Healthy Garden Plots? Harvesting Stories of Social Connectedness from Community Gardens

Because of their profound effects on health and wellbeing, particularly their sense of social connectedness, community garden stories warrant the close attention of public health professionals. Efforts to tell these stories, if and when told, often smooth over, intentionally ignore or fail to appreciate vital subplots of social experiences that deserve our collective consideration. Put simply, this article advocates for public health to pay greater attention to the subplots—those secondary strands of the main plotline—of community garden stories. To demonstrate, the plot and subplots associated with the Queen Anne Memorial Garden, a community garden located in a diverse urban neighborhood in a Midwestern American city, are examined. The resultant narrative provides a more complex understanding of the social relationships that formed in and around the community garden under examination. Ultimately, the article shows how sublots weave together alternative interpretations of a story based on different constituents’ experiences silenced by main plotlines and encourage audiences to critically reflect upon their own behaviours.