Two community gardens in London are bringing people together to grow food, with love. Antiracist, anticolonial, intergenerational, rooted in indigenous and ancestral wisdom, and strongly connected with nature, these gardens are regenerative, nourishing and healing – not just for the earth but for the soul. The stories, photographs and this poem were created in celebration of these gardens and the women who are growing there.
Sowing seeds of change
The drizzle from Sandra Salazar D’eca’s watering can adds to an already misty morning. It dissolves the sharp edges of high-rise flats, beyond. “I always tell people that the first time I sowed a seed, it changed my life.” She founded GoGrowWithLove to reconnect People of Colour to agroecological growing. This allows them to pass on the ancestral knowledge of nature that can root those in the diaspora to a new home; a verdant tangle of glasshouses and allotments bursting from the cracks between London’s concrete.
Initially motivated by the need to nourish her newborn son, Sandra has since empowered more than 70 African-Caribbean women through her Women Leading with the Land project. GoGrowWithLove has also trained up 250 housing residents to enhance local food resilience, supported hundreds of allotment holders to gain long-term access to land, and shared growing skills with over 5,000 children.
“It sounds silly to say a seed changed my life, but it did. Because I sowed that seed thinking it was a new beginning for me and my son and my family. And then the next week we went back, and the seed had grown into something. That was magic. And then a couple of months later we were able to harvest a massive marrow.”
“I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing for years, because in a way I was embarrassed. Because where I came from, as a city girl, growing food wasn’t cool. Until COVID happened. And then everybody wanted to grow food. All of a sudden, those people that I was hiding from were growing food with me.”
Working in the boroughs of Tottenham and Enfield, GoGrowWithLove is as concerned with bringing women together to support one another as it is with providing practical skills. “As ‘SoilSistars’, we are all made of the same elements: from the soil and the stars. It’s deeply empowering to recognise this connection.”
“For us melanin-rich people in the diaspora who are perhaps missing that connection with the motherland, food growing and working with soil are ways that we can pass on ancestral information: we can communicate our traditions, our cultural approaches, our knowledge about nutrition. We take people on a journey into what it actually means to grow your own food, and before they know it they’re enraptured by our world.”
Connecting through heritage
This is something that Pamela Shor can also speak to. In the neighbouring borough of Haringey, she, Paulette Henry and their team are empowering over 100 community growers to cultivate their own food through Black Rootz. The UK’s first Black-led growing enterprise, it was founded in 2019 in response to the need for better representation of marginalised peoples in food growing systems.
“We call it agroecology. We call it permaculture. But these lessons have been passed down and we’re just trying to keep them alive: to ensure that our people retain the skills needed to provide a sustainable community and a sustainable world. Our ancestors taught us to protect the land, and we all have a duty to future generations to live in balance with nature.”
Black Rootz follows an indigenous, intergenerational approach and has delivered training to 850 people over the past year. Paulette, an elder, considers the spread of ages for a moment then decides that “our youngest grower must have been about two. Or even one. Yes, she’d just turned one. And our eldest, we think she’s 87, but we’re not asking her because that’s how it is.”
A recent ‘seed share’ raised awareness of the gardeners’ efforts among residents on West Green Road: a tangle of road junctions, tube stations and shops far removed from the area’s green past. But on that day, children scooped up spoonfuls of Momma Selma’s heirloom pumpkin seeds, imbued with five decades of love and local adaptation to London soil, rekindling the connection between generations of humans, as well as our more-than-human community.
Paulette confirms that “this kind of community is about allowing people to have informed choices about what they eat, and educating children so that they know carrots come out of the soil. We teach that every cell of you, every hair follicle, bone, sinew and muscle comes from the food that you eat, which comes from the soil in the ground. Just think about that.”
Pamela agrees. “We grow food because we are part of the earth and the earth is part of us. What’s beautiful is the way we can intertwine our superpowers. Being able to connect communities – human and more-than-human – with our food systems, allows us to understand heritage, to understand power, it allows us to share.”
Reshaping relationships
The current context makes this an urgent task. The UK’s farming industry is 98% white and a major cause of biodiversity loss, with women of colour the most impacted by worsening food insecurity. “Access to land is obviously the biggest barrier that we have,” says Sandra. “So we look at small spaces, any bit of land there is, even if it is a plant pot, and we encourage people to grow food. I’ve found that African and Caribbean people have different relationships with land because of what happened in their homelands during colonial times, and the continuing impact of that. Part of our challenge is reshaping that relationship to land and making it a happier one.”
Paulette adds that she “encourages as many people as possible to grow their own food because once you get a taste for it, it’s very difficult to go back. At our glasshouses in Wolves Lane we laugh that everyone’s now a tomato snob; we grew 31 varieties this season and nobody wants to eat anything that comes from the shops!”
This approach is cultivating far more than crops. By growing healthy communities, Sandra, Paulette and Pamela are seeding grassroots solutions for racial equality, land reparations and food sovereignty. “When it comes to food justice through agroecology, community is the power that will move us forward,” concludes Sandra. “Through community, we can continue to pass on this information. We all should be growing together. We all should be tapping into our ancestry. We all should be looking back in order to move forward. We all should be planting seeds of intention, seeds of love, for the next generation to come.”
Authors: Sandra Salazar D’eca is a horticulturist, farmer, and founder of GoGrowWithLove CIC, an indigenous melanin-rich, women-led organisation. Contact: info@go-grow.org.uk. Pamela Shor is head grower at Black Rootz, an initiative from The Ubele Initiative CIC. The first Black-led growing enterprise in the UK, their master grower is Paulette Henry, a founding member who has had her hands in the soil from a very young age. Contact: blackrootz@ubele.org
Photographer: Arpita Shah examines the intersections of culture and identity, frequently through the lens of women of colour and the diaspora. The photos in this collection, called ‘Sankofa’, were commissioned in partnership with Photo Fringe. Contact: arpita@arpitashah.com
This article is part of Issue 2-2025: Cultivating health and healing
