The Cursed Earth Garden

dublin | environment | feature Tuesday May 09, 2006 00:56 by Cursed Earth Gardener

In February this year, a new community garden has opened in Phibsborough, on the banks of the Royal Canal. It started off with some trees and a herb garden, and is establishing itself as an alternative means of urban food production. This article is a reflection by one of the community gardeners on the reasons for the project.

Excerpt:

We have lost the ability to provide for our needs from our local areas, and this coupled with an avaricious consumerism means we import more and more goods, both necessary and unnecessary, increasing the destruction worldwide.

The only sensible way of life is a sustainable one, everything else is by definition, doomed to failure sooner or later. Our lifestyle is so far removed from an idea of sustainability that it has become an absurdity. It’s nigh on impossible to find Irish apples in Tesco in September

Full text:
I’ve been involved in the Phibsborough Community Garden (AKA The Cursed Earth Garden) since its inception. I wanted to get involved mainly as an opportunity to learn about growing my own food. I’m shamefully ignorant about small scale food production. Like everything else in our modern world, it is designated to specialists to increase efficiency. We spend 13 years in school being indoctrinated (longer if you’re particularly slow) and trained to be cogs in the machine of industrial civilization, but unable to fend for ourselves in any basic way. Teaching myself how to grow some food is another small step towards self-empowerment and away from being totally dependent on the machinery of a globalized economy. I find it much easier to get involved in a project that concentrates on building a positive aspect of our ideals rather than trying to destroy a negative aspect of the dominant culture. Maybe it’s just my cynicism that sees oppositional activities as frequently being akin to shouting at brick walls. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk around the walls than try to knock them down.

The land itself is squatted. It appears to be a long disused part of the railway. We’re not asking permission from a higher authority, we’re taking it because we believe in the merits of our actions and the futility of requesting somebody else to improve our lives. It’s all about doing things ourselves, learning, making mistakes, making friends and trying to improve our local area in some small way.

Our city is being held hostage by speculators who crowd our neighbourhoods with over-priced and shoddily built apartment blocks, with no investment in local facilities, green spaces, playgrounds, community centres, etc. The garden will probably be built over with one of these at some time in the not-too-distant future. If nothing else it might serve as a symbol of our society’s principles when it gets bulldozed to make way for yet more gated apartment blocks.

Our environment in this country has been ravaged by the effects of thousands of years of civilization. We have killed all the native forests that used to blanket the island and turned the countryside into a chemically-green wasteland. We have lost the ability to provide for our needs from our local areas, and this coupled with an avaricious consumerism means we import more and more goods, both necessary and unnecessary, increasing the destruction worldwide.

The only sensible way of life is a sustainable one, everything else is by definition, doomed to failure sooner or later. Our lifestyle is so far removed from an idea of sustainability that it has become an absurdity. It’s nigh on impossible to find Irish apples in Tesco in September.

I don’t know if I particularly want the garden to become ‘organized’. Currently it exists as a loose collection of friends and associates. I’d like to see it grow and change organically, with people coming and working on it at their own leisure, for the sake of it, for the enjoyment of walking away from the traffic and digging hands in dirt. It’s self-empowering. It’s practical. In economic terms it means I can grow a few vegetables, save a bit of money, work a little less and have more time to spend doing what I want to do with my time. In human terms I learn a little about how to look after myself, spend time with good friends doing something healthy and life-affirming, make new friends and get to see a piece of land damaged by industrialism get a new lease of life.

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This was originally a comment on this article: report on Phibsborough garden

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