The green space vision privileged an aesthetically pleasing appearance over the private property imperative to protect personal plots. Some gardeners even dis- agreed with the garden rule that prohibited people from entering each other’s plots. They wanted to be able to help those whose plots did not comply with the green vision. But that did not mean unfettered access to the garden as a whole: some con- trol was deemed necessary in order to maintain the green nature of the space, reduc- ing vandalism, trash, and so forth. The green space vision for the garden was intricately related to maintaining a positive relationship with the surrounding com- munity and justifying the garden’s existence to city officials. Gardeners who wanted the garden to be a green space wanted it to look pleasant to passersby. They were aware of the criticism leveled at the garden by some local residents. In creating a beautiful green space, they hoped to differentiate it sharply from the trashed vacant lot it was before, justifying the use of the land as a garden. These gardeners believed that the better the garden looked, the more likely it was to remain a garden—and  not be turned into a park, community center, or a condominium. Framing their vision in terms of survival of the garden added to the relative success of the green vision. Many disagreements, such as the one over asparagus described above were settled in way that appeased the green vision.

Social categories and visions of the garden were not neatly matched. Moreover, while an ethnographic case study can reveal social mechanisms and processes, it is less suited for establishing certainty about representativeness and statistical data gathering, making it difficult to report proportional prevalence of visions among gardeners or their intersections with categories of race and class (Small 2009). At the same time, my research indicates that while the private property vision appeared to be widespread among everyone, the vocal green space proponents were dispro- portionately white, highly educated, native-born, middle-class people, many of whom have moved from outside of New York. Their access to resources afforded  by their social networks and high levels of education helped build the influence of the green vision despite the much more widespread private property vision, and the greater investment of time and effort by those who viewed the garden as a farm (see below). Crucially, the green vision was congruent with the city’s preference for what community gardens look like, as well as with what other researchers have described as the vision of gentrifier gardeners and large nonprofit organizations that manage some city gardens (albeit not the one under study here; Eizenberg 2013; Martinez 2010; Zukin 2010).

Farm

Gardeners like Tai, who wanted to tie up asparagus plants with “ugly” string and sticks, viewed the community garden as a place to grow food above all else. Aesthetics took a back seat  to the needs of plants, agricultural experimentation,  and the imperative to recycle and reduce waste of materials and space. As Aya, a Japanese immigrant gardener, pointed out in response to another gardener’s insis- tence on things looking good: “I didn’t come here for beautiful; I came here to har- vest [sic].” I call this the farm vision.

People who viewed the community garden as a type of farm cared about boundaries in a different way than other gardeners. They may have been more con- cerned that a fence was shading a struggling plant than about its purported ugliness. They even sympathized with gardeners who wanted to protect the fruits of their labor from theft by erecting fences. And these gardeners did not wish for an unfet- tered access to the garden from outside because they feared disruption to their agri- cultural plans in the form of theft of food or tools, or the trampling of plants. While gardeners with a green space vision attempted to make the garden look attractive, gardeners with a farm vision could vociferously oppose this tactic. Martin, an East- ern European immigrant gardener, dismissed the wish of public housing residents  to “look down and see a park, not a garden” by pointing to what in his view was an abundance of local parks. What people really needed, he said, was a garden where they could learn about growing food. The garden should be for people who love to garden above all else.