Dialogue: One man's Eden is another's dump

It was Sunday afternoon and I was once again out and about, crusading as ever to rid the planet of every ding-a-ling and nitwit who has more to say for him or herself than is strictly interesting.

The most recent leg of this campaign found me in Basque Reserve, the little inner-city park off Newton Rd.

To my right was the modest, well-kept, non-profit, food-producing perma-garden that a group of well-meaning hippies and people from St Benedict's Church have run as a positive, community-building exercise for about seven years.

This is the garden that the Hobson community board, for reasons that have yet to strike me as convincing or adult, recently voted to shift to an alternative location.

Milling around were more than 100 locals who had turned out to show their support for this beleaguered little garden. It's true that a lot of these people have dreadlocks, a touch of the hippie about their outfits and a tendency to burst into a somewhat pretentious cacophony (given that they're almost all white) of half-learned waiata. Nonetheless, I would defend their right to live as they wish.

To my left was one Beverley Waide. She is the elderly, tiny, totally wired local who has opposed the presence of the garden in the park since - well, ever since (I trust my notes are correct here) it started to get on her wick.

I am involved in the thankless task of pinning Bev down to the specifics of her dislike for the garden.

I admire her for having the face to turn up at an event where she is so clearly unwelcome. That doesn't change the fact that she has no facts to give me, though.

She seems to loathe the garden for the simple reason that she loathes it.

"This is not what a park should be."

The upshot was a discussion that was one of those tortured, largely ill-advised comparisons of personal taste. In a way, that's all it comes down to.

People who don't like the garden in the park don't like it because it doesn't fit their notion of the way a park should be.

"Look," spluttered Bev furiously, waving her tiny hands at the garden, as she tried to explain why she loathed it so much. "There is no way that that is beautiful."

I looked at the tall, leafy trees that are dotted through the garden, the little paths strewn with woodchips, the brightly painted water-tanks that sit over the garden, the carefully assembled, horizontal bamboo poles that act as fences. It ain't exactly Dumbarton Oaks but it's neat and tidy, well-manned and green.

It's certainly an improvement on the wet, shadowy, unused mugger's paradise that constitutes the rest of the park.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," spluttered Bev, in tones that suggest this point ought to be obvious, "because permaculture can't be beautiful."

"Aha," I thought.

"Can you see it from your house?" I asked her.

"Well, no," she said. "But I just don't think that there should be these gardens in parks."

"I think it's brought amazing richness," said a middle-aged bloke, hearing the end of this discussion.

"I think I know a little bit more about this than you do," said Bev.

"Why not just put a fence around it? asked the bloke.

"Don't you think it's nice that we can have this wonderful community organisation?" asked the woman the bloke was with.

"You are not getting the point," said Bev.

"I think I ... "

I left them to it.

It is interesting to note, though, that at no point during this 15-minute talk with me did Bev or anyone mention the effect the presence of such a garden is supposed to have on property values.

I would have thought people would mention this right away. The fact that they never touch on it is fascinating. It's one of those rare instances where people are defending ideological, not financial, turf. It's the mere thought of the thing, rather than the facts of it, that so irritates its opponents.

"I guess people just don't like disorder," said Father Peter Murnane, the somewhat weary-looking man from St Benedicts, whose justice, peace and development committee came up with the idea of this garden-in-the-park - a community garden to teach about sustainability - in 1992.

How right he is. That's all the St Benedicts Community Garden argument is about.

The idea of a group of long-haired people tending a tidy garden in a public park offends the general idea of order.

Even people who can't see it hate it so much they must rid the world of it. Weird.