By Lauren Bailey, TNFP’s Director of Garden Programs
If you’ve ever been to the Wedgewood Urban Garden, you know that it is a magical space- one that immediately draws you in. As you climb up the steps and pass the trees that greet you, you come upon the urban oasis that it is.
After a decade of cultivating nourishing food and community in this space, we will be relocating our Wedgewood Urban Garden. We have known that this transition would come as our programming and needs have grown and evolved, and we leave the space with so much gratitude for what it is and what it has become. The vibrant community food work that has grown out of that space has been beyond our wildest dreams.
As our staff reflects together on the past 10 years, so many memories arise!
“Volunteering at the Wedgewood Urban Garden space was my introduction the The Nashville Food Project. This garden has been a space for me to both learn life and veggie lessons, and I have been blessed to be able to pass that knowledge and joy onto others. I have grown and stretched as a person in this garden. It was where I was first introduced to the magic of big questions coming from little mouths, and the journey that spark of curiosity could take. Relationships have been built and nurtured in this garden beyond age and language. There are so many freeze framed moments captured in my mind that I am grateful for. The beginning of spring when on a sunny day your eyes are bombarded by the lush growth and the hues of green life. Butterflies and honey bees dancing in the buckwheat. The excited chatter of children as they make their way to the garden. The background noise of conversations that trickle like a creek through the community garden space. These memories and more come to mind when I think back on my experience at WUG.
There is a language one learns while tending and caring for a piece of land. This language is intuitively known by everyone but at times needs to be rediscovered. This rediscovery begins a journey that can teach us many things like how to grow amazing vegetables, but it also enables us to understand the connections that all living things have to one another. I have learned and am still learning this ancient Earth language but am forever grateful to the Wedgewood garden and its tenders for showing and walking with me on this path. ”
“When I read the lines ‘keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in, a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs’ in Marge Piercy’s poem ‘The Seven of Pentacles’, I see the Wedgewood Garden. Certainly from the outside there is some wildness to the space; it’s a bit of a secret garden. From Wedgewood Avenue, you see an arbor built by youth at the Oasis Center. It announces an entrance into this green space. A sign reads ‘We are here to awaken from our illusion of separation. -Thich Nhat Hanh.’ Grass paths beckon into the perennial garden where insects buzz on elderberry, tansy and oregano flowers. Perennial sunflowers wave in the background. Bermuda grass creeps from the walkways into the beds and wild morning glory attempts to outgrow and overrun everything at least once a summer.
Walk up the stone stairs past a picnic area and into the heart of the garden. The trees in the garden are large, old, misshapen & beautiful. They nestle the garden between them in the middle of this busy neighborhood. It makes for a still, quiet place. Here community gardeners have battled the weeds every summer, bringing forth bounty from rich soil overflowing with tomato, melon, radish, henbit, chickweed. It may look like a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but look a little longer and you’ll see people reconnecting with their neighbors, healing as they work the soil, putting down roots in a new community. Under the surface of the soil, season after season this garden has been interconnection for people and plants. ”
Three years ago I landed at The Nashville Food Project as the organization took stewardship of what we now call the New American gardens. In the years prior to this transition, I was working with the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee and worked closely with TNFP staff to establish these garden programs. I have been thinking a lot about what those first years looked like-- the many hands that carried the work to where it is now, the ways the gardens and programming evolved as we “dug” in a little deeper. I’ll always remember the first time I visited the Wedgewood Urban Gardens and how inspired I felt upon leaving. Now, as I think of all of the many people who tended this land in the years since, my thoughts drift from gardener to gardener and the life and growth that each person brought to this small piece of paradise in the middle of the city. As we move from this piece of land, I’m grateful for the many ways that it has provided nourishment for the people that tended it and what it taught me about growing community and food, together.
To celebrate this land and what it has gifted us with over the years, we will be hosting a small gathering at the garden (613 Wedgewood Avenue, 37203) Friday, November 15th, from 10:30-12:30 pm. We hope you can join us!
The Seven Of Pentacles by Marge Piercy
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.