Until recently, the little strip of land in front of the Purple Thistle was unused grass surrounded by industrial landscape and heavy traffic. Now it’s a community garden, tended by young people who are in and out of the Thistle, a youth run centre. 

“It’s great to be gardening in such a high density area because I believe that we should be growing our food where we are,” says Rich, one of the gardeners. “It doesn’t make sense to be growing our food thousands of miles away.”  

Sustainability is a key purpose for this garden.  In the limited amount of space given, it has an herb spiral, berry bushes, fruit trees, grains, greens and multiple other vegetables growing in it. There are also bees on the rooftop. 

“I want to be in a world where I can sustain myself; with a localized economic system instead of a big one where I can’t really see the benefit of where my work goes in to,” says Isaac, another one of the gardeners. “It doesn’t necessarily come back to me, it gets sucked into some vortex somewhere else, where as when I put work into the community that’s around me I can see it come back in a healthy way.” 

But what exactly is this garden? We tend to call it a guerrilla garden, but this is not exactly true:

It officially obtained city permission as a green space garden. You know the little patches of flowers in the roundabout things? 

“They didn’t really know what we were doing and then we just did it all and boom, its this whole establishment and they’re not going to stop it, they’re making room for it so it’s really great,” says Meghan. What some might assume is a guerrilla garden is in fact now officially a community garden. 

Meghan says this project is great for community building as well as skill sharing. Most of the gardeners are new to gardening and are learning through jumping right into it. 

I feel comfortable with learning along the way, says Kevin, another gardener, because we don’t really have to succeed. “Our vision of success could be whatever happens, you know? We’re just sort of learning the natural cycles of plants and of the planet. And if some stuff doesn’t grow that’s fine,” he says of the learning process. 

The group is planning to extend the garden farther out into other unused spaces nearby in the future.