Meet the community gardeners of Marine Crescent Ville who nurture plants, vegetables and friendships

If you happened to walk past Marine Crescent Ville on your way to East Coast Park, your eyes would inevitably be drawn to the vibrant community garden tucked between the blocks of flats, a verdant oasis bursting with life and colour. It is hard to believe that this community garden used to be a carpark.
Ornamental plants surround the edges of the garden to attract bees and butterflies for pollination. In the middle, there are climbing edible plants such as winged beans and passionfruit are grown on trellises, while other vegetables, such as sweet potato, spinach, basil and mint are grown in plots on the ground or in planter boxes.
Nicknamed Our Kitchen Garden as most of the plants grown are edibles, the community garden is the pride of Marine Crescent Ville, and the residents have Gina Ong and her team of amateur gardeners to thank.
The community garden started in 2000 and is also the first to be publicly accessible. The garden achieved the Diamond rank for the 2016 and 2022 editions of the National Parks Board (Nparks) Community in Bloom Awards, which recognises excellence in gardening efforts by community groups and aims to encourage community gardeners to improve the standards of their gardens while continuing to enjoy gardening as a fun and healthy activity.
“Rather than pave the ground over with concrete, I asked the town council if I could start a community garden to have more greenery in the neighbourhood,” said Ong, a product consultant for a hospitality brand.
“I also liked cooking, and thought it would be a wonderful experience to be able to harvest herbs from a garden, whenever I needed some.”
The town council had their concerns, since community gardens were a new concept back then. Ong was given a small plot that has now doubled to its present size of about 400 sq m.
Our Kitchen Garden currently has 15 members. As families tend to come and go, the number fluctuates. “We have only one male member,” Ong said with a laugh. “He’s a window display artist, and he helped us design the garden.”
Fellow member, Rosita Cedillo, a retiree, said: “I think women have more passion for gardening, and are more approachable when we ask them to join us.”
Ong and Cedillo have known each other for decades as they are both Residents’ Committee members. Since then, they have roped in other neighbours such as retiree Tess De La Cruz and piano teacher Sylvia Chua to join the gardening club. Ong’s domestic helper Cora Pamintuan is also an active member. All are long-time Marine Crescent Ville residents.
To encourage ownership, Ong introduced plot adoption in 2013. Members are given a small plot in the garden for their use: They choose what they wish to grow and they provide their own soil and fertiliser.
Plot adoption comes with a catch as owners must tend to their own garden regularly, otherwise the plot has to be returned. There is a waiting list to adopt plots, and Ong has had to take back plots too.
Club members come regularly to help each other out. Armed with their individual bags of gardening tools, Cedillo and De La Cruz, together with other members who have time on weekdays, tend to the garden in the mornings.
Cedillo takes charge of watering all the plots, which takes about an hour, while the others help with other gardening chores, such as pulling out weeds and pruning the plants.
The members are out in full attendance at the community garden on the weekends. Chua harvests bittergourds to make bittergourd and miso soup, Cedillo trims her pandan leaves for mulching, while Pamintuan tends to her basil.
The club conducts workshops for residents and also for nursery school kids in the area. Once a year, they come together to hold a Farmers’ Market, selling their own produce, with proceeds used for garden maintenance.
A NEIGHBOURHOOD COMMUNITY BEYOND GARDENING  
Asked if they have other common interests besides gardening, Ong quipped: “Makan!”
On some weekends, they’ll get together for a hearty breakfast after gardening. Occasionally, they’ll cook together, or have potluck sessions in the garden. There will be homemade focaccia paired with roselle jam, made using roselle from the garden, roast chicken, pasta with pesto sauce made with basil from the garden, and washed down with blue pea tea, from, yes, blue pea flowers from the garden.
Birthdays and festive occasions, such as Chinese New Year and Christmas, are also celebrated together.
Our Kitchen Garden members have also headed to Gardens by the Bay to admire the seasonal floral displays, visited nurseries, gone on butterfly watch surveys and attended orchid shows together. To better their gardening skills, they’ve also attended workshops at NParks’ Centre for Urban Greenery and Ecology.
Chua recalls gathering late one night in the garden for the blooming of a dragonfruit flower. “It was our first dragonfruit flower to bloom, so we were all very excited to witness it,” she said. The flower blooms fully at midnight before it wilts in the morning.
The five women also help in the weekly distribution of rescued vegetables to the residents. These are not from the community garden but from donors such as the vegetable suppliers at Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre.
Every Friday night, they get together to sort vegetables and food items, such as bread, rice and cooking oil, that have been donated to them.
There’s the task of removing rotting leaves or stems from vegetables such as spinach, kailan, celery and bai cai, before sorting them into different baskets. The unwanted vegetables are not thrown away, but instead, put into a compost as fertiliser for the garden.
All the food and produce are neatly displayed at the void deck the next morning. A queue of most elderly residents and domestic helpers starts to form. Distribution begins at 9.30am and everything is given out within 20 minutes.
Ong said: “We might not have enough from our garden to give to our residents, but through this food distribution, we ensure that as many residents as possible are taken care of.”
A CLOSE-KNIT FAMILY
Having spent much time in the garden, the women are naturally proud of what they have achieved.
The women have been nursing plants for the Singapore Garden Festival taking place from Aug 3-11, where together with other community gardens in the South East District, they will be competing in the Singapore Gardeners’ Cup.
Cedillo said that while gardening is therapeutic, “more importantly, it has allowed me to meet more people and form friendships… we are like a close-knit family.”
If she is away and needs help with watering her houseplants, Cedillo knows that she can count on her fellow members. “We are also familiar with each other’s whereabouts.”
Chua added: “We are happy to accompany each other on doctors’ visits when needed.”
Whenever she needs a listening ear, Ong said she usually reaches out to her fellow club members. “We share our grievances as well as our happy moments. We see each other so often and have become close friends.”
She added that gardening has helped draw the neighbourhood closer. “I wouldn’t have known so many of my neighbours had it not been for the garden.”
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