There are no doors or gates to Anathoth Community Garden.  Here, lush vegetable beds join a woodlot, creek, a native plants garden, a covered pavilion, a playhouse, and a children's garden to form a gathering place where families meet to picnic, where neighbors come to walk or rest and talk, where choirs come to sing and bands come to play, and most importantly, where strangers come to eat together. Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons throughout the growing season finds garden members and guests sharing potluck meals:  here homemade tortillas and a pot of pinto beans sit on a wooden table next to country fried chicken, Japanese sticky rice, Liberian sweet potato leaves, and collard greens from the previous day's harvest. 

  Anathoth has become a place of hospitality, a place where children eat, then play with the community's elderly, a place where newly-arrived immigrants join suburbia's overscheduled and overworked professionals for a simple meal at the edge of a quiet garden.  In this place, “to eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.” (Alexander Schmemann).