Matt Macdonald sidled up to the collective garden in Parc du Lac-à-la-Loutre in Saint-Henri with a morning cup of coffee in hand. It is a great little corner between rue Butternut, the Little Pink House and the St. Pierre Woonerf. He walked over from his home to give me a tour of the roughly 950 sq m. Like many of its members, he lives close by so it’s easy for him to amble down from his home.
The garden is run collectively, which makes it different from the city’s roughly one hundred community gardens, where each resident has their own plot. But the collective garden model is different; members share responsibility and chores for the entire garden and share the harvest as well.
Photo: Ville de Montréal – Arrondissement du Sud-Ouest
I visited on a Thursday because it was a “babies in the garden” morning. Parents and toddlers were arriving. Since members said they were looking for activities for kids, they were able to respond. Gabbie Breton-Carbonneau helped organize parents and kids and donated a small kiddie pool. Breton-Carbonneau’s kids are older, but now that school is finishing there will be chances for them to participate, too. The garden also has a senior’s day, and organizes various social activities, including a clothing swap and a movie night with garden-grown popcorn.
Macdonald says that because so many people in the neighbourhood live in condos, they don’t have much space for gardening, and many don’t have a lot of gardening experience. But they have a will to be outside and connected to growing things. The structure of the garden means that there is a lot of shared experience and knowledge to draw on. People who came two years ago with little knowledge are now mentoring the new arrivals, says Macdonald. The focus is on growing fruits and veggies but there was a beautiful stand of lupins in a corner. I admire all of this since I am an indifferent vegetable gardener at best, and I despite many efforts I have never succeeded in keeping lupins alive. Some the magic is a location so wonderfully sunny it makes my backyard look a little dour.
Photo: Ville de Montréal – Arrondissement du Sud-Ouest
Members at the Loutre collective gardens are expected to work eight hours a month. They also need to live in the Southwest borough, but the garden is open to the general public throughout the growing season on Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Saturdays at 10 a.m. and Sundays at 4 p.m. The garden gets a lot of support from their borough’s eco-quartier. If you are interested in the collective garden model, contact the eco-quartier in your borough to see what is happening in your area.
The folks at the Loutre garden are eager apostles for collective gardening so if you get them chatting they will be a great resource for people who might want to try the experiment in their own corner of the island.
I am fortunate to have grown up around gardeners, but what Macdonald said really resonated with me, the degree to which gardening knowledge is passed from person to person and how important it is to have a people around who can share what they know, which makes it a fundamentally neighbourly activity. And it is clear that the Loutre collective garden answers a lot of human needs in the condo-dense area, not just a plot of earth. The kids and parents were there for one another as much as for the strawberry plants.
Photo: Jeremy Wexler
As I was leaving, Macdonald told me a story that illustrates this point nicely. A year or two ago, they were weeding the garden. An older Chinese lady walked by and asked if she could take the plant they were pulling out as a weed. She explained that it was edible and she was a little amazed that people would throw out such a lovely vegetable from their garden. With a little Google Translate help, they figured out that in English the plant is called purslane. While it is commonly treated as a weed here, it is high in protein and eaten in many of parts of the world — raw and cooked. Now, rather than pull it out and compost it, they share it out with neighbours among their many crops.
Jeremy Wexler is an avid amateur Montreal gardener and reader of garden writing. His regular columns for The Suburban.com speak to dedicated home gardeners, interested beginners, and people who are happy to simply read and never get their hands dirty. If you have a question, a tale of woe or a favourite plant, Jeremy will read everything you send to jeremywexler9@gmail.com
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