The Gardening Charter

An email arrived last week from Medfield's Town Administrator (we don’t have ‘City Managers’ or ‘Mayors’, just a Board of Selectmen and an appointed official who oversees our various town departments).  Attached to the email was a letter saying the Board of Selectmen had decided to “review the structure, purpose, and prior years’ work for all appointed Boards and Committees” before reappointing anyone for the coming year.  Attached to it was a two-page questionnaire.

Medfield has 45 Committees; 30 of them ‘Special Committees’, and another fifteen created by the Town Charter. These range from one to ‘Study Memorials’ to a ‘Permanent Planning and Building Committee’. 

Tucked somewhere in the middle of the list is the Community Gardens Committee.  It so happens that Betty and I are on that Committee.  We are, truth be told, its only members and have been so for almost ten years.  We came to be on the Committee because, in 2009, we complained to a Selectman that the Community Garden was in a state of disarray.  We charged the Garden was run by a clique that allocated multiple plots to itself while allowing the others to lie fallow. Spigots leaked or were disconnected.  Weeds were everywhere.  Chaos ruled.

A week later, the Town Clerk asked us to come to the Medfield Town House (we also don’t have a Town Hall, just a ‘Town House’) to be sworn in as members of the Community Gardens Committee (we had no idea there was a ‘Committee’).  After we had been sworn in, we asked when the Committee would next meet.  The Town Clerk shook her head.  “You decide.  They all quit.”

The garden seems to run fairly well

In the intervening years, we have run the garden as best we can.  Our names appear annually in the Town Yearbook, but that is the extent to which anyone acknowledges we hold some official title (I make a point of signing all Community-Garden-related emails ‘Garden Ogre’).

So, it came as a surprise we needed to write a ‘Charter’ for the Committee, and that the Charter should include our “long-term objective or purpose”, “goals for the year”, and “dates and deliverables for committee work”.  In return, the Selectmen would, ominously, “determine if the Committee should continue to exist” and “identify which members wish to continue on the Committee”.

So, I sat down to fill out the questionnaire, starting with answering “Question 1: Should this Committee continue to exist?’  I thought long and hard about it, and finally wrote, “The Community Garden exists only because the Town considers a vegetable garden, open to all interested residents and located on Town land, to be a worthwhile use of such land and a benefit that makes the town a more appealing community in which to live.  The Community Gardens Committee, in turn, exists to relieve the Town of the expense and manpower that would otherwise be required to perform the tasks outlined in the Charter.”

Steal from the best,
I always say...

From there, all I had to do was write the ‘Charter’ I had so blithely referenced.  What, exactly, should a Charter chart?  I decided to use as my reference point a document from 1215 called the ‘Great Charter’ or, as they said in those days, the ‘Magna Carta’.  When you read that 804-year-old bit of statecraft, you come to understand it is a ‘how-to-govern’ manual.  For example, “No constable may compel a knight to pay money for castle-guard if the knight is willing to undertake the guard in person, or with reasonable excuse to supply some other fit man to do it.” Simple, clear, to the point. 

So, I changed the wording somewhat, but otherwise came up with twelve things the Community Gardens Committee is supposed to do; starting with making certain everyone in town knows in February and March plot are available, and concluding with making certain the water gets turned off at the end of October.  I was tempted to include something about droit de seigneur just to see if anyone was reading my responses but, sadly, Betty overruled me.

Once upon a time we all lined up
outside the Town House to get a plot

Writing the Charter, in turn, clarified my understanding of what is involved in running the Community Garden and how it has changed.  Once upon a time, interested gardeners lined up outside the Town House on one specified day and a town employee took money and assigned plots.  Until a few years ago, a group of Department of Public Works employees spent an afternoon staking out the gardens and, once every two weeks, a town tractor mowed the garden’s perimeter.  Now, all these tasks are done by volunteers.

The 2008 plot assignment map Betty and I inherited from the Committee showed a garden with a total of 40 plots, but just 27 gardeners, many with multiple plots, and five gardens that were never taken (and, if memory serves, another half dozen that were abandoned mid-season).  This year, 83 individuals or families are in 73 plots of varying sizes.  Next year, if all goes well, there will be 20 new plots in an annex.  Either interest in gardening has grown exponentially in the last decade, or we’ve fulfilled a need that was not being met.

The questionnaire I filled out will go into a pile along with responses from the other 44 Committees.  Will the Community Gardens Committee continue to exist in 2020?  Time will tell.  Will Betty and I continue to chair it?  I hope so.  I’ve gotten to enjoy signing memos as the ‘Garden Ogre’.