The entrance gate of the garden opens onto the main common area: a green space with benches, a picnic table, and small trees where gardeners and visitors could be seen alone or in groups on a warm day. Across from the common area is a teardrop-shaped community plot. Walking along a series of curving paths, a visitor encounters a tightly packed patchwork of small plots. Some are overgrown with

weeds, others are meticulously maintained, and yet others are somewhere in between. A few plots have towering structures built to support plants; some struc- tures are made with found materials, such as baby cribs and fencing, others are con- structed of wood. The garden dazzles with a wide variety of grown produce, from basil and tomatoes to three-foot-long purple string beans and enormous winter mel- ons. Some plots have signs: “Your mama’s farm,” “Do not touch! This is a private plot!!!” A few are fenced in and padlocked. There is a toolshed and a rather clean portable toilet. One of the older gardeners has built an open shed structure for small gatherings—a casita of sorts. A stroll through the garden during the warm season is a rich sensory experience and a jarring juxtaposition of outside and inside. It is an oasis of greenery separated by a chain-link fence from small industrial establish- ments and dilapidated housing, the chirping of small birds overpowered by piercing beeps from school buses backing up into garages and trucks thundering past.

The garden is governed by an elected steering committee, which maintains the relationship with the city and takes care of organizational tasks such as collecting the voluntary $20 yearly membership fee, purchasing shared tools, arranging barbe- cues, enforcing rules, and negotiating disputes. They also bring proposals to the general membership, which votes on them during the scarcely attended monthly meetings. Some garden rules came from the city, such as a prohibition on drinking alcohol, smoking, gambling, and constructing permanent structures without a per- mit. Others were developed in general membership meetings, including responsibili- ties to maintain one’s plot and pull weeds, obligations to volunteer on completing common tasks, and rules against entering other people’s plots, leaving children unattended, bringing dogs, and playing radios loudly. In theory, the garden oper- ates on a three-strikes rule: after two public warnings from the steering committee, delivered in writing and publicized to the membership, and an attempt to resolve  the dispute with a third-party mediator, a gardener could lose membership. In real- ity, most rules are broken and unenforced, and only one gardener had ever lost membership, after posing a physical threat to others. Few people wanted to be on the steering committee, so its 11 seats went partially unfilled, and the elections were hardly competitive. There was some turnover in the composition of the leadership, as people experienced burnout (including the original founder of the garden) or sim- ply moved out of the area. At the time of research, the steering committee reflected the persity of the garden to some extent, but some immigrant and minority gar- deners, including those on the steering committee, felt that it was really the handful of white professionals—branded “the lawyers” by some—who were making the important decisions. These leaders also ran the garden meetings, using a style of facilitation that was ostensibly participatory but resulted in exclusion of those gar- deners who had difficulties with English, or did not embrace middle-class cultural norms of community building (Lichterman 1995).

IMAGINING THE GARDEN

In a space transected by differences in race, class, ethnicity, immigrant status, disability, and duration of local residence, there was no one way of imagining what

the community garden should be like. Gardeners and visitors were engaged in a competitive struggle over scarce space, and this struggle was intricately connected to the normative struggle to define the desired appearance of the garden, its organi- zation, and behavior guidelines. There were several ways of imagining the garden that competed for dominance and connected to larger neighborhood changes. As these visions clashed, many social hierarchies were reproduced, yet gardeners devel- oped spaces of resistance and formed durable ties across lines of categorical difference.