Rhodes Park Library in Kensington, Johannesburg is an unlikely setting for a flourishing food garden. The Library, on the edge of a park in a middle class, traditionally white area of inner Johannesburg, has a fenced in garden area. This is the site of the food garden the librarian, Edith Mvelase, decided to create in order to provide food for an AIDS hospice in nearby Jeppestown, an area with many homeless people and a shifting population. .

In helping the hospice Edith experimented with two or three seeds to see what would grow on the largely uncultivated ground around the library. She then managed to get a garden going on part of the site with the help of a charity, some volunteers, and gardening experts.