Atlanta: Garden Farm Park City
with Meg Webster
 
 
A hedgerow is a densely planted space which grows up between specifically cultivated areas.  It is a space made where the cultivation of the mower and plow do not reach; it provides a diverse habitat.  It is a space for events which do not occur in the regularly cultivated fields.
 
The project is situated in a common ground and garden in the Midtown section of Atlanta, officially known as the Bedford-Pine neighborhood and historically known as Buttermilk Bottom.  It is a patchwork of four sites and their residual spaces among early 20th century single-family houses, an elderly high-rise, public housing and new condominiums and garden apartments; and the civic center complex. It includes a large part of Renaissance Park, areas of Bedford Pine Park and two adjoining vacant sites.
 
The adjacent but separate parks, Renaissance and Bedford Pine, demonstrate two very different uses and forms of American urban space typically associated with leisure; the park as an expansive green and wooded place of quiet refuge and visual peace; and the park as playfields and courts for physical recreation. 
 
Farm Garden Park City combines the recreational and pastoral with a productive garden in which diverse kinds of growing, land form, ecological principles and community relations are actively intertwined with one another.   There are many pathways through this fabric.
Four sites are linked together within a common field by a jogging / walking surface and the actions of recreational gardening.  The project interweaves the uses, forms and symbolic charges found in the farm, garden, park and city.  Its spaces are made of the intersections of these divergent processes of land formation and occupation and are constructed to allow for exchange among the various constituencies surrounding the parks. 
 
BODY - GROWING - BUILDING
 
The project is a community garden and commercial one with a master gardener as director; it is a teaching garden where neighborhood participants may learn the basic skills of gardening and the gardener’s assistants may gain more in depth skills about gardening and business; it is a recreational space.  The Garden was to be built by the residents with the assistance of the Atlanta Parks Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Corporate support.