Garden of Hopes & Dreams

An Afternoon at Highland Youth Garden

Words by Taylor Dorrell / Photography by Taylor Dorrell / Layout by Atlas Biro

"It only took my son maybe a day or two of going to their youth program, and he was in love with gardening,” longtime Hilltop resident Kayla Davis told me. Before attending Highland Youth Garden’s summer program, her seven-year-old, Kaiden, had little desire or interest in what many children consider one of the most unappetizing pieces of the five main food groups: fruits and vegetables. But after collectively producing these foods in the garden, the greens transcended their negative reputation and became a means of enriching and expanding the existence of all those involved. The organization installed a garden bed in the Davis’ backyard, where Kaiden now grows his own food. Kayla told me,

That excitement is wonderful for any youth, especially when they feel like they’ve grown it as a team, and they’re able to bear witness to it growing from a seed to now something that’s able to be picked,

After two Hilltop recreation centers closed their doors in 2009, founder Peggy Murphy banded with local educators and community members to grow food and teach children about gardening on a nearby vacant plot of land. “We started with a dollar and a prayer,” Murphy said of those early days. Over the next decade, the garden expanded, adding structures, inviting members to the team, and partnering with nearby schools and youth centers to provide an empowering educational experience for the kids who live in the neighborhood. What was once an empty lot when Murphy started has transformed into a multi-plot facility with a building, greenhouse, and various crops that only a connoisseur of gardens could appreciate fully. By the time Murphy passed away in 2020, the Highland Youth Garden was a staple in the community.

The Highland Youth Garden is in that part of Columbus unfamiliar to admirers of the city’s more canonized neighborhoods: west of a quickly gentrifying Franklinton, the underside of deindustrialization, a lower-middle class region of old homes and businesses, and a severe lack of grocery stores. The garden provides an important, even necessary, service when considering the history of the Hilltop. Because the Hilltop had lost crucial 20th-century factories from General Motors, John Deere, Westinghouse, and its state-of-theart psychiatric hospital, the once segregated area and its reputation exists in that place of our urban imagination reserved hastily for that of crime and poverty. The Highland Youth Garden looks like an inverse of the aging homes, a modest plot of soil, a towering greenhouse, and, at the entrance, along an uneven sidewalk, a wooden sign that reads Highland Youth Garden: grow food, grow minds, grow community.

We actually prefer the term food apartheid...Because that makes clear that it’s not a natural circumstance; it is actually a societal choice.

“So much of the land, especially where Highland Youth Garden is today, was actually family farms,” the Hilltop historian and Hilltop area commissioner, Jennie Keplar, told me. “So, it’s actually pretty appropriate to have the Highland Youth Garden where it is because much of that land in that area was private farmland.” But now, the neighborhood is a food desert, lacking any grocery stores within a mile radius. “We actually prefer the term food apartheid,” Shelly Casto, the executive director of Highland Youth Garden, told me. “Because that makes clear that it’s not a natural circumstance; it is actually a societal choice.”

While primarily focused on youth education, the garden also produces more than 4,000 pounds of food annually. While that doesn’t put a dent in the food access shortage, it’s at least an attempt to spur the necessary changes, Casto says. “We are encouraging people to take matters into their own hands by helping them build backyard gardens, learning how to grow their own food, making the tools to do so accessible to them, and then advocating for different policies.” This food, produced by the community, is given back to the community through its various programs and free markets. In a desolate food desert like the Hilltop, these markets can provide the only produce available within miles.

The garden is a breath of fresh air peeking through a landscape of car-crowded roads, underinvested infrastructure, and a community recovering from decades of deindustrialization and segregation. It is an all too rare space designed for people in a city crammed with highways, parking lots, and nonplaces. “I think the biggest thing for other people to know, especially working in the greater hilltop area, is that it’s a huge service that is needed in the community,” Kayla Davis said. “Right now, we have to go to the garden to get your fresh fruits and veggies all throughout the week, so it’s a very much utilized resource in the community.”

Get involved in a variety of ways. From educational programming, gardening, creating art, behind-the-scenes planning & support, or simply sending a donation – there is a way for you to contribute.

highlandyouthgarden.org/get-involved