The Angel St Permaculture Garden
Newtown, Syndey, Australia
June 8th, 2007
There are places in this heart of the urban jungle that make me smile and give me hope, the Angel Street Permaculture Garden is one such place. For the last 16 years people, dedicated to finding more sustainable ways of living in the city, have been stewarding and tending this small piece of earth.
I arrived at the garden having no idea what I might encounter; I was delighted to see that there were people, Tamara Bligh and Leith Mansell, busy in the garden. They were moving an enormous pile of horse manure (mixed with straw from the local mounted police) around the garden to add more organic matter and fertility to the soil. After brief introductions, I jumped at the chance to get my hands dirty and work up a sweat. It was also an opportunity for me to get to know more about this urban oasis.
The Garden was originally envisioned to be in Sydney Park (not far from where the garden is now) by a group of people back in the early 90s called Earthworks. Tamara explained that the group was born out of a need to do “something positive in all the negativity.” Leith added to this by stating, “here (the city) is where we need the food to be grown.”
Much in line with the organic process, the group went through a few rebirths, and the Angel St. Permaculture (PC) Garden was born on a piece of land that belongs to the Department of Education. Much of the design work for the layout of the garden was done in the beginning with the help of a Permaculture teacher and students. However, the design changed and shifted as the people working the land discovered more about how energy flowed down the slopes and contours of the garden.
The Permaculture design has also shifted to meet the needs of the people who tend it and all the living things that grow there. A good example of this was the consideration giving to other beings, in this case, the spiders. There is one in particular, the Golden Orb Spider. This spider is a very large specimen, building an enormous golden web that tends to span across pathways in the Garden. When this happens, the pathway is then blocked off (with rope or what ever is on hand) so people do not accidentally walk into the web and destroy it. The loss of the web will bring certain doom to the spider, who would not have enough energy to produce a new web.
One of the principles in Permaculture is to keep the energy in the system. The way our cities are currently set up, this principle is almost non-existent, except in places such as the Angel St. PC garden. Over the years the garden has evolved into a direct resource recycling center/depot. In addition to recycling the Local Mounted police’s horse manure into the soil, they recycle other things like concrete (used to build retaining walls), Bath tubs into ponds, mulch from people’s yards, unwanted plants, old food from grocers into compost piles, pots for plants, etc. . .
Not only do people come to the garden to access the resource center, they also come to exchange ideas, seeds, cuttings, learn about plants, Permaculture and nature. Some visitors just come to get lost in the hum of the garden. Vivian Spadaro goes to the garden every Wednesday (3-5pm) for the weekly work party. For her, it is a “grounding thing to do”, in which she “feels energized and refreshed afterward.” Tamara added to this by saying “being in the garden is a psychological reprieve from the human constructed environment.”
To me the place is something of a “garden of Eden”. Where food is dripping from the trees, shrubs, vines, ground cover, and even under the ground. From this small patch of urban earth many varieties of food thrive: apple, mango, banana, pear, mandarin, coffee, persimmon, mulberry, lemon, native lime, guava, custard apple, avocado, ice cream bean, olive, loquat, loganberry, fijoa, fig, palmagranted, passion fruit, grapes, paw paw, peach, ginkgo, date palm, neem, a large variety of herbs and annuals, and of course probably 20-50 more plants that I haven’t mentioned. You could imagine all the little creatures that find refuge in this place; they are indeed abundant as well. As Leith Mansell put it, “it is a rare, wild, place!”