After Barcelona, let's move to Paris.
Besides working at Sony CSL during the week, I spend at least one afternoon per weekend to visit some of the 67 community gardens blooming inside the very heart of Paris - they are many more if you count those in the suburbs. My goal is to manage to visit the 67 of them before I leave Paris at the end of May. Until my arrival three weeks ago, I managed to visit ten gardens and meet some active members of four of them. Still a long way to go...
Well, enough statistics. On Saturday December 8th, I was scootering around the 11th district and stopped at the gate of Le Jardin Nomade. This garden was still quite beautiful, although Autumn is not the most exciting season for gardening. I was quite disappointed to see that the person supposed to open the garden was not there, but my disappointment was short. Indeed, a collective soup was announced on the information board for the next day.
As requested, I came around noon on Sunday with a pair of onions and a pot of cream. Some people were already assembled around the table to prepare the soup. I was warmly greeted, and I joined the onion cutting team, asking my bench neighbor about the garden.
Around fifty gardeners are involved in Le Jardin Nomade. They have been assigned small lots to share by groups of two or three gardeners, except for a large "collective" lot in the middle, shared by ten gardeners.
This garden, which started around ten years ago, was the very first to join the "Main Verte" network, which federates the community garden initatives in Paris. It started on a piece of land which should have hosted a public library. As the team planned to be forced to move after some time, they called the place "Le Jardin Nomade" - the Nomadic Garden. However, there were some geological problems, and the site was declared unable to host a building. That's why the garden is still standing there today.
Many neighbors came up for sharing the soup : children from the neighborhood, with or without their parents, a Chinese familiy living nearby, a couple of students involved in teaching support in the neighboring school... Some people passing by were insistently invited to join. A history professor from the neighboring high school arrived with a bottle of wine, and the discussion around the table switched to the history of the neighborhood. A long-lasting inhabitant started painting us a word picture of the streets thirty years ago. In the middle of his description, a woman brought a full dish of Maghreb pastries, and everyone cheered. The children, who were preparing some grilled chestnuts and running around, came back as fast as they could, and the discussion moved to another topic.
After sharing a piece of cake, I had to leave - to some upcycling event, more on this later - but I will definitely come back to share the Spring soup with the team. Or maybe do some gardening ? This does not seem to be the most valuable aspect of the garden, after all.
(Here is the official website of the Association du Quartier Saint Bernard in charge of the garden - amongst many other activites.)
