Grounded, rooted, growing: the queer joys of gardening
Queer and trans identity can mean it isn’t always comfortable to be relaxed and authentic in a gardening environment, and having groups that don’t present this barrier can be important. Dylan Beck reports on the growth of LGBTQI+ inclusive gardening groups in the Southside.
By Dylan Beck | Illustrations by Issey Mede | Photos by Rob Reid
Pandemic seeds
“Your first year is a total flop… and then your second year is slightly less of a flop!”. It’s not the most encouraging reflection, but this is how Fi Halliday, the facilitator of the Govanhill Baths’ LGBTQI+ Gardening Group excitedly describes what, for some, became a lockdown hobby.
This was the case for Ardis Önnerfors, who would previously walk past community gardens wishing they were a part of them: “I don’t know if that would have changed if there hadn’t been this complete stop to all other activities.” But this ‘strange outstretched blob of time’, as Ardis describes it, meant that attending a gardening group at the Bowling Green became an important new way to gather with people and feel more grounded.
Finding space to grow
As Covid restrictions eased, newly green-fingered residents encountered some difficulties in maintaining their hobby. As Rachel Walker, co-founder of Rumpus Room says: “Everywhere is either private property, council owned, or tenement gardens, and so there is very little opportunity to grow produce and to cultivate a long-term garden anywhere in Govanhill… We have our parks and green spaces, but they’re all managed by the council, who don’t particularly promote engagement in green space other than leisure.”
Jac Reichel, one of the co-founders of the Plot 26 community herb garden in Pollokshields, agrees that the issue is not the lack of land as such, but rather choices in how it’s managed: “I find it infuriating how difficult it is to get access [to land] from the council when it’s just lying there, or being sold off to developers.”
Having started the Rumpus Room garden without much previous experience in growing food, Rachel feels that having a place to set down roots meant the group could plan and put energy and time into it. Even then, as Ardis, who along with Rachel runs the weekly drop in gardening sessions points out, the apple trees are planted in moveable planters: “We don’t know how long we’re going to be somewhere.”
Fears around gardens disappearing aren’t unfounded: such was the fate of the one on Agnew Lane that was demolished on Christmas Eve a decade ago. But alongside the worry, there’s hope. When Rumpus Room invited Geneva (who runs food solidarity project, Plant Grow Share) to talk to young people at the studio, they were excited about guerilla gardening – a practice of growing in neglected or private spaces – and Agnew Lane was reborn. Now, the group are at the early stages of a community buyout.
For many of the queer gardeners interviewed, such perseverance against all odds is an indication of how important urban growing can be. “It’s frustrating, but at the same time I find it inspiring that people just do it anyway”, says Jac. “You learn to be scrappy about it, to source free materials. You can go, ‘okay, I’ll endear myself to all the local cafés and they’ll supply us with their food waste and then we don’t have to pay for compost, we’re making it ourselves’” adds Geneva.
If you’d like to join…
Govanhill Baths’ LGBTQI+ Gardening Group meets fortnightly on Monday evenings (6–8pm) at Agnew Lane.
Rumpus Room Garden Club, aimed at young people age 12 and above, meets weekly on Wednesday afternoons (4–5.30pm) at the Rumpus Room yard on Langside Lane.
Plot 26 Community Herb Garden run their weekly gardening sessions every Friday (3–6pm) at the New Victoria Gardens.
Agnew Lane Gardening Group meets weekly on Sunday afternoons, at around 1pm.
Rowan Lear, one of the facilitators of Un/Nature, a queer ecologies reading group at the Glasgow Zine Library, similarly speaks of the beauty of people simply doing it anyway and creating these tiny ecologies, no matter how short-lived. Coming from a rural background, they feel they have had to forgo dreams of a queer commune or having their own farm, as the current system of land ownership makes it really hard to access land if you haven’t inherited it. Instead, they try to make peace with growing in a city.
Queer ecology brings together queer theory and ecology to challenge heteronormative ways of understanding nature. Rowan explains that it is rooted in the recognition that the way ideas of nature have been constructed is based in structures of oppression – poverty, racism, misogyny – and notions of domination. For Fi, exploring the topic has been a step in suddenly questioning a lot of their previous understandings of the world.
Growing together and imagining collective futures
How to make compost or build planters are among the things that gardening creates an opportunity to learn. Community gardens offer a way to do this in an accessible, supportive space, through trial-and-error: “the emphasis is on us all learning together, and we can come for as much or as little as we want,” says Jac.
The desire to learn in a non-hierarchical, collective environment is also part of what drove Rowan, along with Nat Walpole to start the Un/Nature reading group. Open to anyone interested in challenging conceptions of nature, the pair are both clear that their focus as facilitators is that of functional organising, rather than pre-deciding readings and direction.
Fi takes a similar approach with their group, creating a space for participants to step up and take turns leading on sessions focussing on their interests and skills, be it nature collaging or a mushroom walk – building confidence along the way.
Going through these journeys of learning and growing together can teach about relying on others: “It gives a little window into how we could be looking after things communally that aren't just gardens,” Ardis believes. Rachel also feels that the experience of it taking more than one person to grow a garden helps them dream of brighter futures: “You start to imagine your life further entwined with the season of the garden, and that comes into thinking about living situations where you’re growing food and depending on others for that.” They believe this vision of communal living and nurturing a garden together can be seen as a queer imagining of family and interconnectedness.
Such entwinement with the seasons and the deepening of their connection with time is something that most gardeners mention. “Your perception starts revolving around seasonal plants: that’s something that you can’t go back from,” explains Fi. This encourages slowing down, and allows for what they describe as ‘a stage of deep knowing with a place’. For Ardis, gardening has encouraged them to put down their own roots – and they’re appreciative of a hobby that has an ‘enforced rest’ period during winter. It’s what Rachel calls ‘gardener’s time’: “It puts emphasis on recovery and quiet time. That’s when growth happens, in the space between things.”
Another part of this is letting go of things, with others reaping the rewards – human or otherwise. When seedlings they planted get eaten by slugs, Fi has learned to reframe this: “Well, the slugs had a good meal!”.
Connections and identity
There are mixed opinions from people about how they feel about the garden as a social space. “It’s such an easy thing to gather around, and you meet so many people who are interested in similar things to you,” says Ardis. “Mainly you talk about the plants, but then you still feel socially fulfilled going away from it.” They don’t feel like there is a lot of identity packed up in gardening. “You can leave it and you can just stick your hands in the dirt, and it’s social in a really generative, lovely way.”
For Rachel, the social aspect of gardening is less important, with the focus firmly on plants. “But I want to be around other queer people in all aspects of my life, so why not also gardening?” they add. They also remark that gardening is something that isn’t always accessible for marginalised people: “It’s one of those things where class, gender and race intersect, and there’s this idea of what a garden and a gardener is.”
For Jac, being in growing spaces has been completely transformational. When coming out as trans, they took a lot of courage from the plants around them, and the knowledge that there’s more than just the human community: “You can go on a walk and there’s all these trees, all these plants, and knowing that we’re all in community with all these other beings, I find that reassuring. I feel quite held by that other community when sometimes I don’t feel so held by the human community.”
When fed up with having to fight for even the most basic healthcare as a trans person, herbalism felt as something Jac could do for themselves and for people around them: “It doesn’t replace essential healthcare, but it does give you a sense of wellbeing. It feels like you’re connecting with plants and with each other.”
This, however, isn’t always straightforward. Jac speaks of the tension that can sometimes exist in a community garden between creating a comfortable space for queer people specifically while also building trust and relationships with local people from all walks of life. While many of the Plot 26 participants are queer, Jac doesn’t believe that queer-specific sessions would feel right.
On the other hand, Fi’s perspective as a group facilitator has made it evident to them that while people want to do growing, they are also excited by a queer group. For some who recently moved to Glasgow, the gardening group is the first queer-specific thing they’ve found: “I get the feeling that some people, as much as they love growing, also just want to feel held in a space like that.”
As with other things, there isn’t one definitive queer experience when it comes to gardening, growing and the outdoors. What is evident, though, is that these activities foster wellbeing and social connection, all experienced in a multitude of ways — and that Govanhill and the rest of Southside are buzzing with community gardens and queer people coming together to partake in the joy of growing.