If there’s one way to sum up the English, it’s in our approach to community gardening.
Across the Atlantic, gardeners club together and collectively transform large swathes of common land into something beautiful and useful. Agrarian democracy, you might say. Here, it’s feudalism – with the land carved into allotments and parceled out to individuals, for individuals. For a nominal fee to the local town council, an allotment is an Englishman/-woman’s private kingdom to tend and make productive. It’s an opportunity for good, satisfying hard work, a sense of community with one’s neighbors (who often became good friends), and the simple yet deep pleasure that comes from shouting “Gerroff my land!”
In recent years the allotment system has struggled. Growing demand has severely outstripped dwindling supply – from the million allotments available to the public at the end of the Second World War, only a quarter remained by 1997. In recent years the figure has risen – but so has the waiting list of people, currently around the 100,000 mark. In the ’70s it was green issues (championed by the iconic sitcom The Good Life) that made gardening hot again. Now it’s the economy. Free food? Where do I sign?
Our local and national government simply can’t keep up – but it’s just got an enormous boost from a most unlikely direction. The National Trust (a charitable organization looking after historic properties, and one of Britain’s biggest landowners) has just released land for the creation of 1,000 new allotments. That may not sound much compared with demand, but it’s thrown the plight of allotmenteers directly into the limelight – and those 1,000 plots could still create around $2.5 million’s worth of groceries for their lucky owners. There’s also the symbolism: one of Britain’s traditionally conservative organizations (in a literal sense), recognizing that food self-sufficiency is the way forward. Exciting stuff.
A new generation of gardeners and landowners are dragging on their wellies – and while the economy suffers, our green and pleasant land is going to work.
Image: lizjones112