A Park With No Grass: DeRoche Projects Is Growing an Edible Public Garden in Accra

A park doesn't have to be something you just look at—it can be somewhere you grow vegetables, play a board game, or wash your feet. That's the question the Backyard Community Garden, now under construction by DeRoche Projects in Accra's Osu neighborhood, sets out to answer. It marks the second phase of the larger Backyard Urban Campus project, following the completed Backyard Community Club, and pushes the idea of "public space" beyond a single building into a string of connected, walkable places scattered throughout the block.

The garden deliberately does away with lawns and ornamental plants. Instead, it's filled with crops used in Ghanaian cooking and traditional medicine, shade-giving trees, and spaces designed for gathering, play, farming, and the exchange of goods. Produce grown on-site will feed into the seasonal menu of an on-premise café—meaning cultivation here isn't landscaping for show, but part of the everyday infrastructure of the place.

The overall circulation logic borrows from long-standing West African agricultural grid systems—layouts historically used to organize irrigation, cultivation, and shared land use, rather than any particular aesthetic style. Visitors first pass through an ancillary building, then descend into a sunken garden anchored by a six-meter-tall cascading water feature, before moving through a shaded area with cast-in-place seating and a space for the board game Oware, and finally arriving at an educational crop plot, a children's play area, and the café pavilion. The three small structures on site—the café, the ancillary building, and the water feature pavilion, which also provides shade—are deliberately dispersed across the grounds so that architecture takes a back seat and the landscape stays front and center. The café itself keeps its indoor footprint minimal, putting most of its presence into a generous veranda inspired by the semi-outdoor "living spaces" common to West African community life—somewhere that functions as a café by day and can just as easily turn into a workshop, yoga class, or community meeting space at other times.

Materially, the project builds on research already underway for the Backyard Community Club: DeRoche Projects continues to develop stabilized rammed earth mixes that replace part of the Portland cement with lime and volcanic ash, turning a construction method deeply rooted in West Africa into a contemporary, durable, low-carbon system—rather than treating earthen construction as a nostalgic gesture. Ground surfaces skip imported paving and turf altogether in favor of crushed palm kernel shells, an agricultural byproduct that's permeable and stays walkable even through Ghana's rainy season, while still keeping the texture of packed earth. Buried piping collects rainwater for irrigation, turning the ground itself into part of the garden's maintenance system.

Slated for completion in 2027, the Backyard Community Garden is the kind of public landscape that asks people to get their hands dirty rather than just stand on a path and admire it.