December 6, 2020

See the New Design for the Garden!

In 2020, members of the Fannie Lou Hamer Garden partnered with the Bloomfield Park Neighborhood Association on a community process to start to redesign the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Garden.

This is a special place, but the infrastructure is starting to fail and it's not accessible to anyone who can't climb stairs. Plus, there is an overgrown sliver of City-owned land next to the garden that could be used to create a nice public space.

We got COG Design – a nonprofit landscape design firm – to help us create a new design for the space! Nearly 200 neighborhood residents gave input on the designs. See the pretty pictures below of early designs.  

You can also see the final community presentation from November of 2020 which has many more details.

During the next several years a group of neighborhood residents (both gardeners and others) will be working to raise funds to implement this beautiful plan! Although, first, we must bring control of the land the garden sits on into community control.*  If you are interested in helping, email: flhgarden@gmail.com.

We expect this to take a few years, and happen in phases, but eventually we will have an even more special space – not only for gardening, but for community events, and just sitting to enjoy nature.

PLEASE NOTE: These are early designs and are not final! Updated designs may expand the total garden plot area, and have garden plots be locked and secured from the public space.

* The Fannie Lou Hamer garden land is owned by Dorchester Gardenlands. That nonprofit is now controlled by only one person who continues to block the larger community's desire to restore the garden. The City of Boston and Boston Food Forest Coalition are interested in working with the current active stewards of the garden to restore it and implement a new design, but we cannot move on those plans until the current control of the land changes or expands. Email us if you want to learn more and help advance a strategy to make this change.