Fifty years ago, it was an industrial wasteland. Then came the squatters, and a remarkable transformation took place: a guerrilla garden the size of a city block carved out of thorny thickets. Garden beds built with scrap wood and filled with buckets full of dirt and compost. And so this abandoned Eastside Vancouver lot became the Cottonwood Community Gardens.
Resourceful punks and hungry hippies, activists, artists, basement renters, van-lifers, and couch-surfers took part in the takeover of this former dump site with a road right-of-way running through it. An Indigenous youth group built a sweat lodge for ceremonies. Volunteers pried apart pallets and put together a compost-to-soil system. Much of the land is still covered with impenetrable blackberry thickets three meters tall. But those bramble bushes feed people too.
For years, the city wielded its road easement like a sword, periodically threatening to build a new highway through the neighbourhood and the garden. New highways were indeed built, but the Prior Street corridor was spared. Eventually, the city granted the gardens a 25-year lease that expires in 2030. But there’s no guarantee that city politics and development pressure won’t bring the sword down on the gardens after all.
Over on Vancouver Island, the boulevard gardens and front-yard veggie patches of Victoria’s Fernwood neighbourhood had “gone mainstream” by 2014, according to the Fernwood Neighbourhood Resource Group. After years of bylaw skirmishes, the city gave in and awarded its stamp of approval, and hundreds of homeowners turned to horticulture.
Why, then, has the trend not spread throughout Victoria and every city across the country? Especially now, as punishing tariffs make fresh produce from the south increasingly scarce and expensive?
There’s nothing new about boulevard veggies and front-yard gardens. Almost one hundred years ago, during the Great Depression, cities and provincial governments established Relief Gardens. Almost a quarter million plots fed throngs of the unemployed. Victory Gardens followed during World War II, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island and everywhere in between.
In more recent times, cities and provinces have seldom taken the lead on these projects. Quite the opposite: guerrilla gardeners in the ’80s and ’90s were rebelling against rules, government, authority, and gentrification. Cheeky slogans were everywhere: “Squash the state!” “Beet the system!” and “Give peas a chance!” These urban guerrillas went hand in hand with radical movements like Food Not Lawns and rowdy street-party scenesters symbolically ripping up roads with sledgehammers and planting parsnips in parking spaces. A short-lived burst of exuberance, but we thought we were changing the world.
Agriculture, of course, is an intensive working of the land. Planting a garden is very different from living the way original peoples did (and sometimes still do), foraging, gathering, scavenging, and hunting. Agriculture allowed the human population to explode to unsustainable levels, and that population now requires massive exploitation of the land. To survive the coming collapse, we’ll need a new wave of Relief Gardens. And if governments won’t lead, ordinary people will.
