The Walled Garden begins to take shape

There seems to something special about ‘primary production’ or what Tolstoy would call ‘bread labour’. To get involved in growing food, working land, spinning thread, building shelters is somehow also to get in touch with ourselves at a deep level, and provides an opportunity to forge friendships that cross all sorts of cultural and social boundaries. A new project in Bristol has just opened, in the middle of a tower block estate, turning what was once the substantial walled garden of a vicarage into a neighbourhood growing project.

It has been almost two years in the planning, but the Walled Garden Project, as it is known, finally opened on Dec 11th. Our vision is for it to become a place for all sorts of people to meet, get their hands dirty and find friends. The area in which the garden is placed has recently become home to a large number of Somali people. We are working with a number of disadvantaged groups including asylum seekers and also with several other growing projects in this part of the city.

For example, last summer we initiated a community garden with staff and residents at a homeless hostel just 50 yards from Bristol’s main Cabot Circus shopping centre. It felt interestingly subversive of the dominant culture! This year we are hoping that some of the staff and residents at the hostel will also join us at the Walled Garden and find new friends there.

In terms of EarthAbbey the journey of this project has been instructive. While we started off with it as an ‘EarthAbbey’ project we noticed quickly how this obviously religious title caused many local community groups to hesitate. In response, while our values remain the same, the Walled Garden Project is now presented clearly as a project for the whole community, without reference to EarthAbbey, and almost every local organisation has supported its development, as well as the churches.

This has been a formative experience in understanding how to think about EarthAbbey and its relationship to member’s projects and to recognise that many members will be taking forward projects, doing it as an expression of their faith, but not wanting to speak of it as an EarthAbbey project or one with any specifically religious title. See the FAQs about EarthAbbey for more on this.

We are also delighted to recognise that other organisations are doing projects very similar to those that we are doing. Dave Bookless, at A Rocha, who has been a good friend to us already, notices how Grow Zones and this project are so similar to their interfaith growing project at in Southall  and the Camberwell Farmer’s Garden headed up by Will Campbell-Clause. I sense that we are experiencing a wave of new things to do with people reconnecting with the earth.

It says in the prophet Isaiah ’
See I am doing a new thing,
do you not perceive it,
I am making a way in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert…

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