Raised Beds, Rooted Wholeness

How the garden project is embodying the health Wendell Berry envisioned.

By Josh Singleton | Founder and Lead Cultivator, The Neighborhood Garden Project

Wendell Berry’s Vision of Health

In his essay “Health,” Wendell Berry insists that “health is not divided. One of the meanings of health is wholeness.” He warns against the cultural habit of breaking health into parts: doctors manage disease, farmers mass-produce calories, institutions treat symptoms but rarely address causes. In Berry’s view, health is not a commodity to be bought, but a pattern of right relationships. He writes, “We cannot have health apart from one another and apart from the earth.” True health is not merely the absence of sickness, but the presence of wholeness that stretches from soil to food to family to community.

Berry also names the danger of abstraction: when health is taken out of its natural setting, it becomes the business of specialists. He observes, “When we take responsibility for health out of the context of community and environment, we inevitably reduce it to the cure or prevention of disease.” In that reduction, health is treated as a service to be purchased rather than a way of life to be lived.

The Garden Project in Parallel

At The Neighborhood Garden Project, we see what Berry names. The garden resists fragmentation. When a child plants broccoli and later tastes the difference between what grows in the soil and what comes from the store, wholeness is being restored, not as an abstract service, but as lived reality. When neighbors work side by side, when presence becomes more valuable than performance, when people rediscover that tending the soil tends their own soul, health begins to re-emerge as overflow.

Just recently, my 7- and 4-year-old sons have begun asking for garden carrots and radishes. They sense in their bones that the season is drawing near. They have never known life without a garden, and because of that, their appetites are tuned to its rhythms. We do not look to create “healthy boys.” Instead, it is their exposure to the soil through community that cultivates anticipation, patience, and belonging. Health is not the target; it is the byproduct of cultivated presence. This is Berry’s vision made visible. He warned that in a culture alienated from the land, “we live not by the seasons but by the market.” Yet children who grow up in the soil develop an anticipatory mindset, one rooted in the rhythms of creation itself. Their appetites are formed not by the shelf but by the season.

Developing Role: Community Health Cultivator

Wendell Berry reminds us that “the concept of health is rooted in the idea of membership. We are members of each other and of the earth.” In that spirit, The Neighborhood Garden Project is discerning new ways for health to be restored, not as a program or prescription, but as a way of life in community.

One expression beginning to take shape is the Community Health Cultivator (CHC). This role is not yet official, but it is developing naturally from within the life of the garden. The CHC is not designed to manage symptoms or function as an expert, but to embody presence in the soil alongside neighbors. Rather than focusing on outcomes, the role is about walking with people until health is rediscovered as an overflow of belonging, timing, and relationship.

In this way, the CHC reflects Berry’s warning that health cannot be reduced to something managed by specialists. Instead, it must be lived in place. The garden is where that kind of membership is made visible, and the CHC is an unfolding step toward carrying that membership deeper into daily life.

From Fragmentation to Wholeness

Berry concluded, “A healthy community is not one that is free of problems, but one that is able to take care of its problems.” That simple line cuts through our culture’s obsession with control and perfection. Health is not found in eliminating struggle but in creating the capacity to bear it together.

At The Neighborhood Garden Project, we are answering that same call. We are not trying to build flawless gardens or flawless people. We do not chase after an image of success where every row is weed-free or every participant is free of hardship. Instead, we build spaces where soil and soul can face reality honestly. Problems will always come: weeds return, seasons shift, and people carry burdens that are not easily solved. But when a community is knit together through soil and shared presence, it gains the strength to hold those burdens.

Our first garden manager, Kayla, is a prime example. She came to co-steward with us after nearly fifteen years of gardening experience. At first, her work in the soil had been largely personal, providing food for her own household. But through the garden, that fragmented practice was brought into wholeness. She quit her job to help in the garden full-time, without a promise of a salary. She simply stepped into the opportunity.

That choice was not about security or predictability. It was about presence. What had once been private gardening for consumption became relationally driven stewardship, where her past experience could be poured into others. She learned, and we learned with her, that health does not emerge from holding tight to guarantees. It grows when people commit themselves to one another, trusting that provision will meet the step taken. In Kayla’s life, gardening shifted from a solitary skill into a membership practice. Her story shows what Berry described: health as wholeness, carried in community rather than managed in isolation.

The wholeness we are cultivating is not neat or polished. It is relational. It is messy at times, but it is durable. Neighbors who work the soil together learn to listen more deeply. Children who grow up in the garden discover rhythms of patience that resist instant gratification. Adults who enter weary find rest in belonging, not in performance. Over time, this living membership makes visible what Berry foresaw: a culture where health is not consumed but carried, not treated as a service but received as a gift of presence.

To build such spaces is to stand against fragmentation. It is to declare that soil and soul are not separate, that food and relationship are not rivals, that body and spirit cannot be divided. In the garden, they are reconciled. And out of that reconciliation, health begins to live again—not as an institution’s promise, but as a community’s way of life.

Generations of Wholeness

When Wendell Berry wrote “Health” in the 1970s from rural Kentucky, he was both critiquing and envisioning. He saw how farming was being stripped of its context, land reduced to commodity, health reduced to symptom management, and communities reduced to consumers. His words carried a warning: fracture was spreading, and if soil, food, and people were pulled apart, wholeness would vanish.

Nearly fifty years later, that vision has crossed geography and generation. What Berry lamented from a hillside farm in Kentucky is being answered in the raised beds of a city parish. Where he named the fracture, we are rejoining the pieces. Where he dreamed of membership, we are embodying it, not in wide fields but in plots of soil that knit neighbors together.

It is striking how each generation carries its share of this wholeness. Berry’s task was to see and speak, to stand against the tide of industrial fragmentation. Our task is to cultivate, to bring those words into soil and community so that health is not abstract but lived. What was once prophecy has become practice.

Berry wrote, “We cannot have health apart from one another and apart from the earth.” In rural Kentucky, that was a call to remember. In the city, it is a call we are answering, a living picture of health restored, not as a product but as presence, not as a program but as membership.

All Wendell Berry quotations are from “Health,” originally published in The New Farm (1977), and later collected in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.