Community in a Garden
Troy Gardens Reaches Out to Madison, Wisconsins North Side Community

Midwestern winters possess a sharp, cold beauty. Crystalline snowflakes coat the pine trees, and residents bundle themselves into sweaters and heavy down jackets as they pad their way across snow-covered sidewalks to the relative warmth of offices and homes. Aside from the winter sports enthusiasts, who don’t seem to mind the runny noses and frost-nipped cheeks on their cross-country ski runs, entire cities seem to hibernate their way through the season. You’re hard-pressed to find someone willing to shoot the breeze outdoors on a 12 degree day.

Teenagers working in a pea plot at Troy Gardens.

After months of this weather, summers in Madison, Wisconsin are greeted with an almost preternatural abundance of joy from simply being outdoors. If you’re outside and the sun is shining, it’s a good day.

If you ventured over to Troy Gardens on the North Side of Madison on a warm day in early August, you would have found a celebration of summer itself. Kids dashed around the Troy Kids’ Garden in between having their faces painted, blowing bubbles, and making necklaces with soil and tiny mosses. Bohemios Klan, a traditional Mexican folk band, provided music while visitors sampled huitlacoche, a traditional Mexico corn mushroom. The Mayor of Madison, Dave Cieslewicz, brought a bike tour by the gardens while a West African drum group preformed.

“The idea was to get people out on the land, to reach people who don’t already walk the nature trails or tend a community garden plot,” says Sundee Wislow, the executive director of Friends of Troy Gardens, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development, management, and stewardship of the 26 acres of open space now recognized and prided as Troy Gardens. “The variety and diversity of the festival attracted over 600 people.”

Variety and diversity are two hallmark traits of Madison’s North Side neighborhood. The area, composed of seventeen different neighborhoods, is ethnically, racially, and economically diverse with a substantial percentage of residents in lower and middle income households. In the 1980s and 1990s, the area was seen as a “trouble spot” in Madison as crime and drug use increased. In 1999, it was named Neighborhoods USA’s “Neighborhood of the Year.”

What produced the turnaround? Diligent work by neighborhood organizations, which included a large coalition advocating for the preservation of what was then an undeveloped 15-acre site used by a few residents for gardening.

It’s difficult to definitively prove that urban gardening reduces crime. Although crime often decreases in areas surrounding urban gardens, the reduction is often attributed to other factors such as increased neighborhood activities and better police coverage.

The community-building effects of urban gardens, however, are well-documented. Mark Francis, a University of California-Davis professor found that gardens built and maintained by community residents have “unique social and economic benefits.” Residents can develop and control part of their neighborhood, inspiring feelings of ownership in a community.

Child gardening in Troy Gardens' plot.

Studies conducted by Jill Roper, a former graduate student at Rutgers University, found that community gardens inspire people to actually talk to one another. Roper’s interviews with participants in the New Brunswick Community Gardening Program in New Jersey revealed that having a garden significantly increased the frequency of interaction among the gardeners, even outside the gardening season. These interactions build a shared sense of community and ownership over neighborhood activities.

“A community activity such as gardening can be used to break the isolation, creating a sense of neighborliness among residents,” says Charles Lewis, a greening advocate formerly with the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois in “What Good is Community Greening,” by David Malakoff. “Until this happens, there is no community, but rather separate people who happen to live in the same place.”

Troy Gardens inspired a sense of community before it even became Troy Gardens. After the Mendota Mental Health Institute forfeited its rights to the land, the State of Wisconsin intended to sell the site to a commercial developer in the mid-1990s. At the time, North Side residents used a few acres for gardening, bird watching, and appreciating the outdoors. Alarmed at the prospect of losing a valuable community resource in the North Side community, neighborhood groups, gardening activists, and representatives from the University of Wisconsin joined together to create the Troy Gardens Coalition.

After a series of meetings, the Coalition presented a proposal for integrated land use, combining housing with open space and agricultural uses. In February 1997, the State removed the land from the surplus land list, and Troy Gardens was born.

After the considerable fight to create Troy Gardens, the surrounding community is vested in the future of the gardens. Troy Gardens now sits on 31 acres in the city of Madison and includes 30 units of mixed-income affordable housing, an urban farm, 230 community garden plots, and prairie and woodland restoration.  Instead of a 31-acre housing development with a small park or golf course, Troy Gardens is a new model for development – affordable housing with a large open space, gardens, and a farm.

A garderner in Troy Gardens' Hmong Herb Garden.

Although the gardens draw some middle-class, white gardeners, over 60 percent are Southeast Asian, many of whom are Hmong immigrants. In Hmong culture, herbs are highly valued for their culinary and medicinal properties, so several gardeners approached Friends of Troy Gardens with a request to build a Hmong herb garden. Recently, the garden opened, with rows of herbs native to Laos and Vietnam neatly labeled in Hmong characters.

“It’s beautiful,” says Wislow. “The Mayor of Madison and representatives from the DNR came out to dedicate the Hmong Herb Garden to the City of Madison. We don’t know of any other public garden like this one in the states.”

The neighborhood around the gardens also has a significant Latino population, which Troy Gardens is engaging through outreach programs. Troy Gardens’ brochures are printed in Spanish, and they advertise on local Mexican radio and television programs. Festivals also feature traditional Mexican foods, such as the huitlacoche tasting and cooking demonstrations at the Savor the Summer Festival.

“Currently, the Latino community makes up a small percentage Troy gardeners,” Wislow says. “We want to focus on the North Side and reach out the Latino community right around Troy Gardens. The Festival was one way to do this.”

At this time of year, the gardens bustle with the fall harvest. One plot may be carefully tended by an experienced master gardener, filled with fresh green bell peppers and heirloom tomatoes to be served in a carefully prepared salad that evening. The next plot over may have fallen into disarray, much to the dismay (or amusement) of a well-intentioned, but less experienced, gardener. The following one may be filled with herbs rarely seen in these parts of Madison. One can sense the underlying rush that comes with the crisp fall air, the imminent sensation of a weather-in duced vacation from Troy Gardens.

After a summer and fall spent raising vegetables alongside one another, winter at least brings neighborly nods and smiles before everyone rushes into their warm homes. If the weather is warmer than 20 degrees, they may even stop to say hello.