Look at Wee Jackie go. Four-foot-nine, 43 years old, gabbing nonstop, grafting nonstop, her full name – Jacqueline – tattooed on the back of her neck, she shoves that wheelbarrow around the garden like Glasgow’s own Sisyphus. “I don’t know where I’d be without this garden,” she says. “I was in a right horrible, deep, dark place. Up to my eyes in debt.” She smiles. “This place has been life-changing.”
We are in Riverside Garden, part of the Riverside Hall community centre, in Govan, Glasgow. On the southern bank of the Clyde, Govan predates the city into which it was later subsumed and retains a certain independence of mind. The area is often associated with hardship and hard men. Locals find this wearisome. They will tell you that crime and deprivation statistics do not represent its true character, which is a gruff tenderness and instinct for solidarity in the face of life’s struggles. A beautiful community garden in Govan is not an anomaly. It is a perfect expression of the spirit of the place – earthy, caring, everyone mucking in together.
Squeezed between a housing estate and a busy road, on what was a litter-strewn site left by a demolished tenement, the garden is about the size of two tennis courts. Opened last summer, it was designed and part-funded by Stalled Spaces, a council programme that supports community groups in developing underused land.
At its centre are two raised beds, ablaze with flowers – cosmos, forget-me-nots, granny’s bonnet – and crowned by tall lengths of pipe, painted red, white and black in homage to the funnels of the Waverley paddle steamer, docked nearby. By the entrance is a maple tree planted by Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, last year. The maple is deepest red, which seems apt, but the lettuce planted around its base is of less obvious political significance. Perhaps Corbyn, after all, is a romainer.
Jackie Murphy is one of about 20 regulars who garden here for pleasure and as a way of coping with a variety of issues, including addiction and poor mental and physical health. She was a heroin user for almost 20 years and used the prescribed substitute methadone for eight more. She credits the garden with giving her confidence to finally come off methadone altogether; she has been drug-free for more than six months.
Apple and pear trees, as well as blackcurrant, redcurrant and strawberry bushes line one side of the garden. A polytunnel is planted with cucumber, tomatoes and melons. Each gardener is given their own bed, typically planted with potatoes, onions, turnips (“tatties, ingins, neeps”) and anything else required to make a hearty soup. It’s all free to take home.
The garden is enclosed by a steel fence. This is to prevent vandalism and theft, but also acts as the boundary of what, to the gardeners, is a safe space. Struggling to stay solvent or sober? You will find a listening ear and good advice from people who, very likely, have been through something similar. The most abundant crop here is stories.
Taking a break from strimming, Eddie Harkins tells his. “Gardening has probably saved my life,” he says. Harkins is in recovery from alcoholism. He started drinking at 16, self-medicating for panic attacks, and by his early 20s had a serious problem. In his final year of drinking, he was hospitalised seven times. He quit at 40, four years ago. Gardening keeps brain and body busy, he explains – you don’t get stuck in the house or in your own head. “It’s food for the soul.”
Eddie’s partner is Jane Burdass, the professional gardener here. She’s 54, comes from Hull, has seen it all and kept on trowelling. In the early 1980s she shared a flat with Paul Heaton; the fledgling Housemartin rehearsed in the kitchen. (She is “Jane” from The Beautiful South’s Song For Whoever.) Her position here is funded by the National Lottery, but one senses money is low on her list of priorities. She isn’t just tending plants, she’s tending people: David Fraser, the retired taxi driver, who had to give up his allotment following a stroke; Christine Gaynor, whose own health issues are soothed by coming here; Kellyann Hampson, who brings along her boys, and finds it helps her depression; Basil “Gibby” Gibson, survivor of three heart attacks, who tells that tale with the pride of a striker reliving a hat-trick.
It is tempting, writing about Riverside, to reach for metaphors: renewal, regeneration, green shoots of recovery. The gardeners themselves are well aware of this inherent symbolism. Ask John Thomson. Eight years ago, in his early 40s, after the death of his mother, he had a nervous breakdown. He was living in a one-bedroom flat, felt trapped; had anxiety attacks, sweat lashing, a smothering blackness. For anyone who has gone through that sort of experience, the opportunity to spend the days outdoors growing roses, lupins, foxgloves is not a pleasant diversion – it’s a lifeline.
