A couple of blocks up the hill from us, in the little park known as Wing’s Court, some people decided to have a Garden Night. The organizers included quite a few people from the Sustainable Southcoast group that’s been meeting, and so of course my partner Carol was involved.

The organizers got donations of five cubic yards of compost, some hay, and vegetable seedlings. They coordinated with the city, and got permission to replant a garden that had gotten overgrown with weeds and bushes. A couple of local builders assembled frames out of 1×6 rough boards for creating raised bed gardens, and anyone who showed up was invited to take home a raised-bed-frame, some compost to put in it, and some seedlings. There was way too much compost, so Mark (one of the organizers) got a bunch of us organized to spread it in a grassy area to fill in holes and hollows. Different people played different kinds of music, from singer-songwriters, to a bunch of us who led some participatory singing, to a couple of kids who sang a few songs they knew.

The event started at 5:00, and went until after dark. Maybe fifty or sixty people came and went in the course of the evening. It was a very mixed crowd — people of all ages from kids to 20-somethings to middle-aged folks to elders — there were whites and black and Cape Verdeans, Anglophones and Lusophones — a few upper class people and middle class people and working class people — a good mix of men and women. The diversity is partly a function of being in the city, where there is naturally more diversity.

Everyone had a blast.

So why was this event so successful? I stood around after dark talking with a few of the organizers about what made it successful, offering my ideas of what led to success. First of all, it was a participatory event, and you could choose how much you wanted to participate: you could just watch, you could hang out and talk with friends, you could take home a seedling or two, you could sweaty by helping shovel dirt around, you could toast marshmallows over a charcoal grill, you could sing, you could help create a community garden — and so parents could bring their kids and the kids wouldn’t be bored, us men (who are socially conditioned to prefer working and activity to relationship) had something to do, and no one was sitting passively waiting for something to happen (or waiting to get bored so they had an excuse to leave). Second, the organizers were of different races and ages, and they plugged into their networks and got their friends to come; in addition to which, the activities were not particularly racially delimited activities. Third, the people who live or work in the neighborhood knew that their work was going to improve a park that we all use regularly, we knew we were doing something that would have a real impact on our daily lives. Fourth, it was noisy and smelly (the hay smelled particularly good) so people walking by the park knew something interesting was going on.

That was my analysis of why this was such a successful event. The next question is, how do we make this happen again?…