When the world is so dark and so noisy, take some time to look down
Redefining the previously humble garden verge
We are a globalized world with globalized minds. My everyday life, probably like yours, includes news of genocides and the killings of US citizens by ICE. I see daily pictures of Palestinian children killed, starved and maimed by Israel - even allowed to freeze to death. I have recently seen a video of Latino Americans being held in ICE detention, cramped and hungry, the laws and human rights violations too numerous to enumerate.
Ordinary life keeps on going. It is hard to keep up with scale of the switch: from emptying the dishwasher, to keeping company, virtually, with people suffering US and Israeli racism and imperialism. If you want to see how this kind of juggling feels for Palestinians in Australia with family in Gaza, read Randa Abdel Fattah’s novel Discipline - yes, the one she should have been able to freely discuss at Australia’s beloved Adelaide Writer’s Festival until it was brought undone by pro-genocide lobbyists.
Long-time stalwart of climate journalist, Emily Atkin, wrote a post this week reflecting on how to keep going, how to keep holding Big Oil to account when ‘the government is executing people in broad daylight?’.
Emily is one of my ‘heroes’ - sorry for this gendered term, but ‘heroine’ carries its own connotations that are not suitable here. In her piece on juggling climate reporting and state violence, Emily asks:
‘If you’ve got your own ways of staying upright, I’d genuinely love to hear them’.
Emily: this review of Gayle Dallaston’s Gardening on the Verge is for you. A small book with the goal to change the way we see what’s in front of our eyes and our homes. It asks us to consider making a small change, with potentially enormous benefits, both to prepare for increasing heat in our lives, and for developing deeper community connections. It is a joyful book, with both climate and civic benefits.
Gardening respite to keep you going and change the world
When I walk out of my gate, I see only concrete. The townhouse complex I live in has no garden verge. As the number of hot days heats up, I am more and more sensitive to these wide expanses of heat-trapping urban ungreen.
I know this Substack is about language not gardening. But every part of our worldly experience is shaped by meaning, with language our key meaning-making tool. Who knew it was time to redefine the meaning of the garden verge?
Gayle Dallaston’s book Garden on the Verge is about new ways of thinking/meaning about micro-urban spaces. Rethinking always means rewording: Gayle’s book introduced me to some new words I’d not come across before, which I want to share with you.
How about some numbers to get you thinking? Gayle’s verge garden - previously an expanse of grass that required regular dirty and noisy mowing - appears below. She has created 58 square metres of biodiverse habitat with more than 20 local native plants - while following all council policies and regulations.
Used with permission of Gayle Dallaston
Seeing something old anew
The angle of this picture taken of Gayle’s verge is part of trying to reorient our minds to these micro-green spaces. Instead of taking a photo to show this garden as an extension of her private property, the photo shows us ‘her’ verge garden as part of the public commons.
In this photo, her house is now what she calls a ‘bystander’ to the main action. The verge garden is part of something much bigger. Using the analogy of the stock route, Gayle asks us to think about our interconnecting verges as a ‘modern-day, urban long paddock’. To see them as pollinator and wildlife corridors, as part of the commons which ‘connects everybody and everything’.
Gayle is Brisbane based, and calculates that if 2 out 3 residents in the Brisbane City Council area planted verge gardens, it would create more than 1000 hectares of biodiverse habitat and transform the city, just using these small parcels of interconnected land, making the city cooler and more resilient.
And cooler is no joke right.
Used with permission of Gayle Dallaston
The past three years have been the hottest on record. Gayle has measured the temperature on a really hot day: standing on the tarred road she recorded a temperature of 54 degrees (Celsius). The temperature on the unshaded grass verge was just over 15 degrees cooler, at 38.7. The temperature on the shaded grass verge jumped down a further 10 degrees, to 28.7.
What if this is scaled up across our cities? In Melbourne, road verges make up one third of all greenspaces, as I discovered when I started to investigate the idea of ‘citizen gardeners’, a term I came across in Gayle’s book. This peer reviewed, open access study of a council area on Melbourne indicates that ‘citizen gardening’ on the verge is a counterbalance to the loss of biodiversity that urbanisation has brought. This and other recent studies in Melbourne reported by these researchers show a signficant increase in beetle, bee and butterfly populations through strategic citizen gardening efforts.
Developing civic ecosystems
And rethinking the verge is not just good for beetles, bees and butterflies. In a moment I’m going to show you how verge gardens and gardening intersects with research on how to make democracies more resilient and reduce political polarization.
In the process of creating and maintaining this small urban forest, Gayle extended her social connections. As she started, slowly, to unpick the grass and plant a native garden - this is called ‘incremental gardening’ - she discovered she was ‘giving permission’ to passers-by to stop and talk.
She met more people in those first few months of making her verge garden than in the many years of living in her home behind her garden fence.
By gardening on the verge, Gayle spent more time in her immediately accessible public space. Turns out there’s a term to describe this kind of place: it’s a ‘bumping place’ - which I also read about for the first time in Gayle’s book. The term is new - it’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Macquarie Dictionary, and the very very large corpus of news reports that I regularly consult (over 24 billion words of news, from 1/1/2010 to yesterday) shows only a small handful of usages.
A bumping place is where locals or strangers can bump into each other and have incidental meetings which grow and deepen their social connections. A place which ‘encourages lingering and interaction’. Where you can meet real people, in the flesh, whom you can see and know non-algorithmically, whether or not they share 100% all your political ideologies.
The concept of a ‘bumping place’ turns up in social science research on how to develop ‘social infrastructure’. It is discussed here by a researcher in public policy at the University of Cambridge.
And check out this public lecture hosted by Flinders University, about the role of social infrastructure in making democracies more resilient, by a distinguished academic in American Political Science, Professor Daniel Aldrich.
In his lecture Aldrich argues that social capital, built through local or ‘horizontal’ connections, as well as social links developed as ‘vertical connections’ to decision makers, have material impacts on our behaviours, including the potential to resist disinformation campaigns. Prosocial behaviours, for example staying home and wearing masks in the COVID pandemic, were more widely adopted in communities where trust was built along and through these social connections and links. These links help make people resistant to disinformation.
While slowly transforming her verge, Gayle understood this was not an isolated individual act of a private individual. Working on the commons and doing something as simple as planting a native garden, she was acting in a space that is - for good reason - regulated by council. Passers-by would ask her: ‘Are you allowed to do that?’. She made sure to always stay within the regulations which apply to everyone.
Just as important, she thought about all the people who are ‘stakeholders’ of this space: neighbours, parents with prams, cyclists, the postie, and the various utility workers who also work in this space.
The ‘residents versus the Council’ is a common media outrage story, which social media platforms love to amplify. It is an example of what the great Argentinian scientist of populism Ernesto Laclau called ‘the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating “the people” from power’.
Gayle’s unassuming book deconstructs this frontier. Gayle’s book, full of specific gardening tips and advice, is a manifesto for building community. To create a verge garden that is open to the world means understanding all of the people who are impacted or touched by changing your verge from grass to native garden.
Your garden should be built slowly, mindful of all of the people who make up the community of which the verge in front of your home is one small, significant part.
It’s not you against the world, a psyche which social and Murdoch media is built on. It’s putting your little verge into a wider frame, where you open yourself to diverse perspectives and expertise. There you will see the potential for growing shared green streets and even ‘urban forests’, through ‘residents and councils working together to nurture social and natural ecosystems’.
This act of rethinking the verge ‘de-individuates’ you: it takes you out of your private castle, and puts you inside your ‘civic ecosystem’. As Gayle describes it:
‘In the process, we create the opportunity to nurture civic ecosystems of councils, community organisations, research organisations, businesses and individuals, all sharing and working together towards a future where nature and people thrive’.
Redefining the ‘verge’?
‘Verge’ has been a very hard working word over many centuries. In the Oxford English Dictionary, there are 18 quite diverse meanings - from a term for the male organ, to a type of candle, to a stick or wand, and more. Some of these 18 entries have further subdivisions of meanings of this term.
In its meaning as used by Gayle - 16(b) in the OED - it is defined specifcally in relation to grass. A verge is a ‘narrow grass edging separating a flower border etc from a gravel walk’. The term has a deep, naturalised association with grass. In this meaning of verge, the word is attested to the early 18th century - that’s a 300 year history of verge and grass going hand-in-hand.
In this first quarter of the 21st century, Gayle is redefining ‘verge’: no longer as ‘grass edging’, but as a local, citizen-tended, biodiverse, socially and civic-ly connected space.
You can watch the episode of Gardening Australia which interviews Gayle here. And the link is here to buy her book.
Many thanks for this Annabelle. You see what's happening below the surface.