Lines Undrawn: Community Publishing Garden in Action
As the 2026 season gets growing in earnest, I’m recalling how the Community Publishing Garden crafted a zine-making session where participants were invited to become both storyteller and knowledge-keeper. Our aim was to transform garden tales into tactile, shareable works during the 2025 Being Human Festival. Held at Calthorpe Community Garden and designed in collaboration with the School of Advanced Study’s Maker Space team, the event honoured individual and collective growing stories, gathered simple collage, layout, and printing techniques to weave together personal anecdotes, creativity and communal memories for making into mini publications that travel, inspire, and preserve the living know-how of community gardens.
Printmaking at the Lines Undrawn Community-Zine Publishing event during the 2025 Being Human Festival
The in-person zine-making workshop served as a site of radical imagination - where the lines between author and reader, expert and community gardener became beautifully blurred on one drizzly day in November, 2025. Our intention was to transform community stories into a living publication, cultivating knowledge that grows from shared experience and in the ways in which participants wished to express their ideas through the use of adaptive publishing practices. Thanks to the natural resources available at Calthrope and the creativity and expertise of public scholars from the School of Advanced Studies, we provided materials, inspiration, and a supportive space to explore how knowledge emerging from community gardens enriches and enhances public life. It was a brilliant opportunity for community publishing in practice with the Being Human festival!
What we did:
Gathered stories and insights from community garden experiences
Created zine pages using writing, drawing, printing techniques
Made many beautiful things that can keep growing beyond our workshop
We’re bringing zine-making to Reading’s incredible food-growing and community-garden pioneering groups with Incredible Edible Reading during 2026. Let’s root more community-garden led storytelling in the craft of zine-making together, so that the voices of everyday growing are ones that are shared and celebrated within and beyond our gardens.
If your community garden would like to join this growing movement, we’d love to help you run a similar project: from workshop design and outreach to layout and print-ready files, we’ll tailor the process to your space and people. Reach out to propose a collaboration, request a free project consultation, or invite us to a planning session. 🌱
#zine #communitygardening #beinghuman
