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  • From: Niels Corfield <mudguard@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Chadwick Garden, pictures
  • Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2007 11:19:29 +0000

Rain,

Can we get to see some of these pics?
I hope so.

All the best,
Niels Corfield

My Bookmarks:
http://del.icio.us/entrailer

My Pics and Projects:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nielscorfield/
http://picasaweb.google.com/mudguard

Groups I Contribute to:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/polyculturepeople/
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/leeds_permaculture_network/?yguid=243022692
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/scythe

Swillington Permaculture Forest Garden Project -Aerial Image (Now Quite Old):
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=LS26+8QA&ie=UTF8&z=19&ll=53.760874,-1.428051&spn=0.000943,0.00339&t=k&om=1



Rain Tenaqiya wrote:
The Chadwick Garden is currently undergoing a revival, with abandoned areas
being restored to production and new designs. It is the best mixed food
garden I've seen, with some areas approaching food forest status. I've
attached a couple pictures from my book, West Coast Food Forestry (on disc),
if you'd like to see what some of these areas look like. I believe that the
trees, shrubs, and other perennials planted in this garden (and others like
it) are one of the main factors for its continued existence, as they provide
a structure and continuity through all the changes and periods of neglect.
Rain

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Today's Topics:

1. Alan Chadwick?s garden is a ?garden of the mind?as much as it
is of the soil. (Lawrence F. London, Jr.)


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Message: 1
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:17:58 -0500
From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." Subject: [permaculture] Alan Chadwick?s garden is a ?garden of the
mind?as much as it is of the soil.
To: permaculture
Message-ID: <45B0FD46.5070707@intrex.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed


A Brief History of the UCSC Farm & Garden Projects
Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food System, UC at Santa Cruz
http://zzyx.ucsc.edu/casfs/about/fgstory.html

"Alan Chadwick?s garden is a ?garden of the mind? as much as it
is of the soil, and like all genuinely inspired creations it has the power
to stir us to new dreams, to a new vision of what man and nature can do,
together."
- Page Smith, UCSC Professor of History

"This was the first UC effort to focus on sustainable agriculture,
commercial organic production methods, and the social issues associated
with developing a sustainable food system. "

The UC system is well known for its contributions to agriculture: the land
grant universities are recognized worldwide for research in such fields as
plant breeding, integrated pest management, and livestock care. Perhaps
less well known is a project that started on the UC Santa Cruz campus in
1967, when legendary English gardener Alan Chadwick broke ground for a
student garden.

In their own unique ways, the UCSC Garden Project (now the Alan Chadwick
Garden) and the UCSC Farm have nurtured a different approach to
horticulture and agriculture?an approach that emphasizes exacting soil
and plant care, resource conservation, working with and respecting nature,
and finding the ecological basis for sustainable food production. This was
the first UC effort to focus on sustainable agriculture, commercial organic
production methods, and the social issues associated with developing a
sustainable food system. Under the auspices of the Center for Agroecology &
Sustainable Food Systems (formerly the Agroecology Program), the Farm &
Garden continue to combine tradition and vision as students, staff and
faculty search for environmentally and socially sound methods to produce
and distribute crops.

This article presents a brief history of the UCSC Garden & Farm projects
and the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems. Given the more
than thirty years which this history covers, it is by no means a definitive
effort, but is offered with the hope that readers ?especially those
unfamiliar with the Farm & Garden?will gain some sense of the
contributions these projects have made. One could argue that "only in Santa
Cruz" could the Farm & Garden have taken root and thrived, in a time and
place that encouraged new ideas and innovative approaches to learning.
The Garden?s Root

UCSC?s garden was sown in an era of both political and physical turmoil.
As bulldozers reshaped the Cowell Ranch?s meadows and forests for campus
building sites, students sought "a sense of place" at the fledgling
University. In 1966, a conversation between visiting professor of history
Donald Nicholl and his office-trailer mate, philosophy professor Paul Lee,
sparked the idea of creating a garden to offset students? feelings of
displacement and disruption. "It was a time of obvious destruction,"
recalls Chadwick contemporary Jim Nelson. "The Vietnam war was raging, the
world seemed preoccupied with artificiality and contrivance ? students
were hungry for something new that would help foster change, love of the
earth, positive things." (1) Developing a garden was seen as a way to
bridge some of the gap between the natural and the artificial.

The idea found enthusiastic support from Chancellor Dean McHenry, who
smoothed the way for an agricultural effort on the new campus. In one of
those chance events that has now passed into legend, a Bavarian Countess
provided the link between UCSC and the gardener who would leave his
indelible mark. Countess Freya von Moltke* visited the campus in 1966 with
her friend Oegain Rosenstock-Huessey, a mentor of founding faculty member
Page Smith. The garden idea came up in conversation, and it was von Moltke
who made the connection to Alan Chadwick. She had met Chadwick in South
Africa, where he?d gone after World War Two to start a theater company
and to design a national display garden.

Chadwick was reluctant to take on the task. "Alan was in his fifties, a
failed Shakespearean actor ? failed in the sense that he?d never met
with any great success on the stage ? and suffered a great deal from his
back, which he injured during the war," recalled Smith in a 1992
interview.(3) "He was looking for a place to live out his life in relative
comfort. But Freya said to him, ?Alan, you must make a garden here. This
is your mission.?"

Persuaded by von Moltke, Chadwick arrived in Santa Cruz in the winter of
1967. It was an exciting time at the UC system?s newest campus.
Competition for admission was fierce, as students sought to take part in an
academic setting that encouraged experimentation and creativity. Anthony
Mohr, a member of the campus?s ?pioneer class,? remembers that ". . .
we created our own traditions, rhythms, and boundaries. We barred
competition. There were no grades, no rank in class. . . No athletic teams
existed beyond informal groups. We governed by town meetings. . .
Fraternities were banned."(4) Against this backdrop, and accompanied by
Chancellor McHenry and a group of students, Chadwick toured the new campus
in search of a garden site.

His choice for the enterprise crossed the line that distinguished the
simply challenging from the truly daring: given the pick of the Cowell
Ranch?s gently sloping, grass- and flower-covered meadows, Chadwick
instead staked out four acres on a steep, rocky, chaparral-covered hill
between Stevenson and Merrill colleges. "At that time, the hillside was the
heart of campus," says Orin Martin, who now manages the Chadwick Garden.
"Alan wanted to be in the center of things, and the Garden was the first
thing people would see as they drove onto the upper section of the
university."
Growing the Garden

Chadwick set to work on the stony soil with a vengeance, using only the
Bulldog spade and fork that Smith & Hawken would one day make popular.
Author Robert Howard writes, "For the next two years, without taking a day
off, this 58-year-old man worked from dawn to dusk every day of the week.
Those who were there say he worked more heroically than they had ever seen
anyone work before." (5) Drawn to the emerging garden and the tall, lean
Englishman, students pitched in to clear coyote brush and poison oak, and
amend the paper-thin topsoil with tons of horse manure and other organic
materials. Under Chadwick?s often-demanding direction, volunteers hauled
limestone from the campus quarry to build paths and retaining walls, and
loosened the rock-hard soil with pickaxes before setting to work digging
permanent garden beds. "Those who fell under his spell had generally to put
up with a good deal. That so many were willing to do so is the best
possible testimony to the power of what he had to teach which was
inseparable from the way he taught it and person he was," wrote Page Smith
(6).

By 1969 the brushy hillside had been transformed. "From thin soil and
poison oak had sprung an almost magical garden that ranged from hollyhocks
and artemisias to exquisite vegetables and nectarines," says Robert Howard
(7). Chadwick had designed the site as a set of distinct "rooms" reached
from a winding central path, with marbled limestone walls buttressing
sloping garden beds designed to take full advantage of the sun?s course.
"Life appeared on that slope?the hummingbirds, the butterflies, and the
birds were always there," says Paul Lee. Wave after wave of tulips,
chrysanthemums, tithonia, cornflowers, zinnias, anemones, coreopsis,
scabiosa, and other blossoms brightened the Garden year-round. "It was a
heady period," wrote long-time Garden supporter Louise Cain. "A kiosk
supplied daily bunches of cut flowers to anyone passing by. Never have
University offices and home dining tables in Santa Cruz been so
blessed."(8)

Chadwick introduced a unique approach to gardening, which he called the
?biodynamic/French intensive? method. Biodynamics was a movement
initiated by Chadwick?s former tutor, Austrian philosopher Rudolf
Steiner, which according to Chadwick,

"...refers to total truth ? the utmost connection of spirit, mind and
body, with horticulture as just one of its facets."(9) "French intensive"
reflects the practice of 19th century French market gardeners, who planted
their carefully amended and cultivated beds using an ?intensive?
spacing, so that plants touched each other when mature. According to
current Garden manager Orin Martin, the biodynamic/French intensive method
". . . synthesized traditional horticulture practices and observations from
the Greek, Chinese and Roman cultures on through 19th century French market
gardeners ? folk techniques with modern scientific validity."(10)

Students were taught how to "double dig" beds, using a spade and fork to
loosen the soil to a depth of two spade blades. Chadwick noted that this
approach to gardening was nothing new. In a 1974 interview, he explained,

"What we call the French intensive method was something picked up by
the ancient Greeks. They discovered that all plant life grew better on
landslides than on the bountiful, fertile soils of the alluvial plains,
where indeed plants grew well, but on landslides they found they grew
infinitely better." (11)

The double digging process mimics the effect of landslides, creating
aerated, well-drained soil conditions. The Garden?s carefully tended
beds, enriched with compost, bone meal, leaf mold, and other amendments
could produce up to four times the abundance of traditionally managed plots
from the same space.

Chadwick didn?t just strive for quantity. His upper class upbringing in
Edwardian English society had left him with exacting tastes and an
appreciation for fine food that he passed on to his young charges. In an
era when all supermarket lettuce was iceberg, all potatoes Russet and apple
choices were either red or green, the Garden boasted heirloom varieties of
vegetables, fruit and flowers. This was more than two decades before
"California cuisine" would make radicchio, purple beans, and fingerling
potatoes standard fare on restaurant menus. "It?s not much of a stretch
to say that Chadwick and those who trained with him were responsible for
the interest in distinctive fruit and vegetable varieties that we see
today," says Martin.

Rejecting anything synthetic, Chadwick also helped spur the organic
gardening and farming movements, with their craftsman-like approach to soil
building and plant care. He used organic inputs to enrich the rocky soil
and deplored the use of chemical pesticides. He preached composting ?
"Life unto death and death unto life" ? and emphasized the soil?s
fragility, warning that, "The skin of the Earth must be approached with
great sensitivity ... it is fragile and must be protected."

The techniques worked wonders on the inhospitable hillside. In a 1969
article(12), Sunset Magazine called Chadwick ". . . one of the most
successful organic gardeners the editors have ever met. Mr. Chadwick
believes that a healthy plant is not likely to be eaten or overcome by
pests and his intensive kind of culture is such that the plants do stay in
great health." Sunset?s editors marveled at the transformation of
marginal land into an abundant garden, reporting that, "At times during the
peak of the flower season, the students cut and placed ten thousand blooms
a day at the help-yourself kiosk on the main campus road. And last year the
gardeners grew, picked and supplied the college cafeterias with 1 3/4 tons
of tomatoes."

Those who worked with him found Chadwick a short-fused amalgam of charm and
fury. In a 1980 memoriam, Page Smith wrote,

"In an age of "collective leadership" Alan Chadwick was imperious as a
King. In a day of carefully modulated and self-conscious "interpersonal
relations," he stormed and raged not just at abstractions like laziness or
indifference or inattention, but at the poor frail flesh of those who were
the destined instruments of his terrible, unflinching will. And then
suddenly, the consummate actor for whom all the world was a stage, he would
be as sunny, as playful, as irresistible as the prince of a fairly tale."
(13)

Despite his mercurial personality, Chadwick found willing listeners. "He
was a renegade and a madman, which is probably why young people were so
drawn to him," recalls Wendy Johnson, a former Chadwick apprentice. With
1962?s Silent Spring as a backdrop and the first Earth Day on the
horizon, Chadwick?s emphasis on working with rather than overpowering
nature, struck a chord. Some student volunteers began to spend more time in
the Garden than in the classroom, forming the core of an apprentice group
that would eventually be the model for a more formal training program. Beth
Benjamin, a freshman in 1967, recalls,

"Alan was simply the most fascinating human being on campus for me.
Soon nothing else seemed to come into focus but his garden. I was unhappy
and doing poorly in my classes, but in the garden I vibrated with the
colors and the smells and the stories Alan told us about the plants and his
travels and the new skills I was learning. By April I convinced my
counselor that I wanted a leave of absence, and I could finally devote my
full time to the world of plants. As an apprentice, I worked from dawn
until dark and was filled with his dreams and our common task of bringing
the garden into reality, breaking new ground and tending what we had
already planted. He had flaming temper tantrums, told tales, gave us dinner
parties, fed us from his own bread and ham and cheese, threw dirt clods at
us and laughed as he hid behind the compost piles. He taught us the joy of
work, the discipline to persevere in order to make a dream come true, even
when we were hot and tired, and the deliciousness of resting and drinking
tea after such monumental labors ... I think of Alan almost every day
still, 30 years later, and smile with the memories and with gratitude for
all he gave me." (14)

Expanding the Vision: The UCSC Farm

The Garden?s success spurred interest in an expanded undertaking. In the
spring of 1970, students approved the use of registration fees to help
develop a campus Farm, where Chadwick?s techniques could be tested on a
larger scale. Chancellor McHenry added support from his discretionary
funds, and in the spring of 1971 the campus planning committee designated
14 acres of rolling meadow near the campus?s west entrance for the new
venture (the Farm has since been expanded to 25 acres). Steve Kaffka, a
former student and "lieutenant" of Chadwick?s, was put in charge of the
enterprise. Disagreements with University officials over the Farm?s
design and management were in part responsible for Chadwick?s leaving
UCSC in 1973, when he moved on to start new gardens in Marin County (at the
Green Gulch Zen Center), Saratoga and Covelo, California, and New Market,
Virginia.

UCSC?s Farm attracted a fiercely dedicated group of volunteers ? many
of them former students who had left school to devote full time effort to
Chadwick and the Garden, others who had been drawn to the project from
outside the University. These self-proclaimed "home farmers" moved onto the
Farm site, erected tipis, built a rough-hewn "cookhouse," and began to
plant windbreaks and fruit trees, lay irrigation pipe, and put in
hand-worked vegetable beds.

Following Chadwick?s lead, the home farmers rejected the idea of using
mechanical implements to develop the Farm. They tried plowing with draft
horses, and directed by Brian Barhaugh, built a large barn using hand-hewn
lumber and Amish-style joinery techniques that relied on wooden pegs rather
than nails (the barn is still used for equipment storage). After a year,
most of the home farmers moved to Arkansas to homestead their own land.

Under Kaffka?s direction, the Farm found a ready audience amongst UCSC
students interested in pursuing projects ranging from alternative energy to
soil ecology. Still a relatively young, experimental campus, UCSC was open
to non-traditional courses, student-developed classes, and independent
studies. A group of students championed the idea of a Farm Center that
would serve as a dining hall and teaching facility. Campus architect and
lecturer Chuck Kahrs led a special class to work on the plans. Greg Smith,
a young designer and builder, gave months of his labor both to the task of
building and to teaching student volunteers who worked two summers with
hammer and nails. The result was a beautiful, airy redwood building
dedicated in 1976, which continues to serve as a focus of on-Farm life.

The energy crisis sparked other student projects. Physics professor Peter
Scott offered a course in "Practical Physics," using the Farm as a
demonstration site. Students built wind generators, solar-operated food
dryers, composting toilets, and a solar shower (since refurbished and still
in use). Others enrolled in classes taught by Kaffka to learn the basics of
organic soil management and food production.

Although student and volunteer energy and a small, paid staff helped
maintain the Farm and Garden and push through projects such as the Farm
Center, the sites needed a year-round, on-site work force if they were to
develop and thrive. At the same time, students were interested in getting a
more in-depth, hands-on experience than was available through a regular
ten-week class. In 1975, thanks to the efforts of Louise Cain (wife of
Environmental Studies professor Stanley Cain), a year-long Apprenticeship
in Ecological Horticulture was developed and offered through UCSC?s
Extension program for students seeking intensive training in organic
gardening and farming techniques (see be).

The Apprenticeship provided a more formal educational opportunity and
helped address the need for a committed group of on-site workers, but
Chancellor McHenry?s retirement forced Farm and Garden supporters to face
the challenge of finding continued funding and an administrative "home" for
the projects within the University. Fortunately, several distinguished
Environmental Studies professors, including Stanley Cain and Kenneth
Norris, stepped forward to champion the Garden and Farm. In May of 1976 the
faculty of College 8 (which included most of the Environmental Studies
faculty) voted unanimously to undertake academic sponsorship of the effort
as an adjunct to the college.

The facilities became part of an expanded Natural History curriculum.
Norris wrote,

"Natural history is the study of the natural world from a holistic
viewpoint, the learning of her rules and processes. At the Farm and Garden,
the care of the soil, the concern that natural systems be understood and
guarded, and the oneness of people with the earth that supports them form
the philosophical basis for their functioning. This is ?applied natural
history? in its finest sense. Our academic scope for natural history at
Santa Cruz is thus immeasurably broadened by our new association with the
Farm and Garden program." (15)

Student interest in the Farm and Garden grew as the new academic focus
brought more opportunities at the sites. In 1978, Environmental Studies

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