Hilton Harvest History and Vision

Hilton Harvest was started in 2009 by a passionate group of Hilton residents lead by Dr Maggie Lilith. The garden was born out of the desire to build a community resilient to the pressures of climate change and peak oil. At our first community meeting at Progress Hall around 60 residents rolled up ready to support the garden and lend their expertise. 

After talks with the City of Fremantle and the Department of Education, the Rennie Cres South site was secured. Our first site plan was prepared by Coda and allowed us to get going. We planted out our first garden bed in early 2010.

First site plan by CODA

As we progressed along the journey of building our community garden we soon realised we needed to revisit the plan. Fewer individual plots were needed, however there was a strong demand for more interesting communal aspects of the garden. In July 2012 we hosted an open space visioning day to help us inform our new vision. The Book of Proceedings from the day is here. This process allowed us to put together our new vision which included things like the chookship, communal crops, the path way, olive and citrus groves and more. The 2013 vision is shown below. 

The 2013 Illustrated Vision

The community worked hard towards this vision and indeed much of this has been achieved, however in 2014 we had to negotiate a new tenure agreement with the Department of Education. Our current boundary is shown here. The new agreement meant that we had to fence our new boundary, move part of the orchard, move all the asparagus and take down our clubhouse. We have since continued to work towards the vision as best we can however with so much happening in the garden and so many new ideas and inspiration we want to make sure we all work towards the same vision of a beautiful, functional, people friendly space that the whole community can enjoy. So in 2016 we conducted community consultation to come up with our current vision. It's beautiful!