If you have spent any time on the London Road of late, heading in or out of town, our guess is that you will have been stationary long enough to spot the evolution that is happening in Hedgemead Park.
Brilliantly named ‘Vegmead’, the patch of flourishing land central to the green open space is Vegmead, a community focused food growing plot run by volunteers producing organic fruit & vegetables. Less of the manicured lawn and more organic free flowing bounteous growth we are more likely to see on an allotment.
This horticultural enterprise began life in 2011 when Bath Parks gave over a neglected flowerbed in Hedgemead Park to Transition Bath who transformed the space into a wonderful vegetable and fruit plot with the remit to grow organic fruit & vegetables for use by the local community and visitors to Hedgemead Park also ‘to encourage community engagement with the space through creation and promotion of volunteering opportunities’.
Not only do we applaud this enterprise and its horticultural ambition but we have enjoyed watching its seasonal growth and the daily hive of activity. It has certainly added another dimension and talking point to the grim and grey commute together with providing the busy gardeners with plenty to crow about. We think it’s an excellent way to bring people together and encourage new skills.
We do note that it is part of a wider trend. http://guerrillagardening.org/ started as an ‘illicit cultivation of gardens around London’ In a city where space is at a premium Guerrilla Gardening is a ‘war against scarcity and misuse of public space’. At TBG HQ we like to think we are law abiding folk so we can’t condone some of the actions taken but we do like their creative use of space and can only add this to the bank of ideas required when talking to our clients about best use of theirs.
And it’s not just the green fingered British that are using the garden or gardening as a political platform, On the other side of the Atlantic The Gansta Gardener is ‘turning freeways in to food’.
Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens — in abandoned plots of land along ‘kerbs and in central reservations on freeways’ in South Central Los Angeles. The self-described “gangsta gardener” became frustrated with his local area’s lack of access to healthy food, so he took to planting fresh produce in 2010.
It’s certainly all food for thought and challenges our ideas of what is possible with, not only restricted space, but time and money too. In short, there are solutions for all types of outside spaces; talk to us.
Rest assured it will be a while before Donny is seen wearing a baseball cap back to front, and the TBG team will be sticking firmly to legitimate gardening practices.
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There is a short Vegmead video below if you would like to know more.
thebathgardener 