THE NEW HORIZONS
COMMUNITY GARDEN
Where a new home is planted and an
old home is never far away
BY LORRAINE JOHNSON
Zora Ignjatovic, thoroughly enjoying herself during Childrens Day at the New Horizons Community Garden in July
The high notes of a flute whistle through the air. A breeze ruffles hats
and skirts, and brings some measure of relief to the crowd milling under
the noon-time cloudless July sky at the New Horizons Community Gar-
den. With hands connected – grandmother to grandchild, father to
daughter, neighbour to friend – the group gathers in a circle and slowly,
deliberately, says together the word “peace.” You can tell they mean it.
If you were to add up the years represented by those standing in this
Bosnian seniors community garden (celebrating Children’s Day a year
after the seniors first started growing food together and meeting for
shared picnics in a west-end Toronto park), you would probably lose
Photograph: Julia Huterer
track somewhere around one thousand. If you were to add up the years
of war and displacement represented by those standing here, you would
probably lose heart well before arriving at a total. But the animated faces
and the food weighing down the tables make all that – the traumas of
war, the trials of emigration and immigration – seem very far away.
We’re here to party.
____________
Like many community gardens, New Horizons represents the hard
work of a handful, the support of dozens, and the enjoyment of count-
less more. The seeds for the garden idea were planted by Miodrag Za-
konovic, a 69-year-old Bosnian agronomist who left Sarajevo for
Belgrade (“with only my clothes”) when the war started, then followed
his son and daughter to Canada when the NATO bombing began in
Belgrade. “I came here like a visitor, only six months, but I stayed...”
Miodrag brought his love of digging in the soil and his enviable work
ethic with him, immediately volunteering for numerous gardening- and
food-related projects in Toronto. He joined the Toronto Environmen-
tal Volunteers, helped with FoodShare’s composting program, and or-
www.edibletoronto.com Fall 2008 45
ganized a small group of volunteers to work at the Waterfront and High
Park children’s gardens. “I was training them for the future,” he says.
During a tour of Toronto community gardens a few summers ago,
Miodrag decided that he wanted to start a new community garden,
“for people of my country,” as he puts it. He approached Julia Huterer,
founder and president of the Multicultural Association of Bosnian
Seniors and Their Friends, and a plan was hatched: they would create
a garden for the multi-ethnic members of the association – immigrants
from the former Yugoslavia – where the seniors could grow food and
socialize.
The timeline between garden idea and plants in the ground can
often stretch to years, especially when a community group envisions a
garden in a public park. The layers of necessary bureaucracy can seem
overwhelming. The New Horizons garden, however, was fortunate to
have the committed energy of Zora Ignjatovic supporting the project.
A Serbian immigrant who came to Toronto fifteen years ago, Zora (like
46 Fall 2008 edible Toronto
Miodrag, an agronomist) exudes the quiet can-do spirit of someone de-
termined to turn trauma into hope. Her experiences of losing her home
and losing her country are always close to the surface, fuel for the many
projects in which she’s immersed herself.
Zora has had her hand in many of Toronto’s food-related non-
profit groups and community gardens. As Julia Huterer relates, “What
do we say about Zora? ‘We’ve never seen a bigger worker in a smaller
woman.’” She has worked closely with Solomon Boye, who runs the
parks department’s community gardening initiative, and so knows how
to navigate the city’s permit process for new gardens.
Very quickly, the New Horizons garden had a home in Tom Riley
Park, close to Islington and Bloor, and near an apartment complex
where many of the Bosnian seniors live in social housing. Solomon Boye
arranged for city staff to prepare the soil, build a protective fence, and
supply a large water tank. On June 2, 2007, the first vegetable seedlings
went into the ground.
Zora wasn’t at the garden for this ground-breaking event. But she
was somewhere closely connected: she was travelling through Bosnia,
visiting community gardens. I was with Zora on this trip. We visited
one garden after another where people, who less than a decade ago
would have been facing each other with guns, were now growing food
and cultivating peace through the slow, necessary labour of one person
and one plot at a time. Our guide for this tour, Davorin Brdanovic,
who coordinates the reconciliation garden project in Bosnia, put it best:
“Yes, one gardener is Muslim and one is Serbian, and they fought on dif-
ferent sides in the war, but when they’re playing chess in the garden,
what are they? They are gardeners.” He adds, with a wry grin, “The
only fight is over who has the biggest carrots and tomatoes.”
Zora and I visited gardens surrounded by yellow police tape that
warned of land mines (people advised us – nonchalantly – to avoid
walking in tall grass). We visited gardens where mass graves had recently
been found close by. We met a young man who, shattered by the war,
didn’t speak for years, and who sat in a room listening to fifty different
radios; when he showed us his garden plot, he released a torrent of
words. We stood at the site of a prison where people incarcerated for
murder gardened with members of the nearby community, the roar of
planes from the Sarajevo airport in the background. We met a Roma
woman who supported her brothers and sisters with food from her com-
munity garden plot, proud that they didn’t need to beg. And in the
midst of it all, we sat at tables loaded with food and drinks while peo-
ple told us their stories; every story beginning with the war, then slowly
Photograph: Laura Berman
moving to the daily wonders of seeds, water and soil.
____________
 A year later, in July 2008, I’ve come, at Zora’s invita-
tion, to the Children’s Day party at the New Horizons
Community Garden. Maybe it’s because of the mid-
summer sun, the breeze, the perfect heat of the day,
but I’m transported back to the community gardens
of Bosnia: the same outdoor tables laden with cakes
and cookies; children, preened by proud grandparents,
racing through the garden rows; drinking cherry juice
out of plastic cups, and accepting another wafer with
pink creamy mousse inside its thin layers; speaking in
gestures with seniors who are shy about their English
skills. Listening to a former policeman from Belgrade
who is now holding everyone rapt with his joke-telling
takes me back to the ex-soldiers I met in the Sarajevo
gardens. The line separating here and there dissolves.
The garden’s name is New Horizons, but the sight-
line defining the horizon, shaping the view, is a country
that no longer exists. Tended by the doubly displaced –
former citizens of a former country – the New Horizons
Community Garden is a place where a new home is
planted and an old home is never far away.
Every vegetable, fruit and flower in the carefully
weeded rows bears a label with two names: blitva and
swiss chard, kupina and blackberry, neven and calen-
dula; just as each gardener holds tight to a paired iden-
tity. Names and introductions are almost inevitably
followed by a country of origin – Bosnia, Serbia, Croa-
tia, and sometimes a city – Sarajevo, Belgrade, Novi
Sad, Split, Doboj. And then, just as inevitably, the fa-
milial bonds that complicate clear divisions: an elderly
Serbian-born father with a Bosnian-born daughter
with a Canadian-born child now reaching for the bal-
loon tethered to the top of a bean pole at the New
Horizons garden party...
The horizon isn’t a straight line in this garden. It’s
a circle that enfolds. !
To learn more about the New Horizons Com-
munity Garden, visit www.newhorizonsgarden.ca.
For information on the reconciliation garden project
in Bosnia, go to
www.afsc.org/europe/bosnia/programoverview.htm.
Photograph: Laura Berman

Lorraine Johnson is the author of numerous books on

native plant gardening, including 100 Easy-to-Grow
Native Plants and The New Ontario Naturalized Gar-
den. She regularly writes on the social, political and en-
vironmental context of gardens.

www.edibletoronto.com Fall 2008 47