In 2025 an episode of depression resulted in a highly significant change to my life. Social prescribing led me to a one day a week, one-year placement in a community market garden in south-east London. The experience was transformative.
From the outset, De Frene Road looked great to me. The market garden occupies a half-acre plot surrounded by suburban houses. Within this space are squeezed fruit trees, raised beds, bee hives, a chicken run, a clay oven, green houses, a pond, a willow tunnel and a meeting space.
Run by volunteers, on behalf of a charity, De Frene Road is a sanctuary and a place of beauty. The market garden offers some products, such as cut flowers, for sale, but that is not its primary purpose, neither is self-sufficiency; its main job is to help people whose mental health, for whatever reason, is challenged. It’s the good life – for everybody.
The new user is not confronted by a forbidding list of rules. The project’s ethos is unspoken and has developed over a long time – equality and value-free human interaction which does not label people and makes no demand on them other than voluntary participation. The food is vegan. The garden’s practices are designed so that they would not alienate a person from any religious or cultural tradition.
De Frene does not immediately present itself as a therapeutic environment. In my opinion, it offers a practical version of a utopia – a glimpse of what life should and could be like for all of us.
Faith, hope and beauty
One of the first things the visitor will notice is god’s eyes – pendants of brightly coloured wool, some fading, hanging in the trees. These are votive offerings and tools for prayer made on spindles of twigs, commonly found in South American countries in which indigenous beliefs co-exist with Catholicism.
They are expressions of faith, hope and beauty, not incongruous in a world that has become, in our so-called New Age, re-sensitised to nature and to pre-Christian beliefs. Subliminal, ambiguous, they are part of the magic that suffuses the plot. De Frene unlocks creativity, for most of us buried and discouraged since school. Creativity, providing purpose, is a prerequisite of happiness. Humans deserve no less.
De Frene Road packs a lot into a small space and is organised to help the maximum number of people, of all ages. Its vibrant colours and scents stimulate the senses, while the craft making, preserving of fruits and planting of next year’s seeds that go on in its sheltered spaces awaken memories, both of our own childhood and of a human childhood – the pre-industrial past that is just beyond the touch of memory, when south-east London was cloaked by the greenwood, hay meadows and open farmland.
This connection requires no thought or intellectualising; it is a magical process, an alchemy, that comes life when one walks up a sloping path between the bay-windowed 1930s houses of an ordinary sreet, crosses the threshold and enters the plot.
Non-invasive horticulture
This kind of horticulture is non-invasive. Practised with the help of a poly tunnel and raised beds, it doesn’t use chemicals to fertilise soil or kill pests; often stray, self-seeding plants are left in beds for their beauty or pollinator value.
The garden is neat and orderly. But it has plenty of habitats for insects – formal and informal bug hotels. Salvaged materials wait for re-use – synchronicity will provide the right piece at the right time for a DIY build.
De Frene Road’s mature apple trees, and one pear, survivals from the plot’s original use as allotments, provide its main character – a sylvan glade. It’s a return the past, because, as evidenced by street names – Perry Vale, Pearfield Road – the local area was once famed for fruit production.
Has post-scarcity anarchism, the hippy dream of the 1960s, actually arrived and will AI, rather than representing an existential threat, actually drive it – freeing humans from repetitive tasks, like writing up dull meetings and formulating crisp action points?
Those who propose revolutions are normally utter pessimists – every technical innovation is a threat or will only benefit the rich; it’s never the right time to rebel – the agents of change must patiently wait for the next instruction or piece of correct language to be handed down from Revolution HQ.
A quiet revolution
I beg to differ. I think that a revolution is quietly happening in our midst. There is a growing network of community gardens and orchards in every large city – different versions of self-help communities. Some are attached to parks, museums and libraries that were stripped of funding by the post-2008 austerity programme and found that they could only function by using volunteers.
It’s a fair bet that virtually all of this new social infrastructure conforms to the practice of sustainability. Adaptive humans, without being told to do so, have created local, communal responses to diversity destruction and global warming throughout our towns, cities and conurbations.
In terms of ‘mental health’ isn’t it possible that the diagnostic acronyms increasingly attached to people are offshoots of an industrialised, over-segmented, medical model, based on the physical capital of specialised ‘units’? To think is to be ontologically challenged; we all have mental health issues, don’t we? Surely holistic responses are best.
A modest proposal
How about we all spend a day a week turning car parks into orchards, with wildlife ponds; growing stuff that we need – not on our own land, but communally-owned spaces, suburb by suburb, street-by-street? It would be a true form of care in the community. What’s the worst that could happen? People would smile more. Boundaries would blur.
Would this obviate the need for psychiatric services – no, of course not. But such a network of mini utopias would increase the sum total of human wellbeing and make the physical environments that we inhabit, in cities, productive and beautiful.
Beneath the cobbles is a beach. Other futures are possible. In every skip is a summer house. Why shouldn’t every community have a De Frene Road, or, at least, an adapted locally fit-for-purpose version?
I wrote some poems during my eye-opening year and discovered that other service users liked to draw and paint. The result was a collaboration, producing an illustrated publication. The poetry collection Mind Healer can be purchased, with all proceeds going to Sydenham Garden, the charity that runs De Frene Road.
No comments:
Post a Comment