The Communal Garden: Community Cultivation

The Communal Garden: Community Cultivation comes to Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens on Tuesday, December 8, from 6 PM to 7:30 PM. It's a community cultivation class taught by Liv White, and the main feature is a series of PechaKucha presentations on community gardens. If you're not familiar with the format, PechaKucha is a storytelling style where presenters show 20 slides for 20 seconds each, so the whole thing moves quickly and keeps the energy up.

The class is part of The Communal Garden, a series of sessions at the Conservatory that teaches gardeners skills they can use in community gardens or to support their neighborhoods through growing. The series is kept low-cost to make those skills accessible, and this particular class falls under the Conservatory's Growing to Green program, which supports and develops community gardens across Central Ohio. This session serves as the culmination of the 2026 program, so it's a good place to see the year's work come together.

If you've been thinking about getting involved in a community garden or just want to hear how others in the region are doing it, this is a low-stakes way to get some ideas. Between the PechaKucha presentations and the focus on practical skills, it's more of a conversation and a learning session than a formal lecture. It runs from 6 PM to 7:30 PM on Tuesday, December 8, at the Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Columbus, and it's free.