Study Finds That People Who Grow Things Together Grow Together in Other Ways Too
Gardening Clubs in Asia Build Communities Around the Specific Language of Plants
Continent Discovers That Shared Cultivation Produces More Than Vegetables
SINGAPORE — Community and horticultural researchers published findings this week on gardening club culture across Asia, confirming that organised gardening communities across Japan, Singapore, South Korea, India, China, and the Philippines serve social functions that their ostensibly horticultural purpose does not fully capture, producing community bonds, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and urban social infrastructure through the specific medium of people who grow things together.
The study covered gardening club culture across six nations, finding that the social outcomes of organised communal gardening consistently exceed participants’ pre-joining expectations, with members who joined for the plants staying for the community.
Japan’s Allotment Garden Community
Japan contributed what researchers found the most established urban communal gardening culture: the allotment garden system, where city residents rent small plots in designated urban growing areas, creating gardening communities where shared spaces and adjacent plots produce social interaction across demographic groups that urban apartment living otherwise keeps separate.
“My allotment neighbour is 78 years old,” said one Tokyo allotment gardener. “I am 34. We share a fence and a water source. We have been sharing a fence and a water source for four years. In four years I have learned things about soil, seasons, and patience from my allotment neighbour that I would not have learned from anyone else in my daily life. The allotment put us next to each other. Proximity did the rest.”
Community resilience researchers at the United Nations University’s urban resilience programme have documented urban community gardens as effective social infrastructure that creates intergenerational connection and community belonging in urban environments where age-segregated housing and professional social networks otherwise prevent these connections from forming naturally.
Singapore’s Community Garden Programme
Singapore contributed what researchers found the most institutionally supported community gardening culture: the National Parks Board’s community garden programme, which provides plots, resources, and support for community gardening groups across Singapore’s public housing estates, producing gardens that are simultaneously food production spaces, social gathering points, and green infrastructure in the city’s dense urban fabric.
“The garden is on the roof of the block,” said one Singapore community garden member. “The garden was started twelve years ago by six neighbours. There are now forty members. Members have changed. The garden has continued. The garden is the longest-lasting community project I know of in my housing estate. People come and go. The garden stays.”
India’s Heritage Seed Community
India contributed what researchers found the most culturally embedded gardening community: seed-saving networks that maintain traditional and heritage plant varieties through organised sharing, exchange, and cultivation by community members who understand their role as cultural as well as horticultural.
“We grow varieties that do not exist in the market,” said one Delhi seed-saving network member. “These varieties are in our communities because our grandparents grew them and we grow them and will give them to whoever wants to grow them. The seeds are the memory of the food. The community keeps the memory alive. We are gardeners and also archivists.”
The Universal Plant Gifting Economy
Across all six surveyed nations, researchers identified one gardening community behaviour as universal: the plant gift. Gardening club members across all cultures share cuttings, divisions, seedlings, and produce with each other at rates that create informal gift economies whose social function — maintaining relationship through material exchange — is as significant as the horticultural function of distributing plant material. The gardening club gift economy, documented in social capital research through the American Psychological Association’s community research, represents one of the most consistently functional examples of community reciprocity in contemporary urban settings.
