Keeping living knowledge in practice. Location: Triem Tay village (across the river from Hoi An center)
Plant knowledge and skills · Biodiversity and living culture · Community learning
Hội An Medicinal Garden is a community garden and working nursery for medicinal, edible and other locally useful plants for Hội An’s and lower Thu Bồn floodplain villages. It keeps plants in cultivation, practical skills in use and knowledge connected to the people and places that give it meaning.
The garden asks a practical question: as village life changes, how can useful plants remain available, understood and passed on—not only remembered after they have disappeared from everyday use?
A riverside village in transition
Triêm Tây lies across the Thu Bồn River from Hội An Ancient Town. Its gardens, farming land and village life form part of the wider ecological and cultural landscape that has long sustained Hội An.
The village has also lived through severe riverbank erosion, flooding and changing growing conditions. Urbanisation and tourism have brought new opportunities, infrastructure and forms of work, while reducing the time, land and practical reasons for the majority of households to continue traditional cultivation.
These changes are visible in the landscape, but another loss can be harder to see. Useful plants disappear from home gardens and uncultivated spaces. People who know how to grow, prepare or use them become older. Younger generations have fewer occasions to learn through practice.
The risk is larger than the loss of individual species. It is the gradual separation of plants, skills and everyday village life.
A relationship built through practice
Green Youth Collective’s relationship with Triêm Tây began more than a decade ago. By 2016, GYC was working with the village farming cooperative on a 600-square-metre community garden. The garden tested composting, soil cover, companion planting, seed saving and cultivation without synthetic chemicals—work recorded in contemporary reporting.
During the same period, GYC and community partners participated in a UNESCO World Heritage Volunteers initiative connecting organic gardening, waste management, local livelihoods and sustainable tourism in Triêm Tây.
Working in the village over time revealed something that a short project could easily miss. Knowledge rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. It weakens through many small changes: less cultivated land, busier lives, different livelihoods, unavailable planting material and fewer reasons for one person to teach another.
Hội An Medicinal Garden grew from that understanding. Conserving knowledge requires more than documenting it. People still need the plants, the skills, a place to practise and a reason to continue.
Keeping plants and skills in circulation
The garden operates as both a cultivated landscape and a small plant nursery. Medicinal, edible and other useful plants are identified, grown and propagated under local conditions. Composting, mulching and ecological soil care support their cultivation, while seasonal observation helps the team understand how different plants respond to heat, heavy rain, moisture, shade and changing microclimates.
The work includes:
- cultivating locally useful plants;
- propagating seedlings and maintaining nursery stock;
- composting, mulching and caring for soil;
- observing seasonal performance and ecological relationships;
- exchanging planting material, experience and practical knowledge.
Propagation is especially important. A plant cannot return to household, school, community or hospitality gardens if suitable planting material is no longer available. Keeping a species in active cultivation allows both the plant and the knowledge surrounding it to move beyond the garden.
The garden approaches medicinal knowledge with care. It supports plant literacy, responsible cultivation and understanding of everyday uses and well-being. Traditional or inherited uses are not presented as clinically proven treatments or substitutes for professional healthcare.
What this place makes visible
Hội An Medicinal Garden shows that biodiversity and culture cannot be separated easily. A useful plant belongs simultaneously to an ecological system, a body of practical knowledge and a pattern of daily life. When one relationship weakens, the others become more vulnerable.
The garden also connects several GYC Working Models. Ecological cultivation and composting link plant diversity with soil care. Propagation provides useful planting material for gardens and future restoration work. Community School activities turn the real work of identifying, growing and caring for plants into a living curriculum.
Its value is therefore not measured only by the number of species within its boundary. The more important questions are whether people can still recognise and propagate those plants, whether knowledge remains in use and whether plants and skills continue to circulate through the wider community.
Living knowledge survives because someone still has the plant, the skill and a reason to practise.