Rudman's city: Inner-city community gardens may grow on

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The condemned Basque Park community gardens could live to see another autumn harvest if common sense prevails at today's meeting of Auckland City's parks and recreation committee.

A year ago the committee was persuaded by councillors David Hay and the late Phil Raffils that the eight-year-old vegetable garden was a blot on the landscape and should go. The Hobson community board endorsed this, but agreed under pressure to delay the eviction for 12 months. That deadline ran out 10 days ago.

The board also recommended at the time that a report be commissioned "on the suitability of and demand for community gardens within Auckland City". It was a suggestion the city took up.

Since the city had no immediate plans for the area, it would have made more sense to wait for the report before voting to boot out the gardeners. But we all know committees don't always act in a rational manner.

A year on and the report is still in draft form and unseen by councillors, and the gardeners are fighting for a reprieve until the report has been considered. On the day the eviction should have taken place last week, they persuaded the Hobson board to adopt this approach.

Today it is up to the parks and recreation committee to have the final say. The recommendation from open space planner Elizabeth Parkin is that the lease be extended for a further 10 months and that it contain a provision for right of renewal "should the policy statement support the continued presence of the gardens".

Stuck in an inner city gully, overlooked on two sides by light industrial ugliness, the gardens are something of an oasis in an otherwise bleak and neglected, puggy grass paddock.

Wandering along the paths that meander through the plant beds yesterday was a bit of a time-warp trip back to the backyard vegetable gardens of my childhood. There was rhubarb - though only dwarflike compared with the huge-leafed plants we used to hide under as kids - there was silver beet and pineapple sage and fennel, a delicacy now but strictly a weed in my dad's eyes. He would have frowned at the nasturtiums, too, sending them back to the flower garden where they then belonged.

As for the taro and bananas and lemon grass, well they hadn't been invented back then. He'd have disapproved of the docks and other weeds but I guess that under the circumstances you can forgive the gardeners for letting the place get away from them in recent times.

When I last visited a year ago, a battle had been raging for months between local businessman John Waide with his wife, Beverley, who saw the gardens as "an out-of-context excrescence" in "a pristine inner-city park", and a group of church-backed hippies who had been harmlessly gardening part of the park since 1993.

Pristine it wasn't - and never had been. Adding to the confusion was a Metrowater plan to use the park as an emergency stormwater pond. The Waides and the hippies are still battling it out, but the stormwater pond idea has now been abandoned.

For park users, this is good news. But it does delay further planning for its future. Before a new concept plan can be developed, the regional council will have to consent to the stormwater pond designation being removed from the district plan.

This delay, of course, is another argument in favour of a delay in evicting the gardeners.

As for the report on community gardens, Auckland University planning tutor Doug Craig has completed that and my understanding is that he is fairly supportive of the idea. Not surprising, really, since his doctoral study investigates sustainable communities, and he is on a New Zealand Standards working party on sustainable land development.

Mr Craig's report concentrates on how Auckland City can put in place a coherent and integrated policy for city assistance to community gardens, through funding, providing land and so on. It will be released next month and council will put it out to consultation until December. A draft policy will then be drawn up and go to council in April next year.

Until then at least, council officials suggest the Basque Park evictions should be put on hold. That is surely the commonsense solution.