Essay

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The essay “The Community of the Garden” is based on the book Seedfolks, written in 1997 by Paul Fleischerman. This book shows the loneliness and the feeling of not belonging of a group of immigrants living in the United States, and how they overcome this conflict by creating a community. This is the story of thirteen different people whose lives became connected by the formation of a garden in a vacant lot of the neighborhood. This garden is a metaphor of a community. In this essay, I focused on how the people of the garden solved the problems that they faced. I consider it my best work because I enjoyed reading the book and working on this assignment. Also, I liked the way in which I treated the topic of community. Even though there were different stories, found certain conflicts that affected all of them because they were part of a community. However, they could solve them because they behaved as a community. Sometimes I read books without thinking and understanding the implicit meaning of them. This assignment helped me to improve my critical and analytical reading. If there would be something that I could change in this essay, I would like to include a deepest psychological analysis of human behavior in communities.

One of the most important necessities of human beings is to have the feeling of belonging. The sensation of not being part of something might cause loneliness and unhappiness. The book Seedfolks, written by Paul Fleischman, illustrates the attempt of a group of immigrants in the United States to overcome the problem of not belonging. The neighborhood’s garden allowed them to become part of something. Even though the garden turned out to be a pleasant community, some problems appeared; the vacant lot in which it was growing was full of garbage, carrying water to irrigate the plants was a hard task and some people that were not part of the garden didn’t respect it. Every community faces problems but the challenge is to overcome those conflicts by finding solutions.

The first problem that the neighborhood faced when trying to grow their gardens, was the amount of trash in the vacant lot. “Don’t know why anyone called that lot ‘vacant’. The garbage was piled high as your waist” (Fleischman 19). Leona, one of the women of the neighborhood, willing to grow her own garden but concerned by the amount of trash that covered it, began to move towards different government agencies in order to make someone clean that lot. She wasn’t heard until the fourth day she ceased calling and went directly to the Public Health Department with a bag full of trash from the lot. The cleaning of the vacant lot was very important for the formation of the community. The problem of the trash was solved because consciously or not, she was the first person that thought of the garden as a community. Leona could have cleaned a small part of the lot to grow her own garden, though she troubled herself with calling to public agencies so everyone who wanted could grow their seeds too. When the lot was clean a lot of people began to grow their own gardens. The lot that once was vacant and filled with trash turned into a beautiful garden. However, in the hot summer the garden demanded a great deal of water.

In summer, carrying water to wet the plants became a difficult duty for all of them. Sam, who also had a garden in the lot, had the idea of making a contest in order to solve this problem. “When people all the time complain about carrying water, he start contest. He said how adults couldn’t solve problem, let children try” (Fleischman 38). A little girl, who proposed to fill garbage cans with water from near buildings’ rain spouts, won the contest. The meaning of this contest, is not only the fact that Sam paid twenty dollars to find a solution that would benefit everybody in the garden, but also that he took into account children. The solution for this problem was found by involving everyone in the community. Almost everyone in the neighborhood planted their gardens, now all of them belonged to a community. But there were also people who were not part of it, they didn’t cooperate and sometimes even damaged the garden.

The third problem that the community had to deal with was the fact that some outsiders, people who were not part of the neighbor’s community, didn’t respect the garden. Amir talks about that conflict and how they solved it, “a woman screamed, . . . A man with a knife had taken her purse . . . we caught him . . . Not one of us had chased a criminal before. And most likely except near the garden. There, you felt part of a community” (Fleischman 60). The solution for those problems was not hard to find because the garden was already a community, people were used to help each other whenever they needed.

Like any other community, there were some conflicts that the garden’s community faced: the lot in which it started was full of trash, carry water to wet the plants was difficult and some outsiders showed aggression towards the garden. In this neighborhood of immigrants, being part of the garden turned out to be a way of feeling that they belonged someplace. To find the sensation of belonging was an essential and common goal among them. Because they all shared the same objective, they were able to overcome the conflicts they faced by working together as a community.