This is our garden, our Hortus ludi, our ‘garden of delights […] a profane interpretation of paradise’ (and sometimes all too earthly woes when we find our efforts consumed by slugs & snails before the plants have even had chance to develop).
But this is also a marginal landscape. “An essentially peopled landscape, the allotment fits unfamiliarly in contemporary cultural expectations, somewhere between the city and the country and yet representing neither contemporary projected landscape. It falls between being a public and a private landscape in the way that few others do.”[1] Crouch and Ward also identify an important distinction between observation and participation, between spectacle and active engagement in the landscape.
The land we pass across has a history of which we are part. Eventually we will leave traces just as the people before us have left something of themselves. Anonymous though they are, still their presence is felt in the way the land has been worked, modified. In turn we will impress ourselves on the site leaving marks, however fleeting. The site echoes a history of shared experience, of common purpose to which we have added, just as others will when we leave this garden; it isn’t ours, doesn’t belong to us, is common ground, and should remain so.
[1] David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment. Its Landscape and Culture. Five Leaves Publication 1997
Nice quote! But given the nature of the ownership of land (temporary as we are temporary) does who owns it matter?
Security to work it may matter greatly to you and others who invest themselves and their hearts in land and that security is greater with ownership as some allotment holders have found, to their grief.
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Hello Anne, yes with the passing of time and the amount of work we have (and others like us) done to make our allotment productive, we do have a sense of belonging. But we both know that this land is not ours and never will be, and that’s what I meant by ownership. We simply pass across it, perhaps leaving some trace, as others before us have, but the important point to make is that this is common land and should remain so, and that’s what we should fight for (too many allotment sites have been sold off for private development). But then this is a continuing discussion.