Gardening in the street is like talk back radio except the station you choose to listen to is the place where you live.

When you garden in the road you have surprising and interesting conversations with complete strangers, or people you’ve seen but never spoken to.

It can be more surprising than talk back.  And it builds a community where you live, not in the airwaves.

You connect with where you are and make connections and discoveries you can’t predict.  Radio can make wonderful connections within your head and its pictures of the mind are sometimes the best of their kind.  And talk back helps us communicate, helps bring change and action.

But the ‘talk back’ of road gardening adds the here and now of bits of dirt, compost, weeds, the tragedy of a newly-dead plant, a new fruit, and other ways of seeing the street and things in it.  And, I wonder if it gives us something some of us otherwise might only get from talk back – a sense of community?

On the weekend I woke one morning to the sound of metal on brick, scraping and digging noises.  After brekky I went out and a neighbour had started the day early to lay brick paving for four neighbouring houses to enable people to walk from their house to the street across the road gardens.  His gift to us.  And in front of one house he discovered some lovely buried sandstone which he dug up and relaid and washed so that household could use them.

The street looked prettier after.  What I enjoyed most was the gift of the work and thought that went into the new stepping paths.

So the ratings with road gardening are the best ones we can have; our own.

Try it; you’ll be surprised.  (And we can keep listening to talk back; have your cake and eat it, too.)

M