please read the book Seedfolks you'll love it and want to share it with everyone who what's to garden with you. easy read only 100 or so pages.

If it's a standard community garden project, the principles won't help you much. But I'm glad you've brought this up - maybe you can help to set a new standard.

Every community garden I've seen consists of a series of rectangular boxes, some more nicely done than others - even at our Vancouver city hall. I suppose that's because most are for growing vegetables and everyone needs an equal amount of sun.

But people want to do decorative gardening too, and I've been thinking, why not lay out a community garden like a standard landscaping installation - a shade bed here, some foundation planting there - and then lease those parts out to individuals to plant up and manage? And even for the vegetable plots: do vegetables have some requirement for right angles and straight lines that I don't know about?

Whatever happened to creativity, variety, unity, balance, focal points, hardscape? People may put these things into their own plots, but the whole thing inevitably looks like a mishmash with a rectangular theme. It would be nice if the whole thing looked like a garden, vs being a series of gardens that together look like nothing.

Just my 2 cents for now. I'll look for a book to recommend later.

KarinL

karinl,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. Yes, something off the grid is what I, and I suspect the college also, has in mind. The information session is not for a few weeks, but the Art Department has communicated in advance that the organizing committee will be seeking input from art and design students. I suspect that the community ethos of the project will be similar to that of conventional community vegetable gardens. But there will be many linkages between faculty, staff and students internal to the college, as well as cross-linkages to individual members and organizations from the wider community.

The college (it's Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA) has exceptionally beautiful, well-managed and well-designed grounds which seem to have involved expert landscape designers and arborists. It also owns and manages the Graver Aroretum, which features mainly indigenous flora in a wide array of natural habitats, and which is situated some distance from Allentown in a more rural setting.

These considerations and certain others make me think that the project leaders wouldn't need so much to be persuaded to move away from the conventional rectlinear community garden plan, but rather that they are already looking for a new approach. No doubt the core idea is to establish a space for vegetable production, but I suspect they also want to accomplish this in a stylish and decorative manner.

I didn't really consider that integrating non-linear design into a community garden might be so "out there," but I, too, see no reason why it shouldn't be possible.

So really, in asking for recommendations for a textbook or reference, what I have in mind is one that deals with contemporary design principles not for community gardens specifically, but for landscape design more widely, and including perhaps even the most up-to-the-moment and innovative approaches.

Thanks again, and let me know if anything occurs to you.

You might get something out of Grant/Grant. Garden Design Illustrated. Written and illustrated like a magazine article, the "theory of garden design" revealed is uniquely sophisticated and thorough. Focus is planting design, but that's what interests me. The sample layouts shown appear to have bed design and plant selection and combination worked out to the nth degree.

Bard College has a potager style Community Garden. Unfortunately I can't find any good pictures on the web, though a search on "Bard College" and "Community Garden" will give you some idea. It's roughly round and divided into pie quarters with a lot of rustic red cedar elements.

If the garden is going to be maintained by volunteers that wander through, I'd strongly recommend some type of formal structure. It just makes it much easier to explain to newcomers what is where, and what needs to be done.

This is a fun question. Perhaps the need for a design book is not necessary. The thought occurs that your design should be based on problem solving. For instance...

1. Should a building to house wheelbarrows and other gardening stuff be included? Probably. Would it be the basis of a design, attractive and useful from which the project flows?

2. Water lines and faucets are necessary. What is the least expensive way to design for this and would it influence the individual garden bed layouts?

3. Could deer be a problem? Your on-campus horticulturists could advise you on this.

4. There will be a need for a community composting area. How should this be placed discreetly within the project?

5. How large will each gardening plot be? Differing sizes based on the interests of the participants?

Guess you understand my drift on the subject. List all the potential problems and then use them as a basis for the design. Perhaps you would keep us updated on this project.

Thanks everyone for your ideas. bboy, Grant/Grant sounds exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks, too, mad gallica and nandina for your thoughtfully practical input. I think I probably need to reign in an overly-creative urge and remember that the garden needs to be designed to be user-friendly to members and managers alike. So thanks!

I'll be attending the information session in a few weeks, and then I'll know more about expected gardener demographics, irrigation, tools, composting, etc.

I'd second Nandina's recommendations to approach the design of a new community garden starting with the functional requirements necessary as the foremost design criteria. Getting arty about the layout may be all well and good, but if it isn't functional as well, it will come back to bite you in the butt! I suspect that it will be difficult to get people to cooperate about different sized allotments, even though in principle this sounds like a good idea, just as there is no real controlling whether people actually actively garden/maintain their individual plots. When you try to do anything as a committee, there is going to be some friction, compromise and just plain messiness involved. Good on you if you can accept all that as a premise and not lose your sanity, but I have found over the years that I prefer the communist china approach, it is what works best for my personality and garden design...

Sylvia Crowe's Garden Design is the classic and, to my mind, the best--by far.

One of her specialties was shared and community gardens, and the book has chapters on these subjects, but it's best to read the whole thing, from the history through the principles.

It's truly one of those books that can change your life. It did mine anyway.

Bill