Naomi Malaiholla suddenly had enough of struggling in the vegetable garden behind her garden last September. She grew vegetables on the strip of land she had on loan. But the condition of the plots next to her vegetable garden was not very inspiring. “Weeds were very high. Then I thought: couldn’t we just turn it into a communal garden? Immediately afterwards I sent a letter to the housing association.”
Youssef El Otmani, social management consultant at the Servatius corporation, was immediately enthusiastic. He was already working on creating a communal garden in Maastricht-West at the time, he says. “But it was difficult there, mainly because of the size. I had to deal with 36 houses.” At the site proposed by Malaiholla, not far from the inner city, it should be feasible, El Otmani suspected. “Only the tenants of two single-family homes and nine downstairs and upstairs apartments were involved there.”
The strip of land in question was once laid out to give the tenants of the upstairs apartments their own greenery. Residents of ground floor apartments already had a garden behind their house, those of upstairs apartments only had a balcony. The idea has already been applied in duplex houses – houses that were split into two living spaces – that were built during the reconstruction after the Second World War, but also in social housing projects in the 1980s.
The idea was nice, according to El Otmani, but in practice it only worked poorly. Because of the distance between the gardens and the houses, because not everyone felt like working in them, or because tenants could no longer handle the maintenance as they got older.
Roos Schellings, tenant of an upstairs apartment, did root around in her garden. “But really it was just work. The whole environment did not invite to sit in it.”
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On loan
Tenants of family and ground floor apartments, such as Malaiholla and one of her neighbours, Herman Drittij, have meanwhile taken care of some neglected gardens. “But we had that on loan,” says Drittij. “If the tenant changed upstairs and he claimed his garden, then we had to hand over those pieces of greenery. That was actually impossible to do.” So did El Otmani. “Almost always when I came here, there was a fuss around those gardens of the upstairs apartments.”
A few joint meetings with tenants sufficed to generate a lot of enthusiasm for a joint approach. El Otmani: „After that everything came together nicely. Naomi knew Hanneke Rustema from a few blocks away, who turned out to be designing gardens. She combined the ideas of the tenants: the vegetable gardens (in containers, so that gardening is not the same as being constantly bent) that Naomi wanted, the desired fruit trees and the reuse of water from Roos, and the round shapes and the star from Maastricht. city coat of arms on the terrace, as Herman had devised it.”
The Maastricht Elisabeth Strouven Fund contributed to the design of the garden. The local nature and environmental education center supplied the plants. The housing association has also increased the monthly service costs by EUR 4 hours as a contribution to the costs of the communal garden. El Otmani: „That required persuasion. Some of the tenants had to pay more and give up their own garden.”
Almost everyone eventually participates. Only one tenant of an upstairs apartment refused. He is nevertheless welcome in the garden. Schellings thinks the communal garden is more than worth the extra 4 euros per month: “It is already three times as beautiful as on the drawing. And the extra fruit trees and the birdhouses in front of the barns are still to come.”
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Another tenant, a woman of almost 99, had to move to a care home just before the joint garden was completed, because independent living was no longer possible. “She did attend the opening,” says Malaiholla. She points to spiral ornamentation in a bush. “She crocheted those windcatchers especially for the garden.”
The tenants keep the flowered garden together and make use of the shared terrace. “Thanks to this extra meeting place, you see an increase in social cohesion,” says El Otmani. “People look out for each other more. The sense of security has increased. Water that caused leaks in the sheds during heavy rain is now collected in a water reservoir at the lowest point of the garden.” That way it can be used for watering. This is no superfluous luxury in view of the increasingly frequent drought.
Other housing associations in South Limburg are interested in the project. The rapid development of the communal garden is also accelerating El Otmani’s garden project in Maastricht-West, which would not take off. “Elsewhere in the city we are going to experiment with a green strip between flats. In the summer you bake away. With a communal garden you can remove some of the heat stress and also improve drainage during heavy showers. Many of those strips are just lying there.”
Everything depends on the enthusiasm of residents, El Otmani knows. A block away, a communal garden does not get off the ground; the tenants are not yet enthusiastic.