In Bridgefoot Street Park, a community of gardeners experiment with ways to increase biodiversity

Conor Courtney sheltered from the rain behind a black shipping container which serves as both a cafe and storage space for gardening tools.

He was joined by three others, also tending to Taplin’s Field, a small hexagonal community garden at the northern end of Bridgefoot Street Park in the Liberties, at around 12pm this past Saturday.

The beds were filled with kale and potatoes, strawberries and raspberries, apple and plum trees. Willows grow up near the steel fences on the park’s perimeter. There’s a compost bay, a wooden insect hotel and a work-in-progress wetlands.

The wetlands project was started last year led by one member who is a drainage engineer, Courtney said. “And we’re going to collect water from on top of the container to feed that.”

It will be key to improving the patch’s biodiversity, which is the aim at the heart of this whole experiment, he said.

A pair of white mating butterflies flittered around. A wood pigeon picked at a few of the vegetables.

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A day earlier, around the same time, Courtney wandered through Taplin’s Field sipping from a cup of coffee.

He inspected the fruit and vegetables. He spotted a fat red strawberry nestled below the unripe green ones, and took a bite out of a sugar snap.

Nearby, a handsome wood pigeon helped itself to some cabbage leaves.

“He’s having a great feed”, said Tony Lowth, an expert in composting, who had travelled in from Rush.

That’s fine, Courtney said, stoically. “They’re for him too.”

Bridgefoot Street Park opened in May 2022.

Locals in the Liberties had been waiting since 2017 for Dublin City Council to deliver the park, said Courtney, rolling a cigarette on a bench at the edge of the garden.

“There was a whole campaign to get it put in place,” he said.

One of the chief campaigners was the late Richard Taplin, who passed away in June 2019. He had run a community garden on the site, revitalising what was a run-down, overgrown lot, before the council built the park.

Taplin’s Field community garden is named after him.

Courtney hadn’t known Taplin, he says. A trained microbiologist and epidemiologist, Courtney only became involved in creating this new garden during the pandemic, he says.

Taplin’s Field went off in a different direction than the old garden which had a communal area as well as various allotments, he says. “Instead of having your own parcel, we come together where we do things a bit larger in scale.”

Projects have included studying the microbes and bacteria present in the soil, and educating people about compost – which resulted in the compost bay.

Learning how compost works was fundamental, he says. “Because we want to see how we take all this growth and reprocess it into nutrients for the ground again.”

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Lowth strode across Taplin’s Field on Saturday, joining his fellow gardeners up by the container.

That wood pigeon was back, he said. “He’s eating our kale.”

Courtney, once again, wasn’t fazed. It’s a spot for everyone and everything, he says. “We’re trying to increase the quantity of life.”

While the gardeners have discussed the possibility of selling crops in local markets, that’s not a real aim here, he says.

There shouldn’t be the pressure to sell every tomato that grows, he says. “If it rots, it goes back into the ground.”

A lot of Courtney’s thinking is about sustaining a cycle, and making the garden a thing in-and-of itself, rather than the means to an end.

There’s a mini woodland here, he says. “That was to carve up spaces where we could create different kinds of ecological loops.”

They try to create companion plants, paired to support each other’s growth. Like planting fragrant lavender or thyme near a particular vegetable, he says. “That is an attempt to manage the levels of pests as they move through the garden.”

A bright reddish orange nasturtium will attract the slugs and keep them away from cabbages, he says.

The wetlands too will draw in many more insects, he says. “That, in turn, will increase the amount of small birds, and bring seeds from other things that are growing around.”

Small animals should follow, including more foxes, he says, and that is ideal. The aim, he stresses, is improving biodiversity in the area.

The vision of moving away from spliced allotments to a place where everything overlaps is attractive to him, he says.“The park was built around this openness to wildness.”

Much of the new park is built around recycled materials, he says. “Most of the stuff was used from salvage. The hills, the stones, that’s all part of rubble.”

“I feel like that is the aesthetic of the future, this sense of reclamation,” says Courtney.