Community Gardens, School Gardens, and the push to Connect the Two

By Marlon Rice, Guest Editor
Brooklyn, New York, if it were its own city, would be the fourth largest city in America. It would be larger than Houston, larger than Phoenix, larger than Philadelphia. The 97 square miles that makeup Kings County hold a deep and abiding history of agriculture in America.

How deep? In 1879, Kings County was the second largest county in terms of market garden production in the entire nation. Even as recently as 1959, Kings County was responsible for the production of over 325,000 gallons of milk.

Today, Brooklyn has over 200 community gardens – each garden serves as a vital green space amidst the backdrop of an urban environment. These gardens provide opportunities for community engagement, they provide spaces for residents to hone their green thumb, but most importantly they provide opportunities for environmental education for the surrounding community.

Of those 200 plus community gardens in Brooklyn, 37 of them rest in Bedford Stuyvesant. It is the largest concentration of community gardens in the entire city – and, many of Bed Stuy’s gardens in particular arose out of the revolutionary act of concerned residents repurposing abandoned lots and havens of chaos to create these green spaces, a process that is now called guerilla gardening.

Of those 37 Bed Stuy gardens, Ena McPherson is either the Founder or the Operating Coordinator of 4 of them. A feisty elder, with a generous spirit and the disposition of a college professor, Ena has been able to witness the full breadth of the movement of community gardening – from an act of defiance against poverty into a dedicated community system that includes the input of government agencies.

Two of the gardens, T&T Vernon Community Garden, located at 200 Vernon Avenue, and V&T Vernon Community Garden located at 257 Throop were born out of the guerilla garden model in the late 60s. In the early 80s, both of these gardens were made protected by the City’s Parks Department.

Their success led Ena to look into grabbing another lot in the community, right on the corner of Willoughby and Throop.

“I found the lot and did the proposal to create the garden with Green Thumb. Green Thumb gave us a provisional license in 2010. We had to get permission because the lot had been vacant for 30 years. HPD had authority over the land.

There is an agreement between HPD and Green Thumb. When gardeners find a vacant lot, they can petition HPD through Green Thumb to use the space as a community garden. So, we received our provisional license and broke ground on Tranquility Farm in 2010. The garden officially opened in 2011.”

In 2014, HPD came back to Ena and told her that they wanted the land back. Ena and the farmers fought for an entire year to keep the space. And, in 2015 Tranquility Farms was one of 34 gardens that were conveyed to the Parks Department.

While bureaucracy and licensing dictate the process of creating community gardens, the Department of Education owns 19 school buildings in Bed-Stuy, and each of those buildings also has space allotted for gardening.

Unlike community gardens that are curated by residents, many of the school gardens in Bed Stuy are either maintained by an outside community organization, or simply dormant.

District 16 Superintendent Brendan Mims hit the ground running when he accepted the position in 2022. A former Earth Science teacher, Mims immediately set his focus on ways in which he could kickstart the use of school gardens as a tool for education. For Bed Stuy, each school garden truly represents a different layer of the community.

So, while some school gardens like PS 44 sit aside brownstone-lined streets, one block away from a supermarket and surrounded by resources, the school garden at PS 81 sits in the middle of a food desert.

This means that for some of the students in this community, Urban Agriculture isn’t just about growing and cultivating food, it’s also about learning the pillars of nutrition, and what healthy eating looks like.

Mims is clear on the issue, “We have school grounds that are not being taken advantage of in a way that could activate inner city agriculture as well as partnerships in the community.

The vision that I have isn’t just about beautification. It’s about bringing in the parents into the fold, with the youth, and with the community partnership.”

Just 4 blocks from Superintendent Mims’ office, Ena McPherson is steeped in community-supported agriculture. “I’m in four gardens. I’m the founder of two, and I coordinate efforts in all four. We function in collaboration. We don’t have separate meetings.

We operate as a unit, and that is very important to the ethics of how we want these gardens to run. Individuality may work in your personal life, but it doesn’t work in the community. It has to be a collaborative process.”

Ena’s sentiment echoes Mims’ vision. “I just want to give each school the opportunity to reimagine what agriculture and gardening can look like at the school level, then we look to partner with local organizations, and then we bring parents in with the kids so that our community partners are building the parent’s capacity and the student’s capacity to fortify the school and the community at the same time.”

The true potential of the urban agriculture palette in Bedford-Stuyvesant hasn’t yet been witnessed. While community gardeners like Ena McPherson work to keep their gardens up and running while battling a lack of membership retention and a lack of hands-on labor, plant boxes on school grounds across the district are empty.

The rank-and-file gardeners can barely handle the work of their own gardens, much less spend time building out curriculums to utilize gardens on school campuses. And the teachers in the schools are overwhelmed with the rigors of educating students.

To create a truly symbiotic relationship between the knowledge base of community gardens and the untapped potential of school gardens, you need a third party that can build that bridge.

Enter Magnolia Tree Earth Center.
The Magnolia Tree Earth Center is a nonprofit environmental education organization that was founded out of the mindset of a pioneering environmentalist named Hattie Carthan. Hattie is responsible for the block association that led to the birth of the gardens that Ena McPherson oversees, but Hattie was also an educator of young minds.

She created the Tree Corps in the 70’s and educated dozens of students on how to properly care for the tree pits in the neighborhood. In total, through the course of her life Hattie Carthan is credited for the planting of over 1,500 trees in Brooklyn.

Over the last few years, like many other community-based organizations, Magnolia Tree has also seen its struggles to maintain and to survive. But, those struggles don’t stop Board Chair Wayne Devonish from understanding and pointing the organization towards Hattie’s vision.

A recent meeting between a Board member of Magnolia Tree and Superintendent Mims was the spark needed to begin the work of reimagining the relationship between community partners and school gardens.

Wayne explains, “One of our board members had run into Mims and told him that she was from Magnolia Tree. She spoke to him about our work, and he told her that a lot of his schools have unkempt garden spaces. In fact, the school that his office is at had a garden that was in pretty bad shape.

So, I sat down with Mims and we began talking about how we could collaborate. One of the low-hanging fruit missions was right in front of us, and that was to beautify the garden space at the school where his office sits.

So, we were able to execute that, but even better we are working on offering gardening classes for parents utilizing the garden spaces at his schools. It’s something we are working on.”

An organization like Magnolia Tree Earth Center is the perfect organization to stand in the gap. Magnolia Tree has open communication with the heads of all the community gardens in Bed Stuy. They have space to invite parents in to learn about gardening concepts, and they have the legacy of Hattie Carthan to center their work.

Wayne understands this, “We need to give our schools support so that their garden spaces are properly maintained, utilized, and made alive. These schools are mandated to educate our children, and if any part of their work falls into neglect, like the gardens, then the village should get involved. It’s our duty.”

For Mims, the village help is like a life-saver being thrown to someone lost at sea. It is a godsend. “I’ve thought about the approach we are taking with organizations like Magnolia Tree, that have classes that they can offer and to pair those classes with the parents.

So, now it’s a matter of having conversations with the local community farms so that they too can see the vision that we are talking about on how we can tap into the green real estate that our schools have. So, if we can match a community gardener with a school garden, we can start the work as a pilot program, and eventually scale to other schools.”

Ena knows the history of the school gardens very well, and she sees funding as the enemy of progress. “This is the problem. Green Thumb, at one point, had a very vibrant school garden program. They had lots of funding, and they were really doing a lot. They had a partnership with Grow NYC, and they were doing a lot of garden work in schools.

But all of that has fallen by the wayside because of funding. The DOE isn’t equipped to take on that work. The teachers are already burdened with the regular curriculum.

If you add the component of Urban Ag, it’s not going to work. And, you can’t ask community gardeners to simply take on that task. Now, we have a strong component of education attached to all of our gardens. We have the ability for students to tour our gardens and we’ve been doing it for years.

We know that there is a direct correlation between children’s nutrition and their education. And yes, I think that every community garden should be connected to a school. It is a sad situation though.

The community gardeners cannot take on the task of cultivating school gardens. You need a paid staff that can run the Urban Ag programs and teach these children. We can support, as we do now. We can consult, as we do now. But the work of those gardens has to come through funding.”

For Mims, a perfect situation would be one of shared accountability – where community partners and gardeners worked together with parents and with the schools. “You would have shared accountability, shared ownership.

You’d have the district office, the PTA, Community Partners, the Block Association, and the Community Gardeners as the point person, all working to reimagine the story and existence of school gardens as community gardens. The buy-in comes from what it looks like when everybody chips in. A nice school garden rebrands the community.

When someone walks by the school garden and it’s beautiful and they see people from that community working that land, it speaks even stronger to what Bed Stuy is and what Bed Stuy stands for.”

Community gardens might not be school gardens. But school gardens are community gardens. And the work involved with bringing ideas into creation as it relates to the future of school gardens in New York City continues.

However, in Bedford Stuyvesant there is a symbiotic relationship building between the District Superintendent, the Community Gardeners, and Community Partners. And, with the right buy-in and framework, the sky is the limit.

Marlon Rice has been deeply rooted in the vibrant culture and community of Central Brooklyn for a lifetime. His connection with Our Time Press began far before he ever wrote a word as a columnist.

Project Green, an initiative created by Bernice Green, inspired Marlon to educate himself on Urban Agriculture.

That decision eventually lead to Marlon serving as Executive Director of Magnolia Tree Earth Center. During his tenure, he created a curriculum to teach 2nd – 5th graders about Urban Ecology. As a DOE Vendor, he has been teaching our community’s children that curriculum since 2018. Marlon is also certified to teach hydroponics, and has curated multiple school gardens in the District. Marlon is centered firmly in this new Bed Stuy Green Movement.