Bhutanese community gardens in the diaspora serve as sites of cultural preservation, therapeutic healing, and social cohesion, enabling resettled refugees to grow traditional crops such as mustard greens, bitter gourd, long beans, and taro while reconnecting with agricultural identities disrupted by displacement. Programs in Columbus, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Burlington, and other resettlement cities have demonstrated the profound role that gardening plays in refugee well-being and community building.
Bhutanese community gardens in the diaspora are among the most distinctive and emotionally significant forms of cultural practice maintained by resettled refugees from Bhutan. In cities across the United States and other resettlement countries, Lhotshampa families have transformed vacant lots, public park plots, and suburban backyards into productive gardens that grow the traditional vegetables, herbs, and spices of their homeland — crops that are unavailable in American supermarkets and that carry deep cultural meaning as connections to the agricultural life that displacement destroyed.
The Bhutanese refugee population was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian before displacement in the early 1990s, and subsequently spent nearly two decades in refugee camps with minimal access to farmland. In resettlement countries, community gardens have served multiple functions: providing access to culturally important foods unavailable in local markets, creating spaces for social gathering across generations, and offering therapeutic benefits documented by public health researchers.
The Bhutanese community garden phenomenon has drawn the attention of public health researchers, urban agriculture advocates, and refugee service organizations, who have documented its benefits for physical health, mental well-being, food security, and social integration.[1]
Traditional Crops and Agricultural Knowledge
The crops grown in Bhutanese community gardens reflect the culinary traditions of southern Bhutan and the broader Nepali food culture that sustained the community through the camp years. Mustard greens (rayo saag) are among the most commonly cultivated plants, used in the preparation of gundruk — a fermented leafy green that is a staple of Nepali cuisine and a powerful taste of home for displaced Lhotshampa. Bitter gourd (tite karela), prized for both its flavor and its medicinal properties in South Asian food traditions, is another essential garden crop, as are long beans (bodi), taro (pidalu), bottle gourd (lauka), chayote squash (iskus), and various varieties of chili peppers.
Herbs and spices occupy an equally important place in Bhutanese gardens. Fenugreek leaves (methi), cilantro, green onions, lemongrass, turmeric, and ginger are cultivated for daily cooking, while specialty items such as Sichuan pepper (timur) and perilla (silam) connect gardeners to the specific flavor profiles of Bhutanese cooking that distinguish it from the broader South Asian repertoire. Many gardeners also cultivate marigolds, used in religious offerings, and other flowers with cultural significance.
The agricultural knowledge that Bhutanese gardeners bring to these plots has been passed down through generations, although it requires adaptation to the different climates, soils, and growing seasons of North American cities. Gardeners in northern cities like Syracuse, New York, and Burlington, Vermont, must contend with short growing seasons and cold winters that are dramatically different from the subtropical climate of southern Bhutan. Elderly gardeners, in particular, carry deep expertise in seed saving, companion planting, natural pest management, and soil preparation techniques that predate the displacement — knowledge that the garden setting allows them to transmit to grandchildren who have never seen Bhutan.
Therapeutic and Healing Value
Research on Bhutanese community gardens has consistently documented their therapeutic value, particularly for elderly refugees and for individuals experiencing the psychological effects of displacement and trauma. The Bhutanese American community has faced disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, linked to the compounding effects of pre-displacement persecution, the prolonged uncertainty of camp life, and the stresses of acculturation in resettlement countries.[2]
For many refugees, gardening provides a form of embodied therapy that formal mental health services — which may be culturally unfamiliar, linguistically inaccessible, or stigmatized — cannot replicate. The physical activity, exposure to sunlight, and sensory engagement with soil, plants, and water offer physiological benefits. The cultivation of familiar crops provides a sense of continuity with a pre-displacement identity that many refugees feared was permanently lost. The garden's seasonal rhythms — planting, tending, harvesting, preserving — impose a structure and purpose that counteracts the disorientation and purposelessness that some elderly refugees experience in urban American environments where their traditional skills have limited application.
Community garden programs in several cities have explicitly incorporated mental health awareness components, hosting gatherings where garden-based social interaction creates space for conversation about well-being, coping, and mutual support in culturally appropriate settings that do not carry the clinical associations of counseling offices.
Social Cohesion and Community Building
Beyond their agricultural and therapeutic functions, Bhutanese community gardens serve as vital social infrastructure for a resettled population that is often geographically dispersed within cities and suburbs. In the refugee camps, social life was intensely communal — families lived in close proximity, shared cooking spaces, and participated in collective activities as a matter of daily routine. American suburban life, with its emphasis on private spaces and automobile-dependent movement, can be profoundly isolating, particularly for elderly refugees who do not drive and whose English is limited.
The community garden provides a gathering point where community members can interact on terms that feel natural and familiar. Conversations happen in Nepali over shared work. Knowledge is exchanged about planting techniques, cooking methods, and news from the community. Intergenerational interaction occurs as grandparents teach grandchildren to identify plants and prepare soil. Gender dynamics shift as the garden becomes one of the few community spaces where elderly women, who may be particularly isolated in the domestic sphere, can socialize independently. The garden plot becomes, in effect, a village commons transplanted to an American city.
Programs Across Resettlement Cities
Bhutanese community garden programs have been established in numerous resettlement cities, often through partnerships between refugee communities, resettlement agencies, and municipal parks departments or urban agriculture organizations. In Columbus, Ohio, home to the largest Bhutanese population in the country, community gardens operated through partnerships with the Franklin Park Conservatory, local churches, and community organizations have provided dozens of families with garden plots. The Columbus programs have been particularly notable for integrating English language instruction and nutrition education into the gardening experience.
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, organizations including the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and refugee resettlement agencies have supported Bhutanese garden projects in the South Hills and surrounding areas. Syracuse, New York, has seen Bhutanese gardeners participate in the Syracuse Grows and Refugee Agricultural Partnership programs, which provide land, tools, seeds, and technical assistance to refugee farmers. Burlington, Vermont, through the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and the Intervale Center, has supported Bhutanese and other refugee gardeners in programs that have become models for refugee agricultural engagement nationally.
Some programs have moved beyond community gardens into market farming, enabling Bhutanese growers to sell their produce at farmers' markets and through community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs. These market-oriented initiatives provide supplemental income while also introducing the broader public to Bhutanese and South Asian vegetables, creating cross-cultural exchange through food.[3]
Connection to Agricultural Roots
The significance of Bhutanese community gardens cannot be fully understood without reference to the agricultural identity that displacement destroyed. The Lhotshampa population of southern Bhutan was predominantly agricultural, cultivating rice, maize, cardamom, oranges, vegetables, and spices on family-owned and communally managed land in the subtropical foothills of the Himalayas. Land ownership was central to social identity, economic security, and family honor. The forced expulsion from Bhutan entailed not only the loss of nationality and political rights but the confiscation of land, livestock, and the entire material basis of a rural livelihood.
The refugee camps in Nepal offered almost no opportunity for agricultural activity. Families that had spent generations farming were confined to small shelters on allotted plots, dependent on food rations distributed by international agencies. The loss of agricultural agency — the inability to grow one's own food, to work the soil, to exercise the skills and knowledge that defined one's place in the world — was experienced as a profound indignity layered on top of the political injustice of expulsion.
In this context, community gardens in resettlement countries carry an emotional weight that transcends their practical function. When an elderly Bhutanese woman plants mustard greens in a Columbus community garden plot, she is not merely growing food; she is enacting a form of recovery — reclaiming a relationship with the earth that was taken from her, reconnecting with an identity that decades of camp life could not extinguish, and transmitting to her grandchildren a knowledge of the land that no displacement can fully erase.[1]
References
- Hartwig, Kari A., and Mason, Mary. "Community Gardens for Refugee and Immigrant Communities as a Means of Health Promotion." Journal of Community Health, vol. 41, 2016, pp. 1153–1159. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10900-016-0195-5
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Suicide and Suicidal Ideation Among Bhutanese Refugees — United States, 2009–2012." Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 62, no. 26, 2013. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6226a2.htm
- Gerber, Monica M., et al. "Nepali Bhutanese Refugees Reap Support Through Community Gardening." International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1037/ipp0000061
- Intervale Center. "New Farms for New Americans Program Report." Burlington, VT, 2018.
Contributed by Anonymous Contributor, Syracuse, New York
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