By Michelle Domocol @inflourish_
Back to Inflourish: Cebu Blog
In previous articles like Lola’s Bam-i Garden and Binignit Garden, I showed gardens that grow ingredients from a favorite family recipe or beloved holiday delicacy. Yes, the gardens were a convenient supply of useful herbs, spices and vegetables. There were also window into your personal history and culture. These same recipe gardens can transform into meaningful food heritage gardens in schools and communities. They can become outdoor classrooms or community gathering spaces. You can grow plants that represent monumental events from culture and food history.
Since plants are the basis of our life, history, and culture, garden can house a collection of edible ingredients, building materials, textiles, medicines, fuels, technologies, and more. In the a backyard, a school site, or community venue, people can showcase plants’ ancient functions and enduring roles. Through themed tours, oral history projects, student group activities, speaker presentations, or well-researched plant placards. Together, communities can use these heritage gardens to protect cultural traditions and foster curiosity about our environmental and cultural histories.
A well-designed history garden can transport you. Here are some possible activities to bring history lessons and collective memories to life:
- Harvest garden ingredients and prepare cuisine such as local SuTuKil dishes with your community or students. During the meal, students can highlight how contemporary vinegar recipes, fermentation methods, and grilling techniques come from centuries-old Indigenous culinary preservation techniques.
- During the holidays or the Christmas season, organize historical reenactments, community dances, singing events, community history tours in the garden. Tours will spotlight plants’ significant roles in the past.
- Make garden murals and garden sculptures to illustrate significant people and events relevant to your socio-historical themes.
- Share stories relevant about a particular history topic while gardening. Invite community members, relevant experts, elders, and grandparents.
- Create art, baskets, sculptures, and handicrafts with the gardens’ plants. Add art demos or workshops by local artists (e.g., carpenters, payag builders, banig weavers, and bamboo furniture makers).
In the Philippines, families, educators, community gardeners, tour guides, and food historians, can pass down a plethora of food-related histories. The vast diversity of regional cooking styles, barangay-specific recipes, holiday feasts, precolonial food traditions, and eras of botanical trade and global culinary exchanges offer a deep well of knowledge and history from which to draw. Below is a sample garden design:
Remember, the Philippines is over 7,100 islands with a multitude of cultural groups and ethnicities. From this we can learn and honor a rich, layered tapestry of food histories. Here are just 2 historical themes and plant combinations to inspire you.
Precolonial Visayas: Learn about from precolonial Visayas represents ancient food traditions we still practice today. Research the fascinating maritime trade routes that shaped the civilizations of the Visayas and the neighboring Southeast Asian islands. Students or communities can also use this garden to research precolonial communal planting methods and their ancestors’ adaptability to environmental conditions. Plants connected to these historical events are kamunggay, alugbati, gabi, sibuyas, banana, coconut, rice, and native herbs. You can choose to focus on popular ingredients from one of the several Precolonial Visayan islands.
Manila–Acapulco Galleon Trade Route: Explore the intercontinental trade route between Philippines to Mexico that spanned the 1500s through to the 1800s. Discover the tumultuous history that transformed both Mexico’s and Philippines’ culinary traditions, buildings, clothes, economies, customs and laws. Learn about the ships composed of precious Philippine hardwoods that made these colossal journeys possible. In this garden, you can grow commonplace vegetables in the Philippines originally from Mexico. Some examples are mani, sayote, kamote, kamatis, cacao, abukado, atsuwete, and pinya. Or you can grow plants traded from the Philippines like rice, coconut, tamarind, and mango. You can also include Ylang-Ylang, mulberry, cinnamon, and ginger to represent the Asian perfumes, silks, and other luxury goods transported through this fascinating trade route.
I hope this inspires you to grow your personal heritage garden or support garden-based history projects in your community or school.
