Gardens alive and well in the cities Christchurch’s O¯ ta¯karo Orchard is the latest in a growing trend for food forests, writes Ewan Sargent.
From the new footpath-cycleway, the future Christchurch forest looks like a scattering of weeds and shrubs that can’t believe their luck the work gangs missed them. Looking down from new office blocks, lawyers, engineers, and health professionals get a drone-like view of the eyesore plot.
But this small section is no embarrassment. This is the O¯ ta¯ karo Orchard (really a food forest) and it’s trendy.
Looks are deceiving when it comes to a fledgling food forest. All the magic is happening underground.
It’s such a good metaphor for the urban food movement that’s growing in cities and towns across the country, it’s worth letting Orchard coordinator Peter Wells explain in detail.
He’s an American from Seattle who worked with the Beacon Food Forest project there. He was lured to Christchurch, Seattle’s New Zealand sister city, to help grow and unite the food movement.
A year ago, 100 people turned up at the 2000-square-metre plot gifted by the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority near the Manchester St bridge, and started planting.
Wells says it will take three to five years for the forest to really get going.
‘‘As we say in gardening, the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, and the third year it leaps.’’
It’s a permaculture project so the plants have been choreographed to work together above and below the ground.
At present, Wells says, the mycelium fungal networks in the soil are growing and linking.
When they do, they create an information and nutrient highway. It’s like the soil has its own internet. When it’s all plugged in, then ‘‘click’’ he goes with his fingers – the plants above ground will take off.
Before you can say ‘‘self-sustaining, foodproducing ecosystem’’, people will be strolling in a mini-urban forest and helping themselves to pears, peaches, plums, apples, hazelnuts, almonds, pomegranates, logan berries, gooseberries and so on, except blackberries because it wants to take over the world.
That scrappy section will provide
1000 kilograms of produce a year, along with all the other benefits of having an inner-city communal garden.
Christchurch already has 26 community gardens, 76 school gardens growing food, and 26,000 fruit trees identified on public lands that are help-yourself. This will be one of five food forests.
But this inner-city site is special because it will also (fundraising permitting) host an eco centre building to co-ordinate all the urban food groups and make the sum bigger than the whole, a bit like that fungus network underground.
The O¯ ta¯ karo Orchard already has extraordinary backing. Ordinary people are running it, but it is also backed by the city council, the government and private businesses. One million dollars has already been raised, and another $340,000 donated in kind. It needs another $500,000.
The big figures might shock community garden groups elsewhere, but it’s a sign of the commitment to this slow-burning, long-coming good idea. But why should cities grow food?
The whole point of cities was to be a handy place for farmers in the surrounding lands to trade surplus food. It meant not everyone had to be a farmer, and city people like those office workers looking down on the scrappy section could specialise in other things.
And that’s how cities were until the industrial revolution turned them into toxic, miserable, unhealthy, places. Long ago, it was realised that healthy cities badly needed green areas – gardens, trees, parks, grass – if the people were to thrive.
Christchurch’s design was influenced by the garden city movement, which emerged in the 19th century. It already has 8000 hectares of parks, and the massive Hagley Park was called the lungs of the city.
But it seems grass, rose beds, trees and sports grounds are still not enough. And industrialised food production isn’t as good for us as we hoped.
The 1960s fantasy of a space-age future, where you pressed a button and a machine squirted a dollop of all-you-need goop on a plate, turned out to be false.
Instead, people are going back to the past, hungry for closer links to unprocessed food. We want good food that keeps us healthy.
It used to be a sneer to call someone a treehugger, but Wellington’s three-year-old Fruit Trees Guardian programme is almost promoting that.
Small groups promise to look after a fruit tree and, in return, the council gives them one free and a spot to grow it on public land.
Co-ordinator Nina Atkinson says councils back urban food growing because if there is a disaster such as an earthquake, tsunami or storm and the usual food-to-city links are broken, these pockets of free food might make a difference.
This is one way the resilience word is associated with urban food growing.