Breaking ground

Landshare, the process by which land owners allow fellow city dwellers to use their land without charge, seems to be catching on. It began about five years ago in north America and Europe. Environmental campaigners came up with the strikingly simple idea that individuals providing land free of charge, when matched with others providing free labour to cultivate that land, could produce crops to benefit both parties and reduce food miles.

It also helps to put those without any of their own outside space back in touch with the land, with nature and with a less industrialised way of life than that experienced by those of us who live in built-up areas

It was popularised in the UK by TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (see below). Now there are projects in eastern Europe, Asia and Africa as well as the US and Canada. In most countries the message is the same: growing your own food is fun, allowing spare land to be used is altruistic, and the green dividend is that landshare reduces carbon footprint created by transporting produce needlessly around the world.

This month the idea launched across Australia, adopting the same rallying call.

“There are many backyards and vacant blocks around Sydney and the rest of the country that could be utilised,” says Phil Dudman, a gardening writer and broadcaster known across Australia as the Garden Guru. He had his own landshare scheme in New South Wales and has just launched a website and Twitter campaign to spread the idea across the nation.

The global popularity of landshare should not mask its essential characteristic – that it is an act by individuals to make the most of the land they have, for the benefit of a wider community. We have gathered three examples from around the world: the US, the UK and China.

1. United States

The odds are that Laurie Zook is the only homeowner in the historic downtown district of Frederick, Maryland, to have bought two tonnes of horse manure this month. Her corner garden – one-third of an acre – is being prepared for its third spring and summer as a landshare project.

“I don’t want to do all the work myself. I’m signing up people, mainly ones without access to land, to create a sustainable garden. Some are physically handicapped, others haven’t ever grown vegetables and a few just want a sense of cameraderie while they garden,” she says.

Frederick is best known as a tourist destination – it is near Gettysburg and other civil war shrines – but it has also become a landshare capital, with four other schemes using private land like Zook’s.

“The joy is in the creation of a community. Even in winter when the ground is frozen, people work together. We have a carpenter who builds planting frames and others prepare the land. I’m empowering people to provide for themselves,” explains Zook, who sells fine art and memorabilia.

The US has taken to landshare with enthusiasm. In New York there is a rooftop garden where volunteers tend a 6,000 sq ft garden on top of a Brooklyn warehouse, while the website www.urbangardenshare.org matches garden owners and would-be gardening volunteers in Illinois, Washington, Georgia, Idaho and Kentucky.

Unlike in the UK and Australia, there is no US central co-ordinating group, so legal advice is taken by individual owners.

Some admit to relying on goodwill but most draw up individual contracts specifying permanent access to shared areas by the owner and guaranteeing the right to exclude visitors at any time. In return, growers have protection against their produce being damaged or destroyed through the owner’s unreasonable behaviour.

2. United Kingdom

Mark Stephens is a London lawyer – currently representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the UK – and is as far from the caricature sandal-clad environmentalist as you can get. Yet his enthusiasm for his version of landshare is clear.

“It’s fantastic, educational, intriguing,” he explains. The “it” in his case is giving part of his east London garden to a local bee-keeping society to host 14 hives, producing 700 pounds in weight of honey a year.

“I’m allergic to bees and can’t eat honey, as I’m diabetic, but I was concerned about the worldwide collapse of bee colonies a year ago,” he says.

A local bee-keeping group, initially amazed at his offer of free access to land, now uses it as a training site for children and first-time bee-keepers. Stephens, his wife Donna and their three teenage daughters open the garden twice a year for the public to see bees in action.

“Most of those who tend the bees live in apartments, so it’s a real opportunity for them. We have rules so we know who’s arriving and when, and the house is secure so there are no risks,” he says.

Some describe the UK as landshare’s driving force, especially when it received the endorsement of celebrity chef and environmental campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in 2009. He launched the website www.landshare.net, which now has 58,500 members, and offers advice to businesses, schools, charities and individuals.

Its model contracts give what it calls “a necessary legal framework” for landshare, setting out the rules of sharing, rights of the landowner and measures to ensure growers cannot gain de facto entitlement to use the land over time.

..................................................

Details

www.landshare.net

www.landshareaustralia.com.au

www.transitioninaction.com

www.urbangardenshare.org