A community can share a place without sharing the same history, culture, knowledge or way of experiencing it.

At Ediblescapes, people arrive through different relationships. Someone may come to garden. Another may recognise a familiar food plant. A child may follow an insect or taste a fruit. Someone else may come to learn, teach, cook, talk, rest or simply look around.

Not everyone participates in the same way, and participation can change through time. Some people return regularly and become involved in caring for the garden. Others may encounter it only once, yet carry away a plant, a taste, a conversation, a memory or a question.

The living community is also larger than the human gathering.

Birds arrive without invitation. Insects move between flowers. Plants establish themselves in unexpected places. Fungi and soil organisms participate largely beyond our sight. Each inhabits and transforms the garden through relationships different from our own.

Belonging therefore does not have to mean becoming alike.

A commons can hold difference while continually negotiating access, care, responsibility and participation. Difference can bring exchange and learning, but also disagreement, different expectations and different ways of understanding what care means.

There is no single experience of the garden that everyone must share.

Perhaps community is therefore not something we can completely identify simply by asking who is inside it.

We can also look at the relationships forming between different lives, experiences and ways of participating.

How can different lives belong together?

‍