The Somerville Housing Authority has granted residents at the Clarendon Hill housing development land and permission to plant a community garden. ~Photo by Barak Sered/courtesy of the Clarendon Hill Garden Committee By Ashley Taylor The Somerville Housing Authority has granted residents at the Clarendon Hill housing development land and permission to plant a community garden. Last Tuesday night, January 12, the Clarendon Hill Garden Committee held a meeting in order to inform residents about plans for a garden and get more people involved. Attending were Lisa Brukilacchio, director of the Somerville Community Health Agenda, who first proposed the community garden, Rachel Bedick, the community organizer who got the project going, Tai Dinnan, the Gardens Coordinator from Groundwork Somerville who provided gardening consultation, and Jocelyn Scott, Bing Wei, Clifford Pitts, and Isabel Alverez, Clarendon Hill residents and members of the Garden Committee who gathered resident support for the garden project in the form of a 120-signature petition. About 10 residents new to the garden project came to the meeting, and several of them signed up to join the Garden Committee.

The Garden Committee reported that it was working on a grant proposal to the New England Grassroots Environmental Fund, which they submitted this past Friday. According to Bedick, the nearly $6000 grant would pay for a garden fence, 26 square yards of soil, food for meetings, a one-day van rental for residents to take a tour of other community gardens, and other expenses. They will find out whether or not the Fund has approved their request in May.

In other business, the group considered two potential designs for the garden, which will be situated on the corner of North Street and Powderhouse Boulevard, and chose one design. Both layouts have 14 garden plots, each about 80 square feet. The favored design has two central raised beds that could be built extra tall to accommodate someone in a wheelchair or who just couldn't bend down. Around this tall island island, there would be a path, allowing access both to the central garden and to the 12 beds around the garden perimeter.

The group decided that the Garden Committee would meet about once a month and would try to reconvene in February, though no date has been set.

During much of the meeting, people discussed what they would like the garden to be. The idea of a garden seemed to have something for everyone. Brukilacchio, who works for the Cambridge Health Alliance, saw the garden as a way to promote public health. Gardening, she said, in addition to providing nutritious foods, also "a good way to get exercise and be physically active and not feel like you're just working out." Wei, a Clarendon Hill resident who is originally from China, saw gardening as a way to save money and eat vegetables at every meal in a country where, she complained, "vegetables [are as] expensive the meat!" The financial incentive for gardening is particularly strong at Clarendon Hill, a housing development for low-income residents of Somerville. Bedick, the community organizer, saw the garden as "a great place for people to gather and get to know their neighbors" at a housing development where, she observed, "no one seemed to talk to each other… people kept to themselves and there wasn't a lot of communication, there wasn't a lot of people helping out one another."

Many people hoped to involve young people in the garden. Wei saw the garden as a way for young people to "prove that I can do something" and learn to finish a project. Building from Wei's comments, a Haitian woman at the meeting suggested that children from places where gardening is more common could teach the others what they know, "to show them, to teach them." It could also be a cultural exchange. She recalled her childhood in Haiti, where she learned about gardening: "I remember when I was a kid, every day, you bring your medicine from the garden, your tea, your grandma make that tea every morning… I was reading a book about medicine, but I saw my grandma, every morning, five o' clock in the morning, she would bring from the garden the banana leaves and take the water from the banana leaves to put in the eyes. I thought she was crazy. But when I read the medicine book [I found] the water from the banana leaves is good for glaucoma."

The meeting was the culmination of a year's worth of work by residents and community members trying to promote public health and community. The story begins with the Clarendon Hill residents who wanted to garden: Bing Wei, who grew vegetables in window boxes and described how she saved $100 in the effort; Jocelyn Scott, who has "always had flowers in my life, where I lived," and planted her own flower garden at the development last spring, showing what a cared-for plot of land could do for the place.

It took a community organizer to bring them together. In September, 2008, Bedick, who works for the anti-poverty organization called the Community Action Agency of Somerville, started community organizing at the Clarendon Hill in effort to, in her words, "revive the tenant association" there. One of the first residents she met was Wei. "She had been growing these plants by this fence, and she brought me up to her apartment and showed me all these vegetables she was growing there," Bedick said. Meanwhile, Brukilacchio had the idea for a community garden at Clarendon Hill while attending a Haitian Coalition meeting in the basement of one of the development's brick buildings. Brukilacchio said that she asked that organization's director if he "thought people at Clarendon Hill would be interested in a community garden" and he replied, "I think so; you should talk to Rachel." Brukilacchio and Bedick met, and a community garden appeared on the agenda of a tenant association meeting soon thereafter. At that meeting, Bedick met Scott, who was, in Bedick's words, "very passionate about a garden, and I got to know her, and I got to know Cliff, and kind of, just slowly, different people came out of the woodwork who wanted to work on this." From there formed the Clarendon Hill Garden Committee and the seed of an idea for a community garden.

This Fall, the Garden Committee decided to go the Housing Authority with a proposal for a garden and a petition in favor of the idea, which they called a "document of support." They went "door knocking," armed with a petition written in six languages, and gathered nearly 120 signatures, according to Scott. The committee submitted their proposal in early November, and by Thanksgiving, they had their land.

Maybe by next Thanksgiving, they'll have their garden.