youth garden history
Youth Gardens: A History (from 1996)
Salutations!
Welcome to the Environmental Youth Alliance Community Garden Handbook. This book has been designed to provide readers and gardeners alike with an informative and “user-friendly” presentation of our story, projects, plant species and gardening techniques that we at the Environmental Youth Alliance continue to develop, understand and share with the community.
The Environmental Youth Alliance is a non-profit organization whose vision is to build community and environmental health through the understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness with the earth. We promote this vision through hands on action projects created through youth centered, grassroots action.
What is Community Gardening?
Ask someone who works in any community garden what renting or sharing a plot means to them and you are bound to get a great range of responses, often accompanied with a big smile and a willingness to share gardening tips. For some, it is a practical and economical source of providing food for themselves and their families; for others it is a relaxing, meditative way of leaving the pressures of the city behind and being satisfied with the simple acts of transplanting, watering and observing the lives of their plants; for others still it is a way of getting to know and trying to understand the peoples, cultures and beliefs that comprise their community. But for most of the world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, it means survival. Actually it is all of this and more.
Long before the ‘invention’ of environmentalism in the dawn of the 1990’s, city and community gardens have thrived at various moments throughout our past. In Canada, the first community gardens appeared along railway lines initiated by Canadian Pacific Railway in the effort to advertise the West and encourage pioneers in 1890. They lasted until 1930 when bureaucratization brought them into decline. School gardens flourished (1900-1913) on school grounds to promote rural values and co-operation with nature. Vacant lot gardens (1910-1920) were instituted to meet food needs by utilizing unproductive land and were supported by civic governments and national Department of Agriculture. War gardens (1914-1947) were intended to help the war efforts and survived through the Great Depression. Over 1000 gardens were established in Canada during WWI. Since 1965, community gardens in urban centres have been established throughout the country as a response to and as an indicator of the increasing awareness of ecological and food security issues.
The concept of community gardens offers an alternative to the commodity driven, competitive environment that is the commonplace of many cities. They help to create and increase food security, foster self-reliance and support local trade and economics. This involves a collective need and desire to steward the land in a basic and, some may say, instinctual fashion; to be able to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility in the city where many people do not and cannot.
Objectives for the Gardens
The Youth Garden at the Cottonwood Community Garden functions as an ecological site where elementary, high school and university aged youth have an opportunity to learn, experience and share ideas about organic gardening and other garden centred activities with their peers in a supportive environment.
The garden serves as an active and a passive space for all who wish to enjoy it.
The garden and gardening activities are open to the whole community and beyond.
The garden serves as an educational and resource site for anyone who wishes to learn more about organic gardening and garden minded activities such as fruit tree propagation, indigenous species, permaculture, herbs and medicinal plants, composting, horticulture, habitat creation, seed saving, urban sustainability, etc..
The garden functions as a wildspace and shelter for bird and animal species living in the area.
A Community Garden
in the Making
The Cottonwood Community Garden began in 1991 on land owned by the city as a result of the demand for gardening space that exceeded the limits of Strathcona Community Garden. If we take a brief look through more than 150 years, we begin to see a glimpse of the changes that have taken place on the site.
In the 1840s, the entirety of Strathcona Park and the area south were tidal flats (named “False Creek” by the first European immigrant) and coastal rainforest, inhabited by the Coast Salish nation. The present Cottonwood site was the estuary of a stream that emptied onto the flats. Around 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway had extended out to the coast. As the land began to undergo large scale urban development, the False Creek Flats were used as a dump site for industrial and household wastes. In 1911 Great Northern Railroad and Canadian National Railway were given ownership to all land below the high tide mark. The inlet was dammed at Main Street and the flats were drained and filled on and off during the following decades to make room for the railway.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the sites were being used as city dumps. Several East End families kept cows or horses and let them graze on the flats, and certain spots were known for their wild mushrooms. During the Depression, hobo shantytowns, then called “jungles”, were being created on vacant lands in the north east part of Strathcona Gardens. They were destroyed in 1932 by the city who intended on establishing a recreational park. A proposal for False Creek Park was introduced in 1938, but action by the governments was slow and the remaining wet areas were not filled until 1940. Before the park was completed, however, Canada entered W.W. II and the area was used as a military training field. After the war in the 1950’s, filling of the area continued as the water levels had risen and had flooded the area. The area which is now Cottonwood Gardens was filled with alternating layers of garbage and soil.
The proposed False Creek Park which was originally designed with several different recreational areas in mind became the baseball and soccer fields which now dominate the park (renamed Strathcona Park in the late 1970s). Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s many battles erupted between several groups trying to claim the land for different purposes, from a community centre building to a city works yard to a freeway to an Aboriginal Friendship Centre. In October 1984, City Farmer proposed the creation of a “network of community gardens”. On May 5, 1985 Parks Board commissioners approved City Farmer’s application for a community garden and Strathcona was born.
Ellie Epp, Mr. Li and Henry Westergaard were the first three gardeners on the Strathcona site. Out of the growing group of gardener’s, however, it was a group of women who were clearly central to the initial shaping and working of the land: Leslie, Gretchen, Joan, Ellie, Muggs, Joanne, Maxine, Ros, Diana, Sheila, Wendy and many others were the organizers, mediators and labourers who voluntarily spent thousands of hours ensuring that the area would indeed become the flourishing garden that you see today.
A great part of this struggle was a battle beween the Gardeners and the City, who owned one quarter of the four acre site and who, in March 1987 wanted their share back. The Chinese Freemason’s project had been revived and they were determined to build a senior’s home on the acre that was the home to the plots of Ellie, Mr. Li, Henry and a black walnut tree that was planted in commemoration of the newly established gardens. The Gardener’s were esentially being seen as squatters, and City Council was not impressed by nor sympathetic to the time and energy the Gardeners had spent in restoring the land. In July
1988 the squatters were evicted and the land was granted to the Freemasons. Then, in August 1988 at a public hearing, a decision to rezone the land was passed by City Council, despite the fact that those who spoke “against the rezoning outnumber[ed] those in favour almost three to one.”
The Gardens had to be rebuilt. An irrigation system, pathways , an orchard of 45 young fruit trees and three years worth of topsoil creation had to be rescued and relocated within a period of three months by volunteer labour and by hand. On May 6 and 7 of 1989, three hundred and fifty volunteers showed up “to rebuild plots, lay paths, dig in irrigation. The volunteers haul[ed] twenty-two dump truck loads of gravel by wheelbarrow and lay it over the paths and irrigation lines. They [dug] thousands of meres of irrigation trenches and lay pipes. They edge[d] existing beds with wooden borders and construct[ed] raised beds for gardeners in wheelchairs. And then, at the end of the second day, they [came] to the Raycam Community Centre to celebrate.”
The Gardens had come to full capacity by spring of 1991, and the desire to expand had been brewing for some time. Oliver Kellhammer was a key figure in pushing this through. The concept was to put a community ‘monument’ on land that the proposed Grandview Cut highway would go through. A large portion of the future Youth Garden would be sacrificed in the developer’s plan. On April 22, 1991 the Parks board agreed to extend Strathcona’s lease to include the Cottonwood site. With few arguments, on December 12th City Council confirmed public access to the area that has become Cottonwood Gardens.
As a collectively driven space, the Gardeners also agreed to waive the standard plot fees. Strathcona was also in strong support of a Youth Garden and in the spring of 1993, the first areas of the Youth Garden were met with a new energy and spirit. They began working on the eastern portion of the site clearing a sea of blackberry brambles and sheetmulching in the attempt to re-build the soil from what had been clay sand that was once stored by the Parks Board for use at baseball diamonds throughout the city. EYA members Susan Kurbis, Jeremy Dick and Rachel Rosen were important figures in the establishment of the presence of youth at the gardens, and in winter of 1993 they began to organize projects and events for the following spring that would propel the Youth Garden into yet a greener place.
The spring and summer of 1994 saw further Stewardship Camps and the involvement of youth in the gardens grew. Wildlife habitat creation was an important part of this new inner city green-space that was being created. Volunteers created “Willow’s Drink”, a pond which now supports local aquatic and bird species. An urban forest was started, focussing on re-introducing native tree species and providing a stopover
point for the large bird populations which migrate through Vancouver. A sign of the increasing health of Cottonwoods was the appearance of a family of Red-tailed hawks in the Cottonwood trees above.
Running in tandem with the Stewardship camps was another program in the gardens entitled Young Women Creating Change. This program involved women from local high schools partnered with women in Mae Sai, Thailand. Both groups worked on projects which involved learning job skills based on what was produced in the gardens. Traditional uses were explored to make medicines, salves, shampoos, preserves, weaving and cloth dyeing - all from plants within the gardens. Those involved in this project had the opportunity to gain insight and share wisdom around the issues of community economic development, business operation, food and plant use, the health and cosmetic industry and the socio-political implications involved in these issues.
Since then EYA has continued to co-create a healthy and balanced ecosystem by planting native species, using traditional and modern gardening techniques, and bringing groups of young people to the site to educate and to demonstrate the values of gardening, ecology and community building. Youth from the Raycam Community Centre and from Streetfront Alternative Program have held plots in the Garden for several seasons and youth from the Trek Program and the Downtown Eastside Youth Activity Society have played key roles in the development of the Youth Garden with skills in design, carpentry, art and, of course, gardening.
