The power of a local community garden in Cork city

Carla Pittam never planned on setting up and becoming Chairperson of St Luke’s Community Garden.

All she wanted was a plot of land to grow food on, making use of her green fingers at a time of great transition in her personal life.

When faced with a two-year waiting list for her simple request of an allotment plot from the council, she knew it was time to take action, and that set the course for the past four years.

It’s a grey, cloudy Sunday when I go to meet her, the hallmark of an Irish summer. Walking along the Ballyhooly road, the traffic fumes are an unwelcome reminder that I am on a busy city road.

When I turn to enter St Luke’s Community Garden, I soon forget the air pollution, the grey skies, and my meandering thoughts. This garden is in full bloom, arousing my senses. Strikingly colourful flowers and their fragrant perfume lift my spirits and entice me to explore the entire area. A sign featuring a map at the entrance lets me know that all are welcome to attend this community garden’s gatherings, another sign shows current garden features and future ideas.

As I wander, I can’t help but notice the signs of biodiversity - bees hard at work gathering on the native flowers, undeterred by the gloomy day and grateful for these plentiful blossoms, and birds enjoying a safe space to nest.

It is hard to believe this beautiful space was once a quarry. With little soil but plenty of rubbish being dumped here, getting the garden to this point has not been plain sailing for Carla; it has been a journey of progress, step by step.

“My personal journey and the garden journey actually started to grow parallel to one another, so I think there was the right person, the right time, the right space,” said Carla.

And what a journey it has been, that has seen her shift from working outside the home to becoming a full-time carer for her son, from looking for a plot to taking on the enormous project of setting up a community garden.

“As my little boy grew up, I started to notice he wasn’t meeting some of the developmental milestones,” said Carla. 

“So, because of my background, I knew that he would need some . Because we have no family nearby, I knew there’d be a lot of work to be done with my son, a lot of , and a lot of advocacy.

I suppose working in Disability Services gave me a head start in manoeuvring myself around in this.

“My son was diagnosed with autism, a severe level. The garden wasn’t a personal journey. It was always about growing the food, the fruits and the vegetables. But it also gave me that space to get a bit of headspace.”

Carla has always worked, but with her son’s autism diagnosis came the realisation that she would need to leave her job and transition to life as a carer, and this was made all the more difficult by having to navigate Covid times.

She describes it as an emotional and chaotic time for her family. The garden project offered a welcome reprieve during this period.

She is an archetypal nurturer, as is evident in her career history, working to help others in homeless and disability services, and her ongoing ion for bringing together people and cultivating a community.

“Horticulture was just always a ion of mine that didn’t really explode until this project unfolded, so it’s literally my two ions of horticulture, the growing; the satisfaction of just seeing something going from seed to something that can feed people, to me is just absolutely bonkers. And then just dealing with people and gathering people and being with your friends and neighbours is, to me, they’re the two biggest ions, really.”

The seeds for her love of growing her own food were planted a long time ago, in Rome. She paints a vivid picture of her youth in Italy.

“My nicest memories are of going visiting my grandmother in the south of Rome. She had this beautiful, very simple home, a bungalow. She had a lovely veggie garden and beautiful fruit trees. She had oranges, lemons, mandarins, cherries, almonds, pears and, a lovely variety of tomatoes, peppers, all the beautiful lettuces and an olive tree.

We used to go and shake the branches and get the olives falling…

“My first connection with the land was my granny saying ‘Go get ten tomatoes’, and little Carla going to the patch to get the ripest tomatoes. I thought that was amazing. And my dad would have been very much into growing as well.

“That was my initial with growing food and the appreciation that you can grow food at home.”

Sustainability is a thread that is woven into every part of Carla’s life.

“We try to buy what is absolutely necessary, that we need. We have the philosophy of less is more.

“We try to be as sustainable as possible, doing clothes swaps, buying from charity shops when possible, reusing fixing, things like that.”

Growing your own food is a natural extension of her sustainable approach.

“You can go and source, just as you need. You know you have zero waste. You only take what you need and respect it, you respect what it is, and you enjoy it.”

Carla’s positivity is pragmatic, perhaps as a consequence of her journey. When we walk to the storage shed, she tells me that a bag of waste left outside is a sign of progress.

We are always looking for progress, however small it is. This is actually really powerful, even though it might appear just to be dumping.

Carla expands, explaining that over the course of four years, the regular drinkers who frequent the area have come to respect the garden and its gardening crew, even asking for a bag to leave the waste in.

Considering the garden project’s beginnings, where an entire session could be dedicated to picking up waste, glass and drug waste paraphernalia, this is the definition of progress. Not only in of freeing up time for other endeavours, but to see the community respect this space of beauty, an oasis for nature and for all in the cityscape.

Carla is refreshingly honest about setting up this garden. It was no walk in the park, and talking to her, it is evident that every step of progress on this journey has been hard-earned.

She re thinking, ‘This isn’t going to be as easy as I thought’, adding: “I was so naive. And I’m so glad I was because having gone through everything and having learned a lot of things, I don’t know, if I had (known), if I would have still gone through the whole thing. I’m glad that I didn’t know.

We’ve had a lot of turnarounds from people that weren’t initially gone on the idea, through the years then they have come to the garden, they’ve enjoyed the garden, they’ve made donations to the garden.

Carla shares her life lessons from this journey that reflect her character of patient determination and strong leadership approach.

“So I suppose you just really realise that not every journey is going to be smooth and you have to just handle the more challenging situations, get , and keep your vision really clear.

“You just factor in what could be a challenge and try to resolve this and keep going.”

With a loneliness epidemic underway in Ireland, it’s great to hear how the garden is an antidote through a welcoming and inclusive platform for neighbours to connect.

We’ve seen people come into the garden that live very close, but had never met each other or talked to each other, but they were able to gather here at one of the events.

Carla came here from Italy at 15, did not know a word of English, and had to make friends from scratch. She values how the garden connects people, united by a common goal of growing and connecting with nature and each other.

“I can see friendships being made, and I really value that,” she said. “We have people who have no English, but we speak the gardening language. No-one asks where you’re from or what you do unless you want to share that.

We are curious about if there are some skills that you can bring to the garden. Then we get very excited, but we don’t care where you are, or how old you are; we don’t care about your abilities, disabilities, your marital status, gender, or sexual orientation. We actually don’t care, once you are respectful and you love the garden. That’s our bond; that’s our connection there.

We have had people from direct provision come in the last few months, and we love to hear their stories. We love to learn from them. And we love just being together.

Carla believes that participating in the community garden can be as simple as coming to enjoy the space, and sees the value in that too.

“Sometimes, people come and say I don’t do gardening, and I just want to listen to the birds, and I’m like, ‘You grab a chair and just look at us and just be you, you don’t have to do anything’. We need to feel that it’s OK because life is tough on everybody.

“Yes, and some challenges are more obvious than others, but we all carry something heavy.

“I always loved the garden, but I didn’t know why I loved it. Looking back on it, the flower doesn’t judge you; the flower doesn’t ask you how much you earn or what your highest educational level is. It doesn’t ask you anything. If you tend to it, it gives you 100 million times back. That’s been the fix I get that carries me through the challenges.”

As the gardening community begins to gather here at 10 am, I see an eclectic, happy mix of people, all receiving a warm welcome by name from Carla. I taste some of the strawberries growing there, and their fresh floral flavour reminds me that nothing compares to locally grown food, direct from the plant.

With recent funding of almost €50,000 from Climate Action, the community garden can transform some of the ideas listed on its poster into reality.

While Carla says there is no garden without the community, it is clear she is the very roots of this project, that feeds its growth.

Learn more about St Luke’s Community Garden at https://stlukesgarden.weebly.com/