CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Room to Grow

NARRATOR: Walk past a community garden in midsummer and the case for more of them seems to make itself: tomatoes climbing makeshift trellises, neighbours trading zucchini over the fence, children discovering that carrots grow underground. Yet whether cities should set aside more public land for such gardens is a more tangled question than the scene suggests, because every plot handed to gardeners is land that cannot be used for something else.

NARRATOR: Landscape researcher Dana Whitfield is among the most vocal champions. She argues that gardens yield far more than vegetables. In neighbourhoods dominated by apartment towers, she says, a plot may be the only patch of soil a family can call its own, and the friendships formed while weeding often outlast the harvest. Gardens, she adds, give older residents a reason to leave their apartments each day, and give newcomers a low-pressure way to meet the people next door. Whitfield also points to cooler summer temperatures near planted areas, and to households that stretch tight grocery budgets with what they grow. Her account of the social rewards is compelling, if drawn largely from interviews with gardeners themselves, who are hardly impartial witnesses.

NARRATOR: Housing analyst Martin Osei takes a more sceptical view. He does not dispute that gardens are pleasant; his objection is to the arithmetic. A single garden might serve forty plot holders while occupying a lot that could hold dozens of affordable homes, and in cities where rents keep climbing, he regards that trade as hard to justify. He also notes that waiting lists favour residents with the time and patience to stay on them for years, so the people most in need are not always the ones digging. A fair point, though his figures assume the land would actually be built on, which, given how slowly many cities approve construction, is far from guaranteed.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the more useful question is not how much land, but which land. Rooftops, hydro corridors and vacant lots awaiting development could host gardens for years without blocking a single home, and new apartment buildings could be required to include growing space from the start. None of this comes free, of course: someone must still pay for the soil, the water and the fencing. Nor will such arrangements please everyone. Gardeners dislike tending soil they may lose, and developers resent rules that raise their costs. Still, a city that treats gardens and housing as rivals may well end up short of both.