Lots of things grow in Denver’s community gardens. Most are delicious and nutritious. But some, it turns out, can be very, very bitter.
While the majority of people till peacefully side by side in those tiny agricultural collectives that green the corners of the concrete jungle, seeds of conflict do sprout.
Gardeners squabble over the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers and fight over who’s not pulling weeds or showing up for scheduled work days.
In an east Denver garden, a border war broke out between immigrants from Iran and others from Afghanistan because one man had more garden territory than the other.
And last year, the alleged theft of an especially gorgeous head of lettuce required professional mediation by Denver Urban Gardens. DUG is the nonprofit that keeps tabs on 1,251 plots in 60 gardens in the metro area.
That’s the dirty little secret about community gardening: You have to deal with your community.
“These places are gritty at times,” says Denver Urban Gardens executive director Michael Buchenau, who says he must step in from time to time to settle disputes. “Conflict happens, but it gets resolved.”
There was a time when Buchenau idealized the community garden, but he’s come to embrace the rancorous moments that he says ultimately build a stronger community outside the garden gates.
“Conflict is an opportunity for finding better ways of dealing with things,” says Arzella Dirksen, who has led Cook Park Community Garden in southeast Denver for more than 17 years. “It gives us an opportunity to get to know each other and understand our differences.”
About 50 people from 12 countries garden at Cook Park. There are cultural and communication barriers with each new person, but the language of the garden has allowed them to hold together, even through a tough conflict with a neighboring property owner that has dragged on for about 15 years.
The neighbor complains about composting and parking and outside “elements” being brought into the neighborhood. There was mediation, but in the end, the neighbor built a high privacy fence and installed security cameras.
“It has made the garden more cohesive,” Dirksen says.
The gardeners spat about little things, like the use of insecticides. But they also look out for one another, pitching in when people are sick and offering up extra produce to people who might need it. Kids from the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning, which shares part of its playground with the garden, contribute art and labor.
“I love that garden. I love the people in it. I love the community and the challenges it has provided,” Dirksen says.
Paul Titus – recruited by his mother-in-law 25 years ago to apply some muscle to a large extended family that grew vegetables and drank heavily in the Whittier gardens east of downtown – needed two decades and a couple of his neighbors to help put the community back into plots across from his home on Lafayette Street.
Gardeners, not related to the family, were bullied and griped that others were urinating on their crops.
Titus put his shoulder into the garden politics, recruiting nongardening neighbors to create a voting bloc against the bad seeds and inviting new families to the garden. Now his Blue Lake beans come on stronger than his neighbors ever did, and he spends his evenings tending tomatoes instead of listening to horticultural horror stories.
These days, what was once an all-black garden reflects the rapidly changing neighborhood. There are members who are black, white or Asian. There are those who are openly gay. There are parents and grandparents, retired folks and people new to town this year, old hands in the garden and young families taking their first try with a trowel.
“This garden is ideal to me, all of a sudden,” says Titus, 51, as he surveys a garden bursting with squash, corn, herbs and flowers.
Like many of DUG’s community gardens, Whittier is attached to an elementary school. Kids receive some instruction in the gardens and can plant and harvest. With any luck, they learn about nutrition and where their food comes from while also building a sense of respect for the gardens and their communities.
But even the kids sometimes see the dark side of tending a garden in the city.
Don Diehl, a fifth-grade teacher at Fairview Elementary in the tough Sun Valley neighborhood southwest of downtown, says there have been years when the community garden planted by his students was wiped out by vandals.
Now a half-dozen years into a program that uses gardening in health, biology and Earth science lessons, the worst that happens is cornstalks getting used for sword fights now and then.
“This has become a place to grow and get things out of the ground and feel proud about it,” Diehl says. “It’s taken six years of working to change attitudes about the garden, and it’s not totally there yet, but it’s so much better.”
As Diehl and his parents and a handful of kids from the nearby day-care center cultivate fallow plots at Fairview, students peer over the fence and look at crops growing from seeds they started during the winter.
“People stop and talk much more, now that it looks nice,” Diehl says.
Judy Elliott, DUG’s education and community empowerment coordinator, says that’s to be expected.
“This is your garden, and it changes according to what’s happening in the neighborhood,” she says. “They’re sharing recipes and becoming experts at learning to solve conflict.”
Staff writer Dana Coffield can be reached at 303-820-1954 or dcoffield@denverpost.com.
