Wild Seeds Beneath the Snow

Edinburgh has a profusion of community garden projects injecting energy and optimism into marginal areas in the city. This article looks at a selection of these projects through the lens of  the ‘anarchist’ ideas of communal association. 

The lockdown revealed many disparities in our society. One was the very different lockdown experiences had by those with and those without access to a garden. Gardening became a lockdown activity for some, with many discovering its many benefits for physical and mental health. This has long been recognised. For instance the Cyrenians’ Community Gardens at the Royal Edinburgh Community Hospital welcomes people ‘experiencing physical and mental health problems, disadvantage, isolation and poverty’.

The lack of a garden is a particularly acute issue in heavily populated areas. According to the 2011 census, the Leith Walk area is the most densely populated area in Scotland. Green spaces are at a premium. 

Abundant plots 

An early incarnation of the Royal Botanic Gardens was situated on Leith Walk, before moving in the 1820s. The gardening spirit lives on, including in the Leith Community Growers and Edible Estates projects. The Sunshine on Leith Community Garden is part of this network. Though in a busy area close to Easter Road, it’s easy to miss it, a hidden nook surrounded by tenements. Garden committee member Flip Kulakiewicz admits, “though I live just around the corner from it, it took me several years till I found out about it!”. 

On passing through the gate, you soon find yourself in a thickly wooded area, with narrow shaded paths leading you to open ground. Abundant plots engulf the clearings. Following heavy rains, the place was waist high in plants and verdant clumps of herbs. Flip’s own plot produced a superabundant oregano plant with enough of the bold and earthy herb to keep a busy Italian restaurant going for months. 

Flip says that the garden was “a godsend” during lockdown, a place she could decompress in after a lengthy stint stuck indoors on her laptop: “I really needed a place of serenity to wind down during a break”. Flip also feels that “in the midst of a pandemic and all the upheaval, it was very reassuring to have a place which didn’t seem affected by anything – plants and animals were all continuing as usual”. She relates that during the deepest periods of lockdown she “got into a nice routine where I’d come each day to weed and water and then just sit and look at everything; it was a form of meditation”. One legacy of the pandemic may have been a greater appreciation of the many benefits of gardening and of quiet green spaces. 

Communal associations

For many, a community garden or allotment is merely a handy place to spend some time in the fresh air or to grow vegetables, fruit and herbs. However, some see the allotment as something inherently political. It is seen as an example of common ownership and organisation in action, as opposed to state or public ownership. Though the Sunshine on Leith Community Garden is owned by the council, they are organised communally. This, some believe, is an example of how society could be based on communal associations. Such a view is best expressed through the writings of the British anarchist thinker Colin Ward (1924 – 2010) and Paul Hirst (1946–2003) who promoted associative democracy. 

Ward and Hirst’s thought exemplifies the antithesis in British socialism between belief in the efficacy of the state and concern about its growth. Ward viewed the post-war era as one in which British socialism took the “wrong ‘road” and attempted to “bypass” the “multitude of local initiatives” in favour of “the conquest of the power of the state”. 

For Hirst, the aim of the left should be to “devolve activities from the state to civil society as far as is possible”. This echoes Ward’s distinction, outlined in Anarchy in Action (1973), between “the tradition of fraternal and autonomous associations springing up from below” as opposed to “authoritarian institutions directed from above”. 

Ward was an advocate of communal ownership and “self-managed” organisation of as many features of our lives as possible. As he reflected in an essay on Patrick Geddes, Ward was “absorbed by the ways in which people use, manipulate and shape their environment”. For Ward, allotments were seeds of an alternative form of social organisation, evidence that anarchist principles were ever alive and prescient. As he put it, “a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state”. 

In The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture (1988) Ward and David Crouch argued that the non-hierarchical and decentralised workings of allotments were an example of the anarchist ideal in action, of local self-sufficiency. In their opinion, allotment communities were vibrant subcultures to be nourished. 

A spontaneous order

Ward would have welcomed the plots which sprang up on the disused bowling greens at Powderhall in Edinburgh a few years ago. He would, however, have been saddened that allotments are not part of the long-term vision for this area. It’s not always been easy for advocates of allotments to carve out permanent spaces. The drawn-out efforts to set up a community allotment near the old Morningside Station in 2009 are a cautionary tale. 

For many months, ‘guerrilla gardeners’ fought to make use of a piece of waste ground before Network Rail relented. After a couple of years during which volunteers of a wide variety of ages and backgrounds successfully cultivated the land, permission was withdrawn. The area reverted to unsightly wasteland. Ward would have seen such aborted projects as evidence of the deadening hand of private and public bureaucracy. 

This of course connects, rhetorically at least, to strands of conservative thought which seek to reduce the scope of the state. Indeed, Ward’s work was much praised by David Green and Ferdinand Mount, two prominent conservative writers on the theme of ‘reinventing’ civil society. This theme was adopted by the Cameron government in its promotion of the ‘big society’. 

However, for Ward, the Conservative’s embrace of the free market is equally a threat. Free market capitalism might have some of the characteristics of spontaneity (its ability to adapt nimbly to change), but, for Ward, it entrenches existing power relations and inequalities. One of Ward’s aims was to reclaim for the anti-market left some of the libertarian terminology adopted by the free-market right.

Fundamentally, Ward rejected overarching narratives and grandiose centralised projects. He did not seek perfect models and instead concentrated on experiments and moments of possibility that might unlock the potential for a better society. There was, for Ward, no “final struggle”, only “a series of partisan struggles on a variety of fronts”. The Sunshine on Leith Community Garden is a prime example of this type of social experiment. 

Any visitor to the gardens is unlikely to feel that they are witnessing the vanguard of a social revolution. In such a tranquil place, the first thoughts are of the wildlife and ripening crops, not social change. Whatever your political perspective, places such as the Sunshine on Leith Community Garden ought to be valued and nurtured. We surely need more of them. As so many areas of our cities fill up with new housing, and marginal, ‘liminal’ spaces disappear, the need for such places is ever more urgent.

In general, the pattern is for community gardens and allotments to spring up as areas are cleared for redevelopment and for them to disappear when development gets into full swing. In Fountainbridge a community garden was set up on waste ground near Edinburgh Printmakers. As the massive development continues, this patch is being swallowed up. Such places should be maintained after the development process has ended, as those in the new housing will need green spaces. 

Taking back control

It’s heartening to see similar community gardens spring up in other marginal places all over Edinburgh, with unused bowling greens in Victoria Park a recent example. Leith Community Croft, which makes use of some disused tennis courts at the west end of Leith Links is another example of Ward’s thinking in action. Their belief that “urban crofts can help generate community solidarity and well-being, strengthen the local economy, and contribute to community wealth building and skill-training”, underscores the political perspective underlying their project. 

John Harris and John Domokos’s ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ video series for The Guardian has been brilliant at picking up the underlying trends in British politics over the last decade. Often downbeat, the glimmers of optimism the films contain are the community projects Harris and Domokos encountered across the UK. Projects which were, in an echo of Ward, “changing the world a little bit at a time”. 

Their December 2019 episode on Edinburgh and East Lothian featured the inspiring The Ridge community garden in Dunbar. One of the volunteers there summed up the outlook: “sometimes when the world is shit enough…communities and individuals go…‘they’ are not going to do it for us, we are going to have to do it for ourselves”. Taking back control in a genuine sense. For Harris, this was a “spectacular illustration” of people trying to change things at a grassroots level and represented “where the future of the left has to start”. Their “political with a small p” efforts very much fit with Ward’s philosophy of mutual self-help and communal organisation – and Hirst’s desire to devolve activities from the state to civil society. 

Sunshine on Leith Community Garden is one of those projects which flourishes, almost unnoticed, beyond the tentacles of the council. Community gardens and allotments should be seen as something far more than an oasis of calm. The way that community gardens and allotments continue to thrive is a cause for optimism. Indeed, they may well be contributing to an unhurried and unseen social revolution. Alternative ways of social organisation are, Ward believed, “already there…the parts are all at hand”. They are, in Ward’s words, “seeds beneath the snow”. 

Across Edinburgh, local groups are embodying this do it yourself philosophy in radical and inclusive ways. Their example provides optimism in an often bleak political climate. Such efforts need long term commitment, collective effort and more than a little optimism. More anarchy for Scotland does not mean chaos but instead the strengthening of social bonds and the enriching of its civic culture.