or nation, not just those who visit their spaces and collections. The Botanic Gardens Trust in Sydney (the Trust) has a commitment to take its expertise beyond the garden walls to enrich the life of our cities and regional centres, serve the broader community and green the urban environment.

To this end the Trust joined forces with the NSW Department of Housing (DoH) in 2000 to establish a state-wide program called Community Greening. This program facilitates communal gardening on wasted public land and in housing estates, schools and churches. Through this program, disadvantaged groups in our society, including residents of public housing estates and local school communities in urban and regional NSW, take ownership of their surroundings, connect with plants, learn new skills and make friends with people from a diversity of backgrounds. The program also involves the participation of several local and government bodies and benefits from contributions-in-kind from industry and the commercial sector.

Beyond greening the urban landscape, community gardening builds social cohesion and develops community networks. People who might never visit botanic gardens are given the opportunity to gain an understanding of plants, recycling and sustainable horticultural practices. However, there are challenges involved in establishing community gardens and empowering individuals and neighbourhoods. This presentation examines the role of botanic gardens in the urban environment, not only as cultural spaces but as catalysts for social change and community building.

Introduction

At the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, a cage was recently removed from around one of the world’s rarest plants. This botanical treasure is the Wollemi Pine, a living dinosaur discovered about 10 years ago in the Wollemi National Park just 150 km from Sydney – Australia’s greatest urban population of over four million people. The cage was removed because this plant is now commercially available for anyone to take home and keep in a pot or plant in their backyards. Or perhaps it will be used more publicly as a street tree, or be propagated for parkland settings. The strategy for making this plant readily available had a number of objectives:

To take the pressure off the extremely limited wild population – from botanical hunters and would-be intrepid explorers.
To raise community awareness of plants and the natural environment.
To remind society how little we know about our natural inheritance and the importance of biodiversity.

At last, the Botanic Gardens Trust (the Trust) had a plant with the public appeal of a panda to raise visitor awareness of endangered plants and the fragility of the environment. The cage was erected around this Wollemi Pine, the first ever to be planted in the ground, on 9 January 1998 and clearly drew attention to it. And yet, despite the pine’s high media profile, throughout its confinement, it was not unusual to see young visitors run up to the cage with excitement, look inside and exclaim something along the lines of “Mum, there’s nothing in here!”

This reaction highlights the fact that urbanisation has desensitised many of us to our natural heritage. According to Dr Jane Tarran, one of our Trust’s Scientific Committee members and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, current social attitudes towards nature¹ include:

‘Plant blindness’ – inability to notice plants or recognise their importance to the biosphere and ourselves.

Nature haters – nature is messy, threatening and needs to be controlled
Nature neutrals – comfortable in areas without nature
Tamed nature – yards, high density camping grounds & motorised outdoor recreation
Renewal in nature – periodic contact with nature
Love of & dependency on nature – wilderness dwellers.

The role of botanic gardens

Botanic gardens cater for all those with the above attitudes and provide immersion in the natural environment in an otherwise urbanised world. They provide an attractive green backdrop for strollers through the park, and are great places for social occasions. Some botanic gardens contain pockets of remnant bushland which appeal to those who want to experience ‘real nature’ but still stay in control. Ultimately, botanic gardens are places for rejuvenating the human spirit in accordance with the biophilia hypothesis proposed by Edward O. Wilson that says human beings subconsciously seek connections with other forms of life.

However, botanic gardens are also museums of natural and cultural heritage. They specialise in long-term collections of living plants as well as house millions of preserved plant specimens in special keeping places, called herbaria. Just like other museums, these collections and botanic estates are valued by the society that created them and are visited for recreational, horticultural and scientific purposes.

But for those of us who work in botanic gardens, our bigger challenge is to educate people to recognise that plants support all life on Earth. Our practices preach sustainable horticulture and we endeavour in our public programs to raise awareness that plants are endangered by a combination of factors: over-collecting, unsustainable agriculture and forestry practices, urbanisation, pollution, land use changes, and the spread of invasive alien species².

The 2,204 botanic gardens worldwide, individually and collectively, contribute to the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2002 and support the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014).

There are also pressing reasons for botanic gardens to go beyond the garden walls and get involved at the local level, out in the urban environment. As the world’s population increases, and more people live in urban rather than rural areas, natural land cover is being replaced with residential, commercial and industrial infrastructure. Densely-packed buildings destroy natural air flows and the hard pavement and building surfaces absorb heat from the sun. As the local temperature rises, this causes urban heat islands to be set up. Air conditioners are turned on to relieve the uncomfortable conditions thereby increasing energy usage and the cycle perpetuates.

The centre of a city is generally the hottest, with temperatures lowering through suburban to rural areas. Add traffic to the excessive heat and there is likely to be an increase in the rate of ground-level ozone formation, or smog, which presents an additional threat to health and ecosystems.

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Planting trees and other vegetation counteracts many of these negative effects associated with urban development. Plants and natural landscapes also lower CO₂ levels in the atmosphere and effectively capture rainfall and improve the surrounding aesthetics. The staff in regional and state wide botanic gardens are well placed to advise home gardeners, local communities, and government land managers on appropriate plant selection, landscape designs and sustainable horticulture practices.

Over the last decade, extensive research has been undertaken into the ways in which living with nature and natural views can change the way people feel. The evidence confirms that there are both physical and mental health benefits³. Botanic gardens and other open space managers across Australia now promote a new initiative called Healthy Parks Healthy People. This is in support of research results that say visiting a park can reduce stress, enhance productivity, boost immunity, promote healing and foster psychological wellbeing.

If individuals and communities are directly involved with nature, such as through gardening or bush regeneration, the benefits increase. Community educators marvel at how easy it is to get people excited about plants and gardening. Gardening is hands-on and truly interactive and can be done by people of all ages, backgrounds, social status, interest levels and abilities.

The rewards and sense of achievement are instant (there’s the satisfaction of successfully planting something) and ongoing (watching it grow and/or produce fruit). And if one of the key characteristics of education for sustainability is to be ‘futures-oriented’, there is hardly a more relevant way of learning this than by undertaking a garden project. Imagining the future and planning for change – whether it is next week, next season, next year – casts gardeners as 'futurists'. A gardener is a futurist!⁴

At the back of the Uniting Church in Waterloo is the Luncheon Club Community Garden. It was opened by NSW Governor Marie Bashir on International Day of Disabilities 2005. It caters for the needs of HIV/AIDS sufferers. It’s called the Luncheon Club because they grow produce which they then get together to eat. She and education horticulturist Stephen Paul are planting an olive tree – the symbol of peace.

Community gardening

Gardening as a community has been around for a very long time and is considered to have its origins in the commons of Europe and Great Britain in the early nineteenth century. It generally takes place in disadvantaged enclaves of densely populated cities on unwanted public land.

The American Community Gardening Association estimates there are 18,000 Community Gardens throughout the United States, Canada, and the world⁵. The current trend of interest in communal gardening in New York began during the fiscal crisis in the 1970s. The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens became involved in the community gardening movement in the 1990s, and continues to this day to assist with education about the basics of composting as well as supplying surplus plants and providing horticultural advice. This is the model the Trust adopted in 1999 when we decided to see how we could help develop an interest in communal gardening in NSW to build social capital as well as promote environmental stewardship.

The Trust’s Community Education Unit has been taking its programs beyond the garden walls for a number of years and has worked with communities in urban and regional NSW since at least 1982. We reached the broader communities by mainly engaging with the local schools to introduce them to the weird and wonderful world of plants and to help with greening up school grounds. Through annual programs, such as Arbor Day and RBG goes West, Trust staff came face-to-face with local environmental issues and would help the community resolve these and … promote sustainable gardening practices along the way. Community links were strengthened as people came to realise that botanic gardens are interesting, involving and relevant to them.

In 2000, the Trust formed a partnership with NSW Department of Housing (DoH) to promote communal gardening especially in disadvantaged communities in urban and regional NSW. Called Community Greening, it is primarily an environmental education program designed to support social cohesion and environmental sustainability through community gardening projects.

The program has grown steadily over the past six years and over that time Community Greening has worked collaboratively with 128 communities including:

communities living in Public Housing (including 13 from regional NSW)
communities living in Community Housing
disadvantaged communities based around local schools
communities living with HIV/AIDS
Indigenous communities
communities with people with mental/physical disabilities
communities of adults in crisis
communities of youth in crisis.

Community Greening is run by two Trust education horticulturists with support from DoH Regional Coordinators, other government agencies, businesses and the local community. It has its own dedicated van – covered in the logos of the various supporters who contribute seeds, plants, landscape materials, signage and water saving devices etc. for use by community groups.

What do our educational horticulturalists do? They teach about plants, sustainable gardening, recycling and reuse, showing tenants how to mulch and compost food scraps and use grey water. They also teach others. For example, Trust horticultural apprentices are brought on to assist with Arbor Day celebrations and learn how to communicate effectively with children; and tenants, such as those who run the Edmund Rice Community Nursery at Bidwill, are encouraged to pass on their skills to other tenants and visiting groups.

The educational horticulturists also provide advice about landscaping and maintaining natural environments. They promote the planting of species indigenous to the area and demonstrate the water-wise and bird-attracting aspects of cultivating native gardens. Occasionally they recycle plants and landscaping materials that are surplus to need at our botanic estates. And regularly, they deliver ‘surplus’ plants kindly donated by Eden Gardens and Garden Centre or propagated by the Friends of the Gardens.

Provide fig tree (surplus from RBG First Farm) and plants (from Eden Gardens)

The community determines where and what type of garden/natural area it wants and Community Greening provides the inspiration and skills to help them establish and maintain it. The type of garden depends on the community’s preference and the range includes fruit and vegetable, sensory, native, floral and memorial gardens. Some gardens are developed on wasted or vandalised open space in housing estates or on the roof of an apartment block. Others are developed in school or church grounds, or on under-utilised parkland or in empty Council-owned areas.

People choose to participate in community gardening for a variety of reasons. They might come because it is a place to grow much needed produce, or where they can experience peace and tranquility. It gives people living isolated lives something meaningful to do and the opportunity to meet people. Many Community Greening participants don’t share a common language and they break through this barrier by communicating through doing. Public housing tenants who come from rural or agrarian backgrounds enjoy sharing the gardening skills they had learnt in their homeland.

Even though forces outside the community ultimately determine what land and support is made available to communal gardeners, bureaucrats and decision makers cannot drive the process. The initiative must come from the community itself. The Community Greening experience has shown that there is often one individual in the community who is highly motivated and keen to implement the idea. If that person is supported and encouraged then the rest of the community becomes involved.

Government departments, local businesses and industry can then provide materials and support and help cut through red tape. In this way the community achieves what the community wants, not what the bureaucrats want or think the community needs. Community Greening projects also build individual participant’s skills in community consultation, dispute resolution, project management and gardening. During the planning of community gardens, representatives of all community groups must be involved, or at least consulted, if a project is to be accepted and not vandalised.

Is Community Greening successful? It attracts and continues to generate positive media with wonderful headlines such as ‘Plant a garden and watch a community grow!’ and ‘Horticultural Missionaries’. It has been acknowledged as best practice in establishing partnerships, promoting sustainability and contributing to community renewal with a Silver Award in the Social Justice Category in the NSW Premier’s 2002 Public Sector Awards. Individual gardens are regular recipients of local grants (e.g., Australia’s Open Garden Scheme and DoH’s Green Thumbs competition) and local council awards (Tidy Towns Awards).

In 2003, a formal evaluation of Community Greening was conducted by the social research company Urbis Keys Young⁶. They confirmed that it is indeed a successful feature in urban renewal and that the outcomes are significant given a relatively modest investment. Since its inception, funding for has always come from sources external to the Botanic Gardens Trust and has primarily come from DoH and other government agencies. Individual community gardens are further supported by their own local government, businesses and community groups. The partners have recently secured one corporate sponsor for Community Greening. However, it is important to note that securing long-term funding remains an ongoing challenge.

The positive role of community gardens in fostering community development and neighbourhood improvement in a public housing context was also the subject of university research by the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of NSW. Their in-depth study was on the three community garden projects on Sydney’s Waterloo Public Housing Estate⁷. This estate was one of the first community garden networks the Trust became involved with.

Currently there are 105 Community Greening gardens either in development or established on DoH or Council land, in churches or in schools throughout NSW. Annually, over 6,000 individuals participate. Regrettably, but understandably, approximately 10% of community garden projects drop off each year for a variety of reasons. In some cases, despite all efforts, a suitable site cannot be found or the community loses interest. Problems sometimes arise when the ‘motivating force’ leaves the area or when the land owners decide to take the land back for other uses.

Community gardens generally have their heyday in times of economic stress and falling land values. As neighbourhoods gentrify, community gardens may be threatened by local development plans. The challenge is to keep the community motivated and committed, and to keep the land secure from repossession by a variety of stakeholders. Community gardens are not short-term projects – some taking as long as five years to establish – and everyone must be aware that this ‘infrastructure’ that has created such social cohesion can be removed without a trace very quickly.

The slides below show the evolution of the Oasis Community Garden in Toongabbie in Sydney’s western suburbs. Note the mural painted by the Aboriginal community …

Here is five years of development. It starts with the mural in an otherwise burnt-out vandalised block surrounded by public houses. Our Community Greening horticulturists worked with the local school children to come up with a design for the garden, three Job Quest agencies did the hard landscaping, and it was opened by the Mayor of Blacktown City Council in March this year. His ongoing commitment will ensure the community garden’s future.

Conclusion

Let us return to the conference theme of ‘Exploring Dynamics: Cities, Cultural Spaces, Communities’.

In New York in 1999, the Giuliani administration was in the process of auctioning off 114 community garden lots for both market-rate and subsidised housing when two non-profit organisations, the Trust for Public Land and the New York Restoration Project³ (with Bette Midler as its Founder), raised the money and bought them. Since then, the land of many vulnerable and distressed community gardens has been purchased by environmental Trusts and secured from take-over. This exemplifies the fact that only through partnership among individual citizens, community groups, government agencies, corporate interests and private philanthropy can environmental stewardship take place on a large scale.

Bette Midler founded the New York Restoration Project in 1995. Photo: NYRP website.

Incorporating ‘green spaces’ within the building fabric is also being picked up by urban planners and architects and the world over. Particularly inspirational is the work of New York architect Emilio Ambasz. At the Institute of Landscape Architects’ Greening Cities – a new urban ecology forum at Australian Technology Park in Sydney in 2003, Emilio explained his principal of giving back the equivalent amount of land that his architectural designs extract from nature. He described how he won the contract to build the Fukuoka Prefecture International Hall in Japan, which is adjacent to the Tenjin Park, because he proposed to extend the park up and over a stepped 15-storey building.

There are also an increasing number of committed government officials who are making things happen. For example, the Mayor of Chicago, USA, has been a significant contributor to making Chicago live up to its motto: ‘A city in a Garden’. And the recently retired NSW Government Architect Chris Johnson highlighted his strong commitment to environmental issues in his publication, ‘Greening Sydney’⁸. In it he describes an aerial garden filled with lush vegetation at Darling Park, which was created by a team from the Royal Botanic Gardens, in partnership with the land's owners, Lend Lease and two Japanese firms. The Trust’s landscape designer, Ian Innes is quoted as saying: “Visually we were trying to make the rooftops quite diverse in colour – it’s more like a botanical display”. Then Chris adds: “Users generally have no idea that the garden sits on a concrete slab with an expressway full of cars immediately beneath.”

With such inspirational ideas by decision makers and the positive contribution of the community in greening the urban landscape the stage is set for open communication about all sorts of issues. By bringing together community, government and businesses there are triple bottom-line benefits – for society, the environment and the economy. Botanic gardens worldwide are proud to be involved in the process.

References:

1) Urban Forests Forum Dr Jane Tarran University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and Philip Hewett, Newcastle City Council http://www.science.uts.edu.au/des/StaffPages/JaneTarran/jane_tarran.html

2) Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) Vision Statement http://www.bgci.org.uk/conservation/home/

3) New York Restoration Project https://www.nyrp.org/en/

4) Community Gardens as a Platform for Education for Sustainability Linda Corkery. Effective Sustainability Education: What Works? Why? Where Next? Linking Research and Practice 18-20 February 2004, Sydney, Australia

5) American Community Gardening Association http://www.communitygarden.org/faq.php

6) Community Greening Evaluation Report Urbis Keys Young http://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/community_education/community_greening/community_greening_evaluation_report

7) A Bountiful Harvest L Bartolomei, L Corkery, B Judd, S Thompson http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/news_publications/A%20Bountiful%20Harvest.pdf

8) Greening Sydney: landscaping the urban fabric Chris Johnson, Government Architect Publications.

Beyond the garden walls: greening cities & cultivating communities