Exeter Community Garden

by 

Elianajoy Volin

I suppose I owe my very existence to a community garden.   My grandpa grew up on a farm, and he raised my mom in a garden, growing fruits, vegetables, and flowers. When she moved to Denver, she soon found a plot in the community section of the Botanic Gardens. My dad fell in love with both her and gardening through the rhythm of planting, tending, watering, weeding, harvesting. He proposed there in the community garden, the ring nestled inside the box of popsicle sticks they were using to mark the rows. 

They married and got a plot in a community garden a few blocks from our house, and my sister and I spent our childhoods “helping:” spraying each other while pretending to water the plants, pilfering raspberries from a neighbor’s plot, searching for worms and rolly pollys, and hopscotching the stepping stones we gave our dad each Father’s Day. As I got older, my “helping” grew more helpful, and I learned to love the way the rhythms of the garden mark the seasons. We start tomato seeds on Saint Patrick’s Day with heating pads and growlights inside. Soon they outgrow their little homes and need transplanting into bigger containers. Then we move them outside for part each day so they can taste the sun and wind, before finally planting our babies in the garden in early summer. We keep a lookout for the first yellow flowers, and watch impatiently as the fruits grow, losing their green hues. My favorites are always the sungolds, the bright orbs so abundant they weigh down the branches. My sister loves the yellow pears, and my dad is partial to the big heirloom beefsteaks for sandwiches. My mom likes the San Marzanos, perfect for tomato sauce, and she spends all fall saucing, canning, freezing, and drying the bounty so we can we feast all winter long. 

Even with 30 or 40 tomato plants, we have room for sugar snap peas, garlic, green beans, purple beans, long beans, blackberries, asparagus spiking up in spring, squash, zucchini as big as baseball bats, and basil glowing emerald green. My dad loves his hops climbing the tall wooden frame, and his precious carrots, chard, and beets. I prefer the kale and radishes, the tarragon flavored like licorice, the marigolds, and waving sunflowers. One year, we planted purple potatoes near my sister’s jalapenos, between the cucumbers and dill for her pickles. We always have plenty of rhubarb for my mom’s world famous strawberry rhubarb bars. We create this cornucopia for all of us, sharing with neighbors, family, and fellow gardeners.

My appreciation for the community aspect of the garden grew as I did, from the stolen raspberries, the sticky ice cream socials, and the free cookies I was slipped at the farmer’s market by our garden neighbor, to the babysitters we acquired, and the friends we made. I liked helping at the annual harvest sale, counting change and sampling baked goods. Soon the garden was where my sister and I connected with younger kids who needed our babysitting. When my dad began caring for the garden’s beehives, we would adventure to other people’s houses to extract honey and make beeswax wraps for our tomato sandwiches. Life was pretty good in my little green corner of the universe: flowers, food, and plenty of company. 

Then I moved across an ocean to England. On another continent, where nobody quite spoke my language, I was adrift and lonely. I kept thinking about the story my mom told of her first year of college, when she would wander around campus singing the Cheers theme song: “Sometimes you want to go / where everybody knows your name / and they’re always glad you came.” I needed community and yearned for anything familiar and nourishing. 

The first time I walked through the wooden gate into the Exeter Community Garden I was home. I was given thick yellow gloves, shears, and a task, apples, marmalade, and the code to the shed. I came back the next week and the other volunteers greeted me by name. I was found. I made friends with PhD candidates, professors, and international students from around the world. We laughed over the mysterious ways of the Brits, and I explained about sororities and homecoming dances. I settled into the garden’s familiar rhythms, watering the plants in the greenhouse, harvesting so many shades of green. I was delighted by the tiny aubergine and courgette I took home and attempted to sauté. I wanted everyone to know the goodness of the garden, so I brought all the friends I had made. We would laugh and chat as we yanked weeds, planted seeds, built up the dead hedge, and cut down willow trees. My girlfriend and I joined the Pond Project, and we would release the stress of the academic day by hacking at branches and brambles, clearing the way for water to puddle and then pond, creating new habitats and restoring the landscape. 

When it started getting dark, when our shovels and shears and shoulders got weary, it was time for tea. Someone would put the kettle on, and we would wash our hands with rainwater. We gathered, clustering in the polytunnel or spilling out into the orchard, passing the steaming thermos of tea, filling our cheerful plastic cups. I was delighted by how deeply British it all was, the black tea and milk (no sugar), the Victoria Sponge cake, the flapjacks and digestives and ginger biscuits. Each week there were new homemade treats packed neatly in vintage metal tins. In sharing this age-old ritual of tea, we became close to people who had been tilling the community soil for over a decade. We brought our youth and energy, and stories from the books we were reading in class and the new countries we visited each week. They shared their books with us, their wisdom and advice, and stories from when they had visited the same countries years ago. We were all looking for the same things: a task, a snack, a friendly face. We all found them in the garden, week after week. 

Coming from sunny Colorado, I had a hard time with the way the clouds hung persistently over the sky, never really seeming to clear, and the way darkness came earlier and earlier, swallowing up more and more of each day. I returned to campus from the winter holidays before anyone I knew, and I felt like a ghost, untethered to the cold earth. And then I saw the text about the wassail. I floated through the newly fallen snow to the garden, where I was welcomed with joy. We processed around the orchard, scaring the evil spirits by banging pots and pans, singing “here we come a-wassailing among the trees so green! Here we come a-wandering so eager to be seen, love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too, and God bless you and send you a happy new year!” to each tree. When the snow came stronger, we huddled together in the polytunnel, sharing hot mulled cider, warming our hands on a flowerpot overturned on a tealight, sharing the woes of our finals and dissertations. In the warmth, I felt myself filling in at the edges, becoming human again.

Throughout our crazed country-hopping the spring semester, the community garden was home. We always stopped by when we touched down in Exeter, and even planned travel around “can we make it back for the garden on Wednesday?” It was the one place in Exeter I knew I needed to bring my family, and the last place my girlfriend and I said goodbye to before leaving England for good. I started noticing community gardens everywhere, pointing and exclaiming if we passed one on a train, and wandering into any I found with an open gate. I spent a long evening in a tiny town in the Netherlands sitting happily among snails and slugs and raspberries while the twilight dimmed the river rushing alongside the garden I had found.

Now, back in America, at home in my first garden, I wave at neighbors, pick peas, edit my dad’s email about the bees. I came back too late to help plant the tomatoes and I’ll leave again before most of them are ripe, but I sit down to weed on a stepping stone I made so many Father’s Days ago, and pull garlic from the ground as my dad loosens the dirt. I crunch the sharpness of the radish, pick basil to bring to my cousins. I almost stop myself from pilfering just one raspberry from a neighbor’s plot. I turn on the water, watching it spurt through the hose, remembering the days of endless rain. I wonder about the orchard, the pond, the willow trees, and blackberry brambles. I miss England, I miss the garden. But I know, wherever I am, I can find home in the familiar rhythms of watering, weeding, tending, and swirling milk into black tea with company.  

Shears, loppers, secateurs.

So many names for things built to maim.

Blackberry brambles, grasses,

ivy, willow, weeds:

enemies of the state.

A sacred duty to disrupt.

And there is a purification in the work,

the ache,the bodily move,

the pull, the plunge primal.

Cathartic action in destruction

— for the purpose of growth

of course, clean sharp needles of green —

but even if it wasn’t necessary,

or cycle, or process,

still there would be satisfaction

in creating the carnage.

To input maroon energy

into the deep forest green.

To cause change to happen.

To watch plant matter fall away.

There is so much power in you

and your blade.

Here we are in the garden,
folded into a small nursery of light
where daffodils and hyacinths
thread through damp grass.
 

Here we are in the garden,
where gloved hands sort and sow
carefully peeling away the dead
to give room to life.
 

Here we are in the garden,
watch the willow root down
trusting their way through darkness
into the sweetness of the earth.
 

Here we are in the garden,
listen to the birdsong,
curl into a cup of tea,
sit in the softness, the soil, the still.

We start with an inch and end with a mile, 

So please pay attention, just for a while, 

We're mostly on land, but dip in the sea, 

I'm the naughty in nautical, the A B of sea, 

12 inches - 1 foot, and 3 in a yard, 

It's really that easy, not very hard, 

Also 6 feet in a fathom you know, 

But just in the watery depths down below, 

The yards in a chain are 22, 

Cricket pitch length for me & you, 

Put 10 in a line which is oh so long, 

In horse racing terms, 1 furlong, 

So trot & canter, past 6, 7, 8, 

And the mile is completed at a galloping rate! 

But if you're at sea, & I hope you're not spent, 

Coz the nautical mile adds 15%, 

or a minute of latitude wherever you are, 

By ship sailing home from islands afar.

But if all these strange numbers fill you with dread 

Go for the metric units instead!

Walking down the path,

the garden beckons us all.

Happy times await.