DeRoche Projects designs Backyard Community Garden in Ghana

A GARDEN BUILT AROUND EVERYDAY LIFE

DeRoche Projects has broken ground on the Backyard Community Garden in Osu, Accra, marking the second phase of the wider Backyard Urban Campus. Rather than treating the campus as a single enclosed destination, the masterplan distributes buildings, landscapes and public spaces across the neighborhood, connected by short walks through the city. Following the completed Backyard Community Club, the new garden extends that idea into the landscape, asking what a contemporary civic space might look like when its starting point is not the imported urban park, but the ways public space has long been inhabited across West Africa.

Here, lawns and decorative planting are politely shown the door. The landscape is organized around gathering, cultivation, play, food and informal exchange, drawing on environments where vegetation has traditionally provided shade, medicine and produce alongside social space. Gardens planted with species used in Ghanaian cooking and traditional medicine sit alongside areas for leisure, contemplation and education, while produce grown on site will feed into the café’s seasonal menu. The result positions cultivation less as scenery than as a piece of everyday civic infrastructure.

renders by DeRoche Projects

AGRICULTURAL GRIDS ORGANIZE THE PUBLIC REALM

The garden’s layout takes cues from agricultural planning systems found across West Africa, where grids have historically structured cultivation, irrigation and shared access to land. DeRoche Projects borrows the logic rather than the image: planting beds, paths and gathering areas are arranged within a framework designed to change as vegetation grows and community uses evolve. Visitors enter beside an ancillary building before descending toward a sunken garden and six-meter canopy water feature, then move through shaded spaces incorporating cast-in-place seating and games including Oware. Educational crops, children’s play areas and a café pavilion complete the sequence.

Three small buildings — the café pavilion, ancillary building and a water folly that doubles as shade — are dispersed through the site so that architecture supports rather than dominates the garden. The café keeps its enclosed footprint compact, leaving most of its presence to a generous veranda inspired by the outdoor rooms associated with communal life across the region. Instead of being assigned one very serious function, the covered threshold is intended to host café tables one day and workshops, yoga, community meetings or informal gatherings the next. The landscape, in other words, gets to remain the main event.

the backyard community garden forms phase two of the wider backyard urban campus in Accra

RAMMED EARTH MEETS PALM KERNEL SHELLS

Materially, the project continues research begun with the Backyard Community Club. DeRoche Projects is developing stabilized rammed earth mixes that reduce Portland cement through locally available lime and pozzolanic ash, exploring how a construction method with deep roots in West Africa can operate as a contemporary, durable and lower-carbon system. The approach deliberately connects material experimentation with local resources, labor and building knowledge, rather than treating earth construction as a nostalgic architectural gesture.

That thinking extends underfoot. Instead of imported paving or a manicured lawn, the garden uses crushed palm kernel shells, an agricultural by-product selected to create a permeable surface that remains accessible during Ghana’s rainy seasons while preserving the feel of an earthen landscape. Below, pipes collect rainwater for irrigation, turning the ground itself into part of the garden’s maintenance system. Scheduled for 2027, the Backyard Community Garden suggests a modest inversion of the conventional city park: rather than asking people to admire the landscape from the path, it gives them considerably more to do with it.

agricultural grids found across West Africa inform the project’s planting beds and circulation routes