The Phoenix community garden is located on the Unitarian Church’s lot in the Montreal neighbourhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. A space, behind the church, was vacant for a long period and was contaminated. The clergy decided to work with a neighbourhood environmental organization to make this space accessible and green, the original idea being to create a collective vegetable garden.

Our approach for this project was to create a solid basic infrastructure which would allow the community to appropriate the space. The garden has a simple rectangular shape which gives the possibility for gardeners to decide themselves the shapes of the different crop beds and to modify them throughout the years. A precise calculation of soil excavation and filling was made in order to avoid transporting any material out of the site, thus lowering the cost of the project. Only the garden is filled with new soil for culture. A great number of shrubs and perennials were planted in the garden’s surroundings, to make it a lush place.