What did Marion residents ask for in their new community garden?

What happened at the September charrette

On September 21, Healing Roots Design gathered roughly 10 to 15 people, about five of them Marion residents from outside the project and the rest Healing Roots facilitators and West Marion Inc. staff, at the Marion Community Building on North Main Street for a hands-on session about the community garden planned at the West Marion Resilience Hub (WMRH), nSCALE's adaptive reuse of the former Mountain View School into a primary care clinic, daycare, commercial kitchen, event space, and recreation center. Healing Roots is the community engagement and programming firm nSCALE brought onto the project this fall, working alongside Equinox Design, the Asheville landscape architecture firm handling the garden's physical layout and planting design.

Before the session got to programming, Healing Roots facilitator Sunil asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves and name one fruit or plant they wanted to see growing on the site. The answers ranged from practical to personal: Randall Connelly, with West Marion Inc., asked for apple trees because he hunts deer nearby; Jennifer wanted passion fruit because her mother's wild vines used to produce well and haven't the last two seasons; others wanted watermelon, Asian pears, pineapple. It was a small warm-up, but by the time the real exercise started, the room had already agreed the garden should grow food people actually want to eat.

That exercise, called What Flows, put the land at the center of a diagram and asked residents to map what moves between it and five groups the resilience hub will actually serve: Elders, Health Clinic, Youth and Childcare, Recreation, and Keeping It Fresh (the shared food kitchen and greenhouse). Each group got a "From" and "To" board on the wall, and the prompt stayed the same at every station: what does this group already do on land like this, and what could the garden turn that into. Sunil put the goal directly: the landscape and the life of the hub have to support each other, not sit next to each other.

What did residents actually ask for

Healing Roots' Keri Evjy ran the report-back as scribe, moving station by station and reading back what the room had written.

Elders. The board started with "sharing time in nature for calm" and an apothecary, herbal storage for teas, cordials, salves, and bug spray. From there it got concrete: a falls-prevention tie-in with the Foothills Area Agency on Aging, and paths built "age friendly" rather than just ADA compliant, since a toddler and someone using a walker trip on the same uneven ground. Elders teaching in the garden turned into a curriculum hook, counting seeds for a planting row is math, identifying a plant is science, bilingual signage teaches Spanish. One resident described a program already running informally: her garden couldn't be watered this year, so she let it go to flowers instead and has delivered more than 150 arrangements to homebound residents, the senior center, and a skilled nursing facility. "It becomes therapy," she said. The room wanted a program built around exactly that, plus a recurring garden event aimed squarely at elder isolation, and storytelling: placards and set times where elders tell the history of a plant or a place while kids listen.

Health Clinic. Residents connected specific plants to specific conditions across every life stage, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, brain fog, and wanted antiviral plants near the clinic entrance to cut virus load during flu season. One idea Keri kept circling back to: a "doctrine of signatures" garden, where plants are grouped by which part of the body they resemble or support. Horsetail's jointed, vertebra-like stem tracks with its high silica content and its traditional use for bone and joint health, for instance. The layout would loosely follow a human form: memory plants near the head, cardiovascular herbs at the heart, structural plants for tendons and ligaments along a skeletal path. A shaded, wheelchair- and walker-accessible loop, closer to a labyrinth than a straight sidewalk, came up as a therapeutic space next to the clinic. One participant, self-described as "a little biased," floated a partnership with Hopscotch, the primary care network already operating a location in town.

Youth and Childcare. This built directly on West Marion's existing youth garden, its 12 plots and four raised beds already growing watermelon and okra. Residents wanted a dedicated "pick and eat" bed where nothing is off-limits, and a plant-family teaching garden that starts with the safest families (mint: spearmint, peppermint, rosemary, lavender) before introducing riskier ones like carrot, which has toxic lookalikes. A seasonal planting day, spring and fall, would pair each child with a certified adult buddy. A sensory garden would run trust exercises, one child blindfolded and guided by a partner through taste, touch, and smell, next to a soft-surfaced, supervised outdoor play space. Food preservation (drying and freezing herbs, making salsa) and a youth-run nursery as a small enterprise rounded out the station, ending in a harvest potluck where kids cook and present their own recipes.

Keeping It Fresh. The kitchen and greenhouse station surfaced the most operational detail. Residents want the kitchen to run food prep for the childcare center, a cafe, and daily community meals, plus a rentable commercial kitchen slot for community members and a standalone off-grid emergency kitchen for disaster response, a direct echo of the hub's own emergency-shelter mission. One participant raised a partnership already in motion: McDowell Technical Community College has applied for a USDA grant to run a DACUM, a formal process for designing an agriculture training curriculum, and residents want the resilience hub represented in that process so the college's program feeds the garden directly. Composting training, a written operations manual for kitchen users, and a crop-planning discussion, matching a planting schedule to what the kitchen actually needs across a nine- to ten-month season so produce doesn't arrive all at once, all made the board, along with a receiving and sorting process for incoming harvest.

Recreation. The report-back reached this station last, and the recording cuts off after the opening list: gardening, foraging, hiking, yard work. Which of those becomes the community walk residents raised earlier in the process is still open.

Why does this process matter

The pattern across every station is the one nSCALE structured this engagement to find: residents kept converting something they already do informally, foraging, home remedies, backyard composting, canning, into a program tied to a specific room in the building. Healing Roots split its scope from Equinox deliberately, community listening and programming on one side, site and planting design on the other, so the garden is led by residents rather than handed to them.

There is evidence behind the connection residents were drawing between the garden and the clinic. County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, which rates community gardens as having some evidence of improving health outcomes, reports that gardeners are more likely to meet daily vegetable recommendations than non-gardeners, and that a survey of food-insecure gardeners in rural Ohio linked gardening to increased produce consumption, better eating habits, more physical activity, and lower food spending (County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, "Community gardens"). The same research found mental health benefits, reduced stress, reduced isolation, more social connection, strongest for people who started out most stressed. Nobody in the room cited that research. They arrived at the same conclusion from their own flower deliveries and their own falls-prevention programs.

What's next for the garden design

Equinox is folding the charrette's findings into concept design work already underway, against a real physical constraint: much of the garden site drops in elevation from the building through a utility easement, which is why Equinox is running a grading study to determine how much of the garden can be made ADA accessible without regrading the hillside. Signage concepts and a planting palette are moving in parallel.

The build-out is planned in phases. West Marion's existing 12-plot youth garden near the building stays the anchor, with communal herb beds, composting, and a possible hydroponic greenhouse extension layered in as grading work and budget allow. A water feature honoring either the students of the former Mountain View School or the project's donors came up in planning meetings ahead of the charrette; it remains a concept only.