Common Orchard Project

Cincinnati, Ohio

The Common Orchard Project is dedicated to building ecologically diverse and productive food systems on cities’ vacant lots. Imagine 20-plus trees—apple, peach, plum, cherry, pawpaw, persimmon, European pear and Asian pear, along with black locust—in two rows defined by black plastic tarp. In between each tree are herbaceous and woody perennials, including small shrubs such as currant and gooseberry, and medicinal and soil-improving plants such as tansy, comfrey, yarrow, wormwood, and mint. A row of Aronia (chokeberry) provides fruit and color in the fall, and behind that a row of Cornelian cherry provides fruit and blossoms in the spring.

It looks like a park; it’s more of an architectural food forest. The plants provide edible fruit and everything serves a purpose. Neighbors, educated by signage and volunteers, help tend the mostly self-sustaining orchard. All are welcome to enjoy its bounty.

Chris Smyth, who founded Common Orchard Project in 2017, has been studying permaculture, an ecological design system, since 2010. Ever-changing and co-evolving, Smyth says permaculture is based on context, on assets that are on the ground, and on the way communities naturally want to form. “It’s about designing participatory cultures,” he says, and arranging systems more intelligently.

Smyth has built orchards in Cleveland and Cincinnati, has 150 trees in production, and is planning 15 additional orchards this year. For Smyth, success isn’t closely defined by the trees’ edible output. Instead, he sees inherent worth in the orchards’ aesthetic yield.

“Whew,” a passer-by walking to Kroger said to Smith during a recent installation. “Y’all are going to spoil me.”

photography provided by The Common Orchard Project

The Common Orchard Project
CommonOrchard.com
info@commonorchard.com