A few months ago I joined a Master Gardeners class offered by my local extension office. It takes place in a building that used to be part of a camp I once attended. It was used as a mess hall and once a week a dance hall for the camping kids. During classes I sit in a seat where I first danced with a boy when I was ten years old.
The building sits behind a church and graveyard where members of my family are buried. This includes my grandmother, for whom my love of gardening and desire to learn more about it comes from. It seems fitting that the way I’ve found to remember her best was always gardening and now I see her tombstone every time I go to class.
In total I’ve spent less than $20 in order to be a part of it.
Since the class has begun we have shared few details about ourselves. Occupations, our education, and a little bit about our other interests. Most of this was done at a Christmas party hosted by one of the senior members.
The group agenda is pretty simple. We learn what we can over an educational course which lasts the span of a school year. Then we earn a certain amount of volunteer hours helping the extension office answer questions from the public regarding gardening issues.
Things like: “Why is my tomato plant dying?”
“Why does my tree look like this? “(insert grainy blurred tree photo)
We also work on public flower beds and have a compost pile that we hope can someday be used by the community.
We are a diverse group.
People from a variety of backgrounds and even cultures joined together for a simple common interest: gardening.
I have no idea what these peoples religious or political backgrounds are.
And I hope I never know.
Sitting in our discussions and our classes I have found a small bit of hope in this extremely polarizing cultural climate. Where everyone is angry and pissed off at everyone else in almost every other place of community exchange (social media, the grocery store, schools, and even sadly many places of religious worship), this place is a breath of fresh air.
We are not only joined in our love of plants and dirt and even bugs but in our desire to spread such knowledge with others. To use it to build and help our community and the place in which we live.
This class has reminded me that a person will always have more in common with their neighbor than they do with whoever is “in charge”.
It’s made me wonder if there is a way to fix our divided communities by creating these small interest based communities like this little garden club.
Master Gardeners is a program that isn’t just based in my local extension office but many offices across the state (as well as in other states across the country). In the area of Western Kentucky, a small conference was introduced to allow for information sharing, classes and networking between the different county Master Gardening groups.
During this conference I attended a lecture taught by someone of whom, I’m pretty sure, sits on the other side of the political and religious spectrum than me. I know this because we share friends on Facebook, and many of those friends have unfriended me on the platform or no longer speak to me in public based entirely on my religious and political views. I didn’t know if she was aware of who I was based on similar interactions.
Her class was fantastic.
She had great ideas on how to use the connections through the extension office and the gardening clubs to create community gardens as she had in her own community. Including one for a women’s shelter, in which she not only used assistance from a local boy scout group (giving them volunteer experience) to build the gardens but educated the women living there on how to produce food for themselves by teaching them how to garden a variety of things. This year she said she is going to set up a flower area of their garden so the women and children living there can sell cut flowers to help fund the shelter.
Her ideas and the ideas we bounced around in her class could be life changing for some members of the community. But had we never joined this group we could have never shared these ideas.
My husband enjoys the stories that I tell him about our meetings. About how different we all are and the places that we come from. He says he wishes there was a group for people to talk about mechanics or working on cars the same way. A place where politics and religion and personal chaos doesn’t get brought up because the purpose is simply to share knowledge.
I can’t help but feel that this is where the original idea of schools and places of educational growth began. Though, somewhere along the way it all became what it is today. (**Though I want it to be known that I still believe, strongly, in public education and that the majority of educators are desperately trying to create this environment again.)
People need to be reminded of basic humanity again. That the people we hate, or are just pissed off at, are human beings with needs exactly like our own. I truly believe that at our core we are all very much the same. That somewhere along the way we all forgot that and this why so many of us search for connections in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.
Crazy to think that all it took for me to realize that there is a possiblity for all of us to coexist was a little gardening club.
A Hermitess 