Sunflowers, Seeds and Community: A Year at Westmead Garden
Tucked away in the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney, Westmead Community Garden has been a quiet powerhouse of community spirit for over a decade. Run by a dedicated group of volunteers, it's a place where heirloom tomatoes grow alongside friendships and where a lack of running water hasn't stopped people showing up.
Sarah has been at the heart of Westmead Garden for years, running it alongside her friend Demetrious. When we visited to hear about the past year, what came through most strongly wasn't the crops or the events, it was the depth of connection the garden creates.
"A lot of the elderly people that come here, it's more social than actually doing any gardening," Sarah told us. "They just want to come and have a cup of tea and chat. And a lot of them, I think it's the only contact they have."
That social connection runs deep. Some former regulars are now too elderly to visit, but Sarah still pops round to see them. "Hannah, I'm going to go and do the hydrangea for her on Friday, have a cup of tea with her."
Growing the unusual
Westmead isn't your average community garden. The volunteers specialise in varieties you won't find in the supermarket: round yellow courgettes, cucumelons, heirloom heritage tomatoes in deep black, and cucumbers that, as one volunteer put it, "taste like cucumber, rather than water, like the ones you get in supermarkets."
There's even an olive tree producing fruit. Demetrious has a bucket of Hackney-grown organic olives pickling in the shed.
The team have also been building hugelkultur beds, layered beds starting with decaying wood, built up with sticks, vegetation, well-rotted compost, leaf mould and manure. The beds heat up naturally as they decompose, meaning volunteers can start planting far earlier in the season than they could elsewhere. And the slow-release nutrients mean less feeding over time.
Surplus seedlings are shared with volunteers to grow at home, along with advice on how to care for them. Seeds are saved year to year. Sarah showed us a tin of last year's beans, ready to go in the ground. It's a culture of generosity and knowledge-sharing that ripples outward across the estate and beyond.
Events that bring people together
Over the past year, the garden hosted a string of community events that drew in residents well beyond the regular volunteers. Two weekends of Christmas wreath-making proved so popular that people were queuing to get a seat. There was pumpkin carving at Halloween, barbecues through the summer, and plans for pizza days to come.
Sarah used to run regular workshops on propagation, seed sowing and different ways of producing crops, but the ongoing water shortage has made that increasingly difficult.
The water crisis
The biggest challenge facing Westmead is one that's persisted for over two years: no running water on site.
The volunteers have been improvising, running a hose from a tap in a nearby bin store, wheeling a water butt back and forth to the community centre, collecting rainwater in every container they can find. But it's exhausting and it eats into the time they'd otherwise spend gardening.
“And you do feel like, what is the point? What is the point of sowing seeds if you can’t water them?”
The garden's growing capacity has roughly halved. Crops are limited to what can be sustained near the greenhouse. Volunteers who used to come for midweek and evening watering sessions have drifted away because there's simply no accessible water for them to use. The communal cooking, the pastas and shared meals after a morning's work, has had to stop too.
"It would help if we had running water, as we spent most of the summer going backwards and forwards collecting water, so not much gardening or usual crops grown," wrote one volunteer in their feedback.
Sunflowers for Alistair
One of the most moving projects to come out of the past year is Sarah's plan to rename Kingsmead the Sunflower Estate, in memory of Alistair, a much-loved member of the garden community who passed away. His cousin told Sarah that sunflowers always reminded him of Alistair.
Ralph, another long-standing volunteer, donated seeds grown from Alistair's own sunflower plants from previous years. The plan is to get every child on the estate to take a sunflower seedling home, name it, look after it, and see whose grows tallest. The aim is to fill the garden, the front of the estate and the bus stop area with sunflowers come summer.
"If we get every single child to take one home, we can name it after them and then we can have a race and see who gets the biggest," Sarah said. "And in a way, they can look after it themselves as well."
What the numbers say
This year, 37 people completed feedback questionnaires about their experience at the garden. The results speak for themselves:
97% said they had gained new skills, experience or knowledge
92% said they had met new people or made friends
97% said their physical health or mental wellbeing had improved
51% said they had made more sustainable lifestyle changes
The feedback paints a picture of a place that changes how people feel about their lives. "I feel happy and less anxious around a lot of people," wrote one respondent. said another. One volunteer simply wrote: "I am more active and happier."
“Being close to nature and with other people has made me much more content,”
Others described practical changes: growing tomatoes at home, cooking more, spending more time outside, managing their own gardens with greater confidence. Several said the garden made them feel part of their community for the first time.
Resilience, give and take
Running a community garden on a busy urban estate comes with its frustrations. Litter gets thrown over the fence. Plants get stolen. On one occasion, the entire greenhouse was stripped overnight. Branches get snapped by passers-by helping themselves to unripe fruit. But the volunteers have learned to take it in their stride.
"At first I used to get upset when there was any damage," Sarah reflected. "But you sort of expect it. It's a pretty busy estate. These things are going to happen. But it's give and take."
She pointed to the wildflower patch on the nearby marshes, where someone once took all the tulips, but another stranger left a bag of wildflower seeds and installed a bird feeder.
Looking ahead
The garden's most urgent need remains a reliable water supply. The volunteers have explored every option, from a dedicated water main to a simple drainpipe run along the back wall. They've offered to pay for the water themselves. A solution would unlock the garden's full potential: more crops, more events, more volunteers, more shared meals, and more of the connection that makes Westmead so vital to the people who use it.
Despite everything, new volunteers are joining, and they're young, enthusiastic, and ready to do the heavy lifting. "It really sort of gees you along," Sarah said, "because you can get a bit demoralised when you haven't got any water. But yeah, that enthusiasm really helps."
Westmead Garden is proof that community doesn't need perfect conditions to flourish. It just needs people who keep showing up.
Westmead Community Garden is supported by ecoACTIVE as part of our community gardening programme on the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney. If you'd like to get involved or find out more, get in touch.
