What immigrant gardens reveal about access, survival, and belonging

Editor’s note: This piece reflects a moment in time — and an ongoing question. It’s not a finished story. It’s an invitation to keep listening.

This weekend was my birthday, and the celebrations began on Saturday morning with brunch at Pier 6 in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Pier 6 has sweeping views of Boston across the harbor, best enjoyed from its rooftop patio. The food is solid. Getting there, though, still requires passing through a neighborhood that has long been in flux.

What struck me most was how different Charlestown feels every time I visit.

The last time I was there was just over a year ago, when I set out to write a piece about immigrant gardeners in Boston for the print edition of PITH + VIGOR. At that time, the neighborhood felt unsettled — street by street, block by block, you could feel sharp contrasts in income, culture, and belonging. It made me uneasy then, and even more so the year before.

This weekend, the change was unmistakable.

I felt more at ease. The area is cleaner, less visibly worn. I felt safer — and that made me wonder whether the people who live there feel safer too. And if they do, what does that safety cost? More pointedly: does what feels like progress to me make the place less hospitable to the people I spoke with eighteen months ago? I hope not.

I don’t pretend to have answers. Gentrification is complicated, and I’m wary of drawing neat conclusions. Instead, I find myself trying to sit with the tension — and to understand more than one side at once.

Which is why I want to reshare what I wrote then, originally published as “Immigrant Gardeners” in Issue #3 of PITH + VIGOR.

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As gardeners across the region began making their way back outside in the spring, we set out — as we had in previous issues — to meet people in their gardens and talk with them about their plans, aspirations, and projects for the season.

This time, we had a very specific goal. And to say we struggled to achieve it would be an understatement.

The previous fall, after presenting the first issue of PITH + VIGOR to a Boston-based group of women designers, we received feedback that criticized our editorial focus. We were told the magazine felt “too white,” and that it did not fully reflect the breadth of gardeners in our community.

Whether or not that criticism was entirely fair — after all, we had only published one issue — it stayed with me. Our intention had always been to represent a wide range of people and practices. If that wasn’t coming through, then we were falling short of our own goals.

That spring, we set out to follow a group of gardeners who are largely absent from mainstream garden media and from the broader American conversation: immigrant gardeners.

We hoped to learn about new vegetable varieties (we did), unfamiliar techniques, and knowledge passed down through generations but rarely written about. More than that, we wanted to understand how gardening functions as survival, cultural memory, and continuity — especially for people whose connection to home is fragile or fractured.

To be blunt, we were not successful.

As we visited community gardens in Charlestown — populated entirely by immigrant farmers — and in other parts of Boston, we quickly realized how difficult this would be. We spoke with immigrants from Brazil, China, and Cape Verde. We encountered language barriers, understandable distrust of our motives, cultural differences around photography, and real fear that our presence could cause trouble.

At times, we were met with outright hostility.

We tried to build relationships and explain our intentions, but the reality is that we didn’t get the story — at least not for that issue. What we did get were fragments, and lessons we couldn’t ignore. It became clear that trust would take time, and that this work couldn’t be rushed or extracted.

Many of the people we spoke with did not want to be identified by name, nor did they want their words or images publicly associated with them. While we did learn about unfamiliar vegetables and notice inventive trellises and growing methods, the most important insights came from the few statements people were willing to share — and from what those statements revealed beneath the surface.

“Most people have no clue about the people who have to depend on home gardens because other food systems don’t serve them.”

“The people who benefit from farmers markets are not the poor – they don’t have enough money.”

“People steal stuff here. I’ve been here <gardening> for 12 years. Before, there were no people who came here, but now they come here and take the food–it’s so sad.”

“The Chinese supermarket in Chinatown has some—but it is difficult to grow those seeds. They are many years old—too old.”

“We grow bok choy, snow vegetables, beans, watermelon— but not watermelon—it’s different. We save our seeds sometimes. But sometimes we bring them from home.”

In honoring their request for anonymity, we are not sharing names or images. But the words stand on their own. They carry their own weight — and their own urgency.

Honoring their request, the sources of these comments and their images are not being shared. But we think the words have their own anonymous power. We hope you agree.

Originally reported for PITH + VIGOR (print). Updated for context. images by Kelly Fitzsimmons for P+V