At a recent Saturday Coffee in the Garden meetup, community members gathered in the Sn̓k̓ʷan̓ɬqtn̓ Community Garden across from Shadle Park High School to learn about a garden project that is filling a small, oddly shaped piece of city land that had been growing nothing but weeds and collecting trash for years.
About 20 neighbors, including many older adults and kids, sat on log rounds to hear about the revitalization of the corner into a lush home for plant and people communities. The pastries and coffee disappeared quickly. Afterward, the garden committee led walks through the garden describing the intertwining roles of the vegetables, fruits, native plants, pollinator plants and art that figured into the ecology of the garden and how the Salish people used the plants.
In 2022, the idea for a garden started as a conversation between Johnny Edmonton of Growing Neighbors and Jeff Stevens, chair of the Audubon-Downriver Neighborhood Council, about what could be done with the corner to create a community space where neighbors could gather and learn.
Out of this conversation, the idea for the Sn̓k̓ʷan̓ɬqtn̓ Community Garden grew as Edmonton, Stevens and Mary Bishop of All Things Regenerative reached into the community. Students from the Shadle Park High School horticulture program right across the street from the garden quickly joined the project, putting their newfound knowledge to work as they pulled weeds and laid wood chips. By the end of the year, the lot was cleared, and Edmonton was drawing up a plan for the garden layout. The corner of West Longfellow Avenue and North Oak Street would never be the same.
The name, Sn̓k̓ʷan̓ɬqtn̓ Community Garden was chosen to represent the relationship the land, plants and people had in our local ecology through the millennium. The name Sn̓k̓ʷan̓ɬqtn̓, which means “garden” in the Salish language, was chosen to reflect these deep roots the interrelationship had in the communities of the region. Sn̓k̓ʷan̓ɬqtn̓ is pronounced “sin-kwan-thl-ten.”
In 2023, students from the nearby Salish School’s pre-K to eighth-grade program joined the garden. Students from both schools now use the garden as a place to learn how their food grows and where it comes from in a real-world context. For the Salish School students, it’s a chance to reinforce their language studies in the real world as they plant, harvest and talk about the garden.
By 2024 and into 2025, the raised beds were filling up with vegetables and fruits. The Spokane Associated Garden Clubs provided two grants to fund different projects and The Lands Council planted several large serviceberry trees. The pollinator gardens were buzzing with different insects. A shed supplied by Ziggy’s had been painted with a mural of native wildflowers by the Salish School students. They will add the Salish names of the plants if the fall weather holds. The SpokaneScape Program and the WSU Master Gardeners are providing education on water efficient gardening and the role and importance of native plants in the garden.
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