CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF VIBRANT GROWTH, DECAY AND RENEWAL OF LAKESIDE DRIVE COMMUNITY GARDEN
It’s hard work making our dreams a reality, yet it’s the dream that makes the joys and sadness of our work a celebration. This is a perspective of the heart of the vision of our community garden.
Caring for people, caring for the earth, and fair sharing are the interdependent values that lie at the heart of permaculture. These are the principles that seeded the dream for Lakeside Drive Community Garden, ten years ago this year. Seeing the world awash in complex problems of social and environmental degradation, CDU students advocated an idealistic turn to creating a world where relationships found in natural ecologies underpin the design of human settlements and agriculture. The ongoing work of a community group can be hard. People volunteer great swathes of time to enacting a dream and vision, which includes lots of tedium, it’s not all ‘fun and games’, nor is it even all gardening!
A community garden combines local sustainable food production with building stronger, more connected communities. ‘Growing things’ is more than just functional food production. A community garden is very much a creative, open space that contributes to the sense of a neighbourhood. The vision of growing a garden, both with and within, an urban community, is to create a central place to trial and experiment with sustainable lifestyle activities and build relationships with each other and our natural worlds.
These originators of Lakeside Drive Community Garden highlighted the need to experiment and develop knowledge about growing food in the unique climate of Darwin. The seasonal shifts from dry, dusty, rainless months moving to extreme monsoonal rain dumps, creates a challenge for year-round food supply. The planning for a garden that can expand, continually evolve, and adapt; and managing resources so that the cycle of growth and decay, of rain, dry and heat, become the natural rhythms that people work with, is ongoing.
From the Chairperson’s report 5 years on from inception:
… by having a community garden not only are we able to make practical actions that contribute to community resilience fertilizing social conscientiousness, but we create living landscape where all hands are welcomed and dirtied. This landscape provides interconnection between our very cultivated selves and the natural world, a particularly pertinent notion in towns and cities, to have a little arcadia in suburbia. Lakeside is a modest image envisioned by many minds, expresses our informed desires, and is shaped via continual reflection and encouragement.
Like the rhythm of the seasons, over the last ten years the ‘who and how’ of people involved in the garden has ebbed and flowed. The core vision that seeded the heart of the garden continues. Each person infuses their own flavour of wishes, dreams and actions for the garden, keeping the heart of the garden both nourished and evolving.
Today, Lakeside Drive Community Garden is a bountiful, colourful, creative place, replete with diverse food stuffs and networked across our community. We cohabitate a landscape with remnant bushland animated by feather, fur and carapace, and sitting adjacent to the human playing fields of green grass, watch the dog walkers, joggers, cyclists and cars go by.
As we enter a new decade, a new wet season and cycle of growth, the Lakeside Drive Community Garden awaits a new cycle of people to bring their dreams and actions of creating a better world through the magic of community gardening.
There are many ways to be involved in the Lakeside Drive Community Garden: from working in the garden, planning events, designing and building garden structures, creating garden art, saving and propagating seeds, writing grant applications, and engaging with community groups.
Connect with us on Facebook, through the website: https://lcdcg.cdu.edu.au, and sign up to receive the newsletter. Come to the garden Sundays from 4.30-6pm for working bees, which are a great chance to get your hands dirty, meet some of our gardener’s and learn about gardening in the tropics. We look forward to meeting you!
