A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume vı | Number ıı | Spring 2011A Journal of Place

Essays: Cities Going Green, The UrbanLandscape as Food 3Timothy Beatley: Inventing the New UrbanFarm: Field Notes From Detroit

Ben Helphand and Laura Lawson: The Culture of Food and Chicago’s CommunityGardens

Jane Garmey: Rooftop Revolution: CulinaryGardening Aloft in New York City

Jane Roy Brown: They Built a Fahm in Hahvud Yahd: A Tiny Garden Strives forGlobal Impact

Katherine Harmon: Lessons in the Dirt: School Gardens Grow in Brooklyn

Place Keeper 16Paula Deitz: Twin Maples, Litchfield County,Connecticut

Book Reviews 18Elihu Rubin: Delirious New Orleans: Manifesto for an Extraordinary American CityBy Stephen Verderber

Alice Truax: Farm City: The Education of an Urban FarmerBy Novella Carpenter

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Parks, Plants, and People By Lynden B. Miller

Contributors 23

By the end of thenineteenth century itbecame impossibleto “keep ‘em downon the farm”; people

began moving to cities wherefactory jobs and bright lightsbeckoned. A hundred yearslater, with four out of everyfive Americans living in met-ropolitan areas, the countrywas no longer an agrariannation – a fact of momen-tous social consequence witha corresponding effect onthe way in which peoplewere fed.

The industrial revolutionwasn’t just a matter of thegrowth of manufacturing inand around cities. Machin-ery irrevocably changed thecharacter of farming: thehorse-drawn plow becamethe tractor, the wagonbecame the truck, the pitch-fork became the harvester.The appearance of the land-scape as well as the lives of farmers altered more dra-matically over a couple of generations than in all thepreceding millennia thathuman beings had beengrowing crops. Dams madepossible not only hydroelec-tricity but also the irrigationof arid lands. Machine farm-ing meant much largerfields. The interstate high-

way system stitched togetherhinterland and metropolis,making long-distance truck-ing to and from multipledelivery points possible.

So what is there not tocelebrate about much biggerharvests and the liberation of the 20 percent of the pop-ulation who remained on the farm from a legacy ofdrudgery? Isn’t abundance abyword for the American wayof life? And shouldn’t wetake into consideration thefact that the export of grainand other surplus crops isgood for the balance oftrade?

Throughout the twentiethcentury the cornucopia pro-duced by industrial agricul-ture was poured out on thetable in millions of Americanhomes. But this cornucopiawas not made up simply offresh food. Freezers wereanother of industry’s gifts tothe kitchen, and even beforemothers went out into theworkplace, they servedfrozen foods for dinner.Before long, entire frozenmeals could be eaten infront of the television.Moreover, after large-scaleagriculture was put in theservice of the fast-foodindustry, you no longer evenhad to eat at home. Cateringto the specifications ofMcDonald’s, many potatogrowers concentrated solelyon the most suitable varietyfor making french fries.

Corn was grown in unprece-dented quantities to provideoil, sweeteners, and feed forthe cattle that would enterthe human food chain ashamburgers sold by fast-foodfranchises. Profitable junkfoods filled entire supermar-ket aisles.

The seeds of reaction toindustrial agriculture wereplanted in 1962 by RachelCarson with the publicationof Silent Spring. In the book,Carson called attention tothe dangers lurking in thearsenal of chemical weaponsthat had been developed tocontrol pests and improveyields. The seeds she sowedbegan to sprout in 1970 withthe first Earth Day and theburgeoning of the environ-mental movement. Docu-mentation of the poisonouseffect of agricultural chemi-cals on animals and birds, aswell as their danger tohumans when consumed infood and drinking water,helped activists build thecase for environmental con-trols. But none of this at first had much effect onchanging the easygoingdietary habits of the majorityof the American public.

But then in 1971, not longafter Julia Child had awak-ened the taste buds ofAmericans to the joys ofFrench cooking, Alice Waters,now widely considered themother of the fresh-foodmovement, opened herrestaurant Chez Panisse in

Berkeley, California. Morethan a restaurant, it becamethe prototype of the newAmerican cuisine. Otherrestaurants in other citiesfollowed suit, and theirmenus, like that of ChezPanisse, began to detail theprovenance of baby lettuces,goat cheese, lamb, figs, andso on. Waters was not onlyhailed as the pioneer of asimpler native gastronomybut also as the originator of what some now refer to asthe locavore ideal, whoseproponents maintain thatlocally grown meat, dairyproducts, vegetables, andfruits taste better and arehealthier for you than thoseyou buy in the supermarket.

Not surprisingly, in citiesthe philosophy of locallygrown food hit the street –literally – with the prolifera-tion of farmers’ markets innumerous communitiesacross the country. Bringingthe farm stand to the city is agood two-way deal: it pro-vides truck farmers within atwo-hour driving radius of a city with a consumer baseand urban dwellers with ameans of bonding with theirrural neighbors (not to men-tion their immediate urbanneighbors) on market days.

Propelled by an environ-mental movement calling forpesticide-free produce, theword “organic” entered thefood vocabulary. Chemical-free food gained popularityamong a broader spectrumof food shoppers than thosewho already subscribed tofarmers’ market ethic. In the

produce sections of super-markets a two-tiered offeringof fruit and vegetables hasbecome common. In placeslike Whole Foods – theecosavvy fresh food empori-um that has fanned out fromits home base in Austin,Texas, to many other parts ofthe country – there are “con-ventionally grown” and “cer-tified organic” labels oneverything from avocados tozucchini.

But just because it wasgrown without chemicalassistance doesn’t mean thatan organic blueberry isn’t asmuch a product of theindustrial agricultural sys-tem as a conventional one,for organic and local are notnecessarily the same thing.With sufficient consumerdemand and willingness topay higher prices for organicproduce, commercial corpo-rations now have a profitablemarket capable of absorbingthe costs of long-distancetransportation. A case inpoint: Earthbound Farms inCarmel, California, presentsa local-farm-stand face on its website, but the triple-washed, field-fresh containerof baby arugula in my NewYork refrigerator has beenshipped cross-country, rais-ing in my mind the questionof how to measure the car-bon footprint of the tastysalad that is coming to meon a refrigerated truck tra-versing a continent.

This brings us back toAlice Waters, whose philoso-

phy is based on “the princi-ple that access to sustainable,fresh, and seasonal food is aright, not a privilege.” TheEdible Schoolyard (ESY) pro-gram sponsored by her ChezPanisse Foundation originat-ed at the Martin Luther KingMiddle School in Berkeleyand now has affiliated pro-grams in New Orleans, LosAngeles, San Francisco,Greensboro, and Brooklyn.Aimed at combating thejunk-food craze, it integrateslearning in the school gar-den with learning inside theschool. As part of the ESYcurriculum, students cooktheir garden produce in thekitchen classroom. Suchthings as scaling downrecipes are presented asmath problems. However,although part of its missionis directed toward school-lunch reform, cafeterialunches are still prepared inthe same way as before. Thehope is, however, thatschoolchildren whose palateshave been exposed to freshflavors will expand theirdietary repertoire and eathealthier food outside schooland at home.

Hidden in the implicitquestion of why school-grown food is not served inthe school cafeteria is aconundrum. It is one ofscale. Feeding the Americanpopulation of over 310 mil-lion is dependent on large-scale agriculture as well asfood imports from othercountries. The conundrum is one of economics, too.Consumers vote with their

2

Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

Artists’ Garden, South Chicago.

Inventing the New Urban Farm: Field Notes From Detroit

Few American cities have fallen as far or as hard asDetroit. Once the fourth largest city in the country, aniconic example of American ingenuity and produc-tivity, over the last half century it became instead anemblem of cronyism, corruption, and despair. The pop-

ulation, once close to two million, now hovers at around halfthat. Unemployment is at 14 percent. A Time article in 2009cited the median home sale price at less than $6,000 – and noone was buying. Today, roughly a third of the city’s acreage liesvacant – about forty square miles. And yet even these statisticsdon’t fully prepare a visitor for the extent of the devastation.Driving around Detroit, one sees large empty spaces that oncecontained entire neighborhoods and commercial strips remi-niscent of battle-scarred Iraq or Lebanon. Many homes andbusinesses have been deliberately set on fire; others are crum-bling to the ground.

These ruins are punctuated by relics of an earlier, morevibrant time, when the automobile literally defined MotorCity. Here, still, are the enormous factories, the Edsel FordExpressway, the twelve-ton, eighty-foot tire looming over thehighway near the airport. But unfortunately, despite the recentpositive economic bulletins from General Motors and Ford, itis nature rather than industry that appears to be reshaping thecity, as lawns grow wild and bushes invade the houses theyonce ornamented. On the east side of town, where the declinehas been greatest, pheasants have become a common sight.Some, however, see in nature’s regenerative force not thedestruction of Detroit’s past but the key to its future. Bothbusiness leaders and government officials are exploring cityfarming on a grand scale as a serious possibility.

In fact, urban agriculture has come to Detroit’s aid before,as today’s farming proponents are quick to point out. When itsinhabitants were battling hunger and poverty during thedepression of the 1890s, the city’s progressive mayor, Hazen S.Pingree, instituted the use of vacant lots for gardens. The gar-dens became known as “Pingree’s potato patches,” and by allaccounts they were quite successful, feeding many in desperatetimes. At the height of the program some seventeen hundredfamilies farmed half-acre plots, producing food for both saleand family consumption. Laura Lawson, in her excellent book

City Bountiful, describes howthe Pingree program was emu-lated in other cities, includingNew York and Philadelphia.

One of the reasons thaturban agriculture is beingviewed as an appealing possi-bility is that, for the time

being, the city’s aim is not to repopulate its dwindling neigh-borhoods but to depopulate them even further. Mayor DaveBing has introduced a bold master plan called Detroit Works,which will identify existing population clusters in the city andthen densify and reinvest in those areas – essentially giving up on areas that don’t appear to be socially or economicallyviable in the short run. This idea has been controversial, assome residents are afraid that they will be forced to relocate,but doing nothing to address Detroit’s shrinking population isnot an option. With a crippled tax base, the city simply can’tafford to protect its remaining citizens and supply them withbasic services like water and road repair. By one estimate, each vacant lot costs the city about $2,400 per year in publicservices and maintenance – an annual bill in the hundreds of millions and a major reason for the city’s operating deficits.

As many neighborhoods continue to empty, and as DetroitWorks speeds this process along, there are remarkable oppor-tunities to repurpose the vacant swaths of this city, and perhaps more than in any other American city today, urban

3

dollars and their foodstamps. The pricing of local-ly grown food has to equatewith the financial sustain-ability of small farms, andherein lies the rub. As in thecase of all handcraftedobjects, individually planted,handpicked foods cannotunderprice those of industri-al mass production.

Thus Michelle Obama’sWhite House organic veg-etable garden may point theway back to the victory gar-dens of World War II, but itis more symbolic than cat-alytic. Yet the symbolicimportance of this small,highly visible piece of thegreen revolution shouldn’tbe underestimated. LikeWaters’s school gardens itposes a tangible alternativeto the industrial model offood production whilebroadcasting by example theFirst Lady’s message thathome-grown means healthi-er eating.

It should not be forgot-ten, moreover, that gardensare landscapes, not abstrac-tions, and their growingpresence in cities is all of apiece with other greeningefforts: turning abandonedindustrial sites into parks;riverbanks into bikeways andpromenades; and streets intotree-lined thoroughfares.Call it the new city planning,this loosening of the urbanweave with a reborn land-scape of parks, promenades,trees, and community gar-

dens is beginning to dissolvethe dichotomy between ruraland urban scenery.

In this issue of Site/LinesJane Roy Brown takes us toHarvard Yard to see how student gardeners are grow-ing vegetables in the heart of Cambridge; KatherineHarmon visits school gar-dens in Brooklyn; JaneGarmey elevates us to therooftops of Manhattan todiscover hives for honey beesand specialty foods for chefs;Timothy Beatley describes avisionary blueprint for turn-ing Detroit’s desolate lotsinto a large urban-farmingoperation; and BenjaminHelphand and Laura Lawsonspeak of the role communitygardens play in the local-food movement in Chicago.In and of themselves none ofthese things will alter thecurrent pattern of nationalagriculture, but they may be,especially when multipliedby thousands of other exam-ples elsewhere, a powerfulforce in changing our cultur-al ethos regarding food pro-duction and consumption. Itis important to rememberthat even in the age of glob-alization, we are all localswherever we are at any giventime. Why not then be loca-vores as well?

With good green wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersPresident

Cities Going Green, The Urban Landscape as Food

Much of the east side of Detroit is a

mix of abandoned houses and

vacant lots. Some 40 square miles

of vacant land exists in the city,

offering new opportunities for food

production as well as the restora-

tion of natural habitats.

agriculture is poised to be a catalyst for renewal and reuse. Atthe same time, there is considerable angst about how Detroit’sfood-growing potential should be exploited, and competingmodels and perspectives have emerged. At one end of the con-tinuum is a proposal by local millionaire John Hantz to trans-form large areas of the city into intensive and commerciallyviable farms. This proposal has captured the imagination ofmany outside of Detroit and received considerable nationalpress coverage. Hantz, with a net worth of some $100 million,has made a personal commitment to invest $30 million incommercial urban farming in Detroit over the next ten years –a pledge that has given him immediate credibility. He is seenas a native son whose ideas should be taken seriously.

Hantz has described his depressing daily commute fromhis home in Indian Village to his Southfield office in numer-ous interviews. “I’d look out the window,” he told a staff editorat The Atlantic, “and I’d tell myself, something has to happen.Something has to change. One day I was sitting at a trafficlight, thinking this through from an economics point of view,and I thought, ‘What’s our problem? Why doesn’t it get better?’Well, we have multiple problems, but one comes down to realestate. We don’t have scarcity.” There is too much availableland in Detroit, so nobody wants it. “We need to create scarci-ty,” Hantz reasoned, “because until we get a stabilized market,there’s no reason for entrepreneurs or other people to startbuying. I thought, ‘What could do that in a positive way?What’s a development that people would want to be associatedwith?’” And that’s when he came up with the idea of farming: abusiness enterprise that takes up a great deal of space. “Peopleoften think you have to have a big solution to a big problem –why not keep it simple and start with a simple solution?” Andso he founded Hantz Farms, LLC, and hired Mike Score as itspresident.

Score was a good choice. He grew up in Detroit and attend-ed Michigan State University (MSU), where he obtained adegree in crop and soil sciences; it turned out that for manyyears he, too, had harbored a dream of converting some of thecity’s vacant acreage into farmland. After a stint working onagricultural development in Zaire and another teaching inKentucky, where he received his master’s degree, he returnedto MSU to work at its extension service as an innovation coun-selor. It was there, while helping fledgling entrepreneursdevelop business plans for new food businesses and products,that he met Hantz. After he helped the entrepreneur come upwith a financial plan, Hantz offered him a job.

On a cold day last Novem-ber, I flew to Detroit and metwith Score to discuss the farm’s progress. After meetingat the Hantz Farm offices onMt. Elliott Street, he drove mearound the hundred-acre site where he has been working

to cobble together lots – most now owned by the city as aresult of foreclosure – that Hantz Farms is negotiating to buy.Nevertheless, assembling a viable farm in an area that wouldstill include hundreds of individual lot owners remains a chal-lenge. Although we drove by large, empty parcels of land, thecheckerboard pattern of Score’s site map indicated that a con-siderable number of local residents are expected to stay put. Infact, the Hantz Farm staff began its efforts by going door todoor in the neighborhood to explain what they were envision-ing, and that no one would be forcibly evicted. Score claimsthat local support has been high, with some 95 percent of theresidents signing a petition that will eventually be presentedto City Council, asking them to approve the sale of the city-owned parcels. Score believes that over time similar “pods” oflarge-scale agriculture could be established around the city,eventually resulting in perhaps five thousand to ten thousandacres in commercial production.

What kinds of commercial farming are imagined? Scoretalks in terms of stages, beginning with somewhat easier andmore familiar strategies. The first would probably include

hardwood trees (an especially good option ifsignificant soil contamination is discovered),apple trees and other fruit trees, and evenpick-your-own Christmas trees, along withfield crops like lettuce and heirloom toma-toes. A second phase would include moreintensive indoor production, including thenotion of an innovation center demonstrat-ing many different indoor production sys-tems. Score maintains that just about everynew farming idea will be on display and test-ed – aquaculture, aquaponics, aeroponics –and that many of these technologies willprobably be designed in vertical shapes totake up less space. Education and tourismwould be added to the mix, targeting stu-dents of all ages, senior citizens, and com-munity organizations.

The third phase, which would be themost ambitious, would invest in renewable-energy technologies to power all of this pro-

duction sustainably. Although Hantz Farms is a commercialenterprise, its founder believes that it can also serve to educateothers and draw tourists to Detroit. Indeed, at several points inour conversation, Score mentioned the possibility that peoplefrom around the world might one day come there not to cele-brate the city’s automotive past but to learn about leadingurban-farming ideas and technologies. “We believe we can be aglobal center for research and innovation in urban agricultureand we can give birth to a new industry,” he explained. Scoreand Hantz would like to see a time in the near future when, inone trip, a visitor could learn about soil remediation, compareand contrast different growing systems, and observe the socio-logical impact of integrating agriculture into an urban setting.In this scenario, Score says, “many of the lessons that will be ofinterest to urban planners and urban leaders could beaddressed by traveling to Detroit.”

We have no model in the United States for what such animmensely ambitious agricultural project might look like.“Don’t think a farm with tractors,” Hantz has said. “That’s old.”When Fortune magazine did a story on the project in 2009, the editors asked if they could commission an illustrator toimagine such a landscape. The result was whimsical and con-ceptual – multiple elevated growing beds, geodesic-domegreenhouses, and wind turbines – but not that far from Score’sown conception of the future.

4

Mike Score is president of Hantz

Farms LLC, and is spearheading

efforts to bring large-scale commer-

cial farming to Detroit. Here,

he and the author visit the site of

the “proof of concept” farm, on

the east side of the city.

There have been frustrations, Score admits, and many hur-dles remain. The city has shifted the projected site of the farmseveral times. And there remains uncertainty about the legalstatus of commercial farming in the city (there is currently noagricultural zone or category under the city’s zoning ordi-nance). Discussions about the necessity of extending the state’sright-to-farm law within the city’s boundaries are ongoing. But resources and capital to get started, which are so often themajor stumbling blocks, do not appear to be issues in thiscase.

Some city residents are leery of the Hantz proposal, fearingthat it is motivated by profit and opportunism, and referringto Hantz’s efforts to buy the city’s foreclosed properties as aland grab. Ironically, Hantz Farms may be most vocally resist-ed by those who are already involved in producing food within the city limits. By one estimate, there are more thanone thousand small gardens now operating in Detroit, andtheir supporters represent a dramatically different philosophyand practice of urban agriculture. One of them is Dr. KamiPothukuchi, who teaches in the urban studies and planningprogram at Wayne State University. In Pothukuchi’s view, theHantz proposal has suffered from the beginning from a failureto connect with the city’s robust and growing urban agricul-ture movement.

Pothukuchi would like to see many more small gardensscattered throughout the city rather than the development ofone big, privately owned enterprise. During our meeting, she emphasized the many benefits of community gardens, andthe profound ways in which they help to strengthen neigh-borhoods. Hantz, she argued, sees his project merely as a “con-venient use of land,” whereas “people who are in urban agriculture talk about the possibility of abundance, about shar-ing, about all the multiple community benefits that can be obtained from agriculture – involving young people andinspiring neighborhoods.”

There is no question that Detroit suffers from a disintegrat-ing and dysfunctional community food system; there are manyplaces on Detroit’s east side where residents have no easyaccess to a grocery store. The commercial establishments thatremain in these neighborhoods are often liquor stores or tinyconvenience shops. Pothukuchi has developed a programcalled Detroit FRESH to help the owners of these stores stockat least some fresh fruits and vegetables for their customers.Pothukuchi took me to one such store – a little market onMack Avenue, where the owners are proud that they haveresisted the alienating trend of installing bulletproof glass toshield themselves from their customers. This store alreadyoffers more foodstuffs than most, but front and center, Inoticed, were bananas and apples and pears.

For Pothukuchi, this is just a beginning; she and the ownerdiscussed plans already under way to establish a garden on anadjacent empty lot, which could then provide the store withextremely fresh produce during the growing season. Pothuku-chi also mentioned the possibility of organizing a specialevent to counsel nearby residents suffering from diabetes, andthe store owner seemed interested in participating. Lots ofsmall-scale efforts such as these are in progress throughoutthe city, and increasingly they identify themselves as part of alarger movement. Many of the gardens are connected by theDetroit Garden Resource Collaborative, a joint effort of TheGreening of Detroit, Detroit Agriculture Network, EarthworksUrban Farm, and Michigan State University. These organiza-tions provide technical support, training, and planting materi-als to representatives of the hundreds of individual gardensscattered around Detroit. In so doing, they also nourish a net-work of community activists who are, in their own ways, build-ing a different kind of city.

One impressive example of urban farming of a differentsort can be seen at Earthworks Urban Farm, which was started by a Franciscan brother in 1997 to provide food for theCapuchin Soup Kitchen. A member of the collaborative,Earthworks Farm has blossomed into a hub of urban garden-ing activity. Its greenhousenow produces some onehundred thousand vegetableseedlings, many of which aredonated to other communitygardening efforts around thecity. On the day I visited,Patrick Crouch, programmanager for the farm, wasbusy laying out a passivesolar hoop house that willexpand the production andtraining space even further.Earthworks maintains morethan thirty beehives and pro-duces honey and beeswaxhand balm in addition tojam and canned foods. It alsoruns two youth-farming ini-

tiatives, which teach kids about food and agricultural issues.The farm is a highly grassroots, neighborhood- and communi-ty-embedded venture, and it exists to combat poverty, socialequity, and food insecurity. These are goals and objectives notoften mentioned when the Hantz Farms proposal is described,and therein lies part of the schism that has emerged in theDetroit urban-farming community.

In some ways, this seems a predictable clash of values.Hantz is a businessman. He has a diversified portfolio thatincludes ownership of a corporate airline, a bowling alley, abank, and a lot of real estate. This latest venture has been fromthe beginning a commercial one – Hantz’s civic concernsabout the health of his native city notwithstanding. This is oneof the reasons that Score objects strongly to criticisms thatHantz did not reach out sufficiently to the city’s urban-garden-ing community. “John’s perspective is a business perspective,”Score said. “When Apple wanted to build their desktop com-puters they didn’t go to IBM and say, ‘You were here first –would it be all right with you if we put this in the market-place? They took millions of dollars and put it at risk, and ifthe market doesn’t like the idea the business will fail. ForJohn, he never felt compelled to sit down with other groups inthe city and find out whether they liked his idea. He was just

willing to put his money at risk and see howthe market responded.” Score believes thatthe commercial marketplace must be theprimary catalytic force that moves the cityforward.

Part of the resistance to the Hantz pro-posal is certainly due to the immenseamount of national publicity Hantz hasreceived when smaller-scale urban agricul-turalists have been working in the trenchesfor decade or longer with little recognition.But it also stems from the scope of the pro-ject, and the difficulty of anticipating itsnegative consequences before it will be toolate to prevent them. In fairness to Hantz’sdetractors, corporations rarely feel beholdento the communities in which they do busi-ness, whereas for Pothukuchi and others inDetroit’s urban gardening movement, it isthe neighborhood and the community that must be the primary point of focus. AsPatrick Crouch told one reporter, smallerfarms “fit within the fabric of a neighbor-

5

Kami Pothukuchi is a professor at

Wayne State University and believes

the future lies in smaller, neighbor-

hood-based urban agriculture. Here,

she and the author visit one of

the greenhouses run by Earthworks

Urban Farm.

hood,” whereas a large operation like Hantz Farm becomes “asubstitute for community redevelopment instead of being acatalyst for community redevelopment.” And as John Gallagher,a longtime reporter for the Detroit Free Press, points out in his recent book, Reimagining Detroit, there are many reasonsurban farmers might feel suspicious of corporate power and influence – “because the banks and big business redlinedDetroit and other cities, or because of the horror stories they hear about the way corporate farmers treat livestock, orbecause of the intensive use of pesticides and other chemicalscorporate farmers use to make huge single-crop farmsprofitable.”

How irreconcilable are these competing visions of a green-er Detroit? Score believes that there is plenty of room inDetroit for both of them. Certainly, the city bureaucracy hasbeen galvanized to develop an institutional framework sup-portive of urban agriculture. A committee appointed by the

city planning commission isdrafting a new urban agricul-ture policy and looking care-fully at the code and zoningchanges that are needed,including provisions for keep-

ing poultry and bees in the city – activities which are currentlyillegal. A food policy council has also been formed. Perhapsthese new urban food initiatives will create opportunities forthe various constituencies to speak and work together. With anextension of good will from both sides, it might also be possi-ble to craft synergies to advance neighborhood cohesion andcommunity food security as well as larger-scale economic foodproduction, but whether that good will is forthcoming remainsto be seen.

Hazen Pingree’s statue now sits in Grand Circus Park, andalthough most residents probably could not identify thisfigure, who later served two terms as governor of Michigan, heis an important historical reference point for Detroit’s sup-porters of urban agriculture. It is interesting to ponder whatPingree would have thought about the rift between the neigh-borhood gardeners and the proponents of larger-scale, com-mercial farms in the city. The potato-patch gardens wererather small, to be sure, and born out of concerns about justiceand poverty and health. As Melvin G. Hollis, in his compre-hensive book about the reformer notes, a main goal of the pro-gram was to “eliminate the stigma of pauperism attached to[public] relief.” Give the poor the skills, material, and land, andthey, even in cities, will feed themselves. But then again, Pin-

gree was himself a Republi-can, albeit a progressive one, and the owner of a shoefactory, so one could imaginethat he might approve of the capitalist sensibilitiesbehind Hantz’s vision. Myguess is that Pingree wouldcertainly approve of a gov-ernment agricultural policythat accommodated a spec-trum of philosophies andapproaches: both small-scaleand large-scale, local andcorporate. The one thingthat all sides agree upon isthat Detroit needs a diver-sified and resilient mix offood producers and produc-tion systems.

Perhaps most exciting is the possibility for Detroit thatJohn Gallagher suggests in his book – that his hometownmight emerge as an example of how other American cities canadapt themselves to a postindustrial (postcarbon) identity inthe twenty-first century. There is room to restore nature, toexplore new economic models, and, ironically, to create theconditions for a less car-dependent society. Especially intrigu-ing are current arguments for an ambitious greening agenda:more trees and forests – something the local group theGreening of Detroit has already been working on for years;more stream restoration and native hydrology; and a celebra-tion of the returning wildlife, such as the beavers that haveapparently moved back into town after many decades. Toembrace these possibilities, however, Americans must begin byrealizing that smaller need not mean lesser but instead cansignal a sustainable, innovative city with a higher quality oflife. As Gallagher reminds us, “a city can shrink and grow atthe same time.” – Timothy Beatley

The Culture of Food and Chicago’s Community Gardens

America is in the midst of a food crisis. The numberof obese children in this country has tripled in thelast thirty years. Hundreds of thousands live in so-called food deserts, neighborhoods with limitedaccess to supermarkets or other sources of healthy

food. Food pantries are faced with higher demand and declin-ing donations. Fresh produce is prohibitively expensive formany and often loaded with pesticides. And our current foodsystem is inextricably linked to our dependence upon fossilfuels: the average meal travels fifteen hundred miles to ourplate.

Partly in response to this crisis, interest in community gar-dens has blossomed in cities across the country. Longtimeorganizations that support gardens, from the Boston NaturalAreas Network and Denver Urban Gardens to Seattle’s P-Patchand New York City’s GreenThumb, have noted an increaseddemand for garden space. And newer organizations have takenroot in places like the Twin Cities, Pittsburgh, and Salt LakeCity, breathing new life into unused properties. City parks andrecreation departments are setting aside corners of parklandfor gardening, and churches, hospitals and schools are reimag-ining institutional land as a place for vegetable plots.

Though some garden projects are purely ornamental orfocused on restoring animal habitat, most are conceived as aresponse to some aspect of the food crisis. Community gar-dens are established with the promise of saving money, feeding the hungry, and relieving food deserts. What’s more,the locally grown food they provide needs only travel down the block, not across the country.

6

One of the garden sites at

Earthworks Urban Farm. This farm

serves as an important hub for

small-scale neighborhood gardening

and food production in Detriot.

tional support for – urban gardening. By squarely facing thebenefits and limits of today’s community gardens in address-ing our food needs, perhaps we can better guarantee their sur-vival over time.

Community gardens can’t feed us. They can’t even feedthose who garden them, never mind the surrounding commu-nity. In order for a community to actually live off of a garden itwould need a lot of space and a considerable investment inspecialized equipment and training – to say nothing of a greatdeal of backbreaking labor. Community gardens generallydon’t have enough of any of these things – and most wouldn’twant them. Instead, community gardeners are content to toil on their four-by-eight or fifteen-by-fifteen-foot plot, gettheir hands dirty on weekends and summer evenings, andshare tools with their fellow gardeners. To be sure, they takeimmense pride in their modest harvest, whether they are supplementing their kitchens with fresh food in season ordonating some to friends or charities. But that is only part ofthe satisfaction these gardeners derive from their efforts.

Cynics who question community gardening as food pro-duction will cite the “$5 tomato” phenomenon – the novicegardener who enthusiastically buys all the tools, soil amend-ments, and fancy trellises to grow one tomato plant. In termsof time spent and money invested, they argue, it simply doesn’t balance out. At the other end of the spectrum, champi-ons of community gardening for food can point to recent

studies that have found that community gar-dens in Philadelphia, Camden, and Trentonhave produced millions of dollars’ worth ofsummer vegetables. Limiting one’s view tothe market value, however, would be to missthe garden for the carrots, so to speak. Thesame harvest reports reveal that much of the power of these gardens stems not fromtheir yield but from the culture they nour-ish; the personal relationships that under-gird the distribution systems where peoplehave staked out direct control of their foodsupply. And certainly the grower of the $5 tomato is less likely to be motivated bythe bottom line than by a yearning to growsomething he can eat – and to eat somethinghe has grown.

Every Saturday morning in the Uptownneighborhood of Chicago’s North Side, ahandful of volunteers gather freshly harvest-ed vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers

and load them onto a bicycle trailer for the several-mile-longjourney to Vital Bridges’ GroceryLand, a food pantry for low-income people living with HIV/AIDS. The volunteers usuallyinclude a mix of seasoned gardeners, curious newcomers, anda group from a local university. Each year Ginkgo OrganicGarden, which is named for the large tree near its entrance,donates about fifteen hundred pounds of produce to the foodpantry, providing high-quality, organic food to a population on a limited income for whom a nutritious diet is essential.

While recognizing the contribution of this donated pro-duce, it is important to keep it in perspective. A garden leaderfrom Ginkgo once recounted being teased about the yield by a farmer, because for him it seemed so tiny. But the leader wasunfazed because he sees the garden as providing a service for those who grow its produce as well as those who consumeit. Ginkgo hosts hundreds of volunteers each season, and formany this is their only direct connection to food growing andnature. Each workday ends the same way: a group photo inhomage to Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic,with one lucky volunteer holding the iconic pitchfork in hand.While some of the harvest certainly finds its way home withvolunteers, this garden is about service to others, not growingyour own lettuce. (In its early days, in fact, Ginkgo had a

7

Our habit of turning tocommunity gardening in timesof crisis is not new. As a soci-ety, America has embraced theidea of community gardensever since it became an industrialized, urban nation – especial-ly during times of war, depression, or urban decline. When lifegets crazy, we go to the garden. Economic relief is usually amajor goal, but community gardens are often intended toaddress other large, societal concerns as well: nutrition, health,education, job training, and beautification.

Until quite recently, these efforts were organized from thetop down. During the 1893 to 1897 depression, municipalitiesin Detroit, Chicago, New York, and other cities worked withlocal charities to found vacant-lot cultivation associations sothat unemployed laborers could grow and sell food. At thesame time, educational organizations and women’s clubs wereestablishing school gardens and civic gardening campaigns toeducate citizenry and beautify neighborhoods. During theGreat Depression, churches, charities, and eventually govern-mental agencies established subsistence and work-relief gar-dens to occupy the unemployed and improve nutrition, andsimilar efforts were undertaken during both world wars.

Only in the 1970s did community gardens acquire thegrassroots aura that they hold for many today. Confrontedwith urban decay and inspired by an era of civil-rightsactivism, city dwellers began appropriating abandoned lotsand growing produce and flowers in them. The notion that acommunity could organize and take control of its surround-ings became increasingly popular. As with the earlier plots,however, these gardens were founded not with an eye to thelong term but as a temporary response to dying neighbor-hoods.

During each incarnation, organizers proclaimed great out-comes – immigrants who gained new skills, children who atethe food they grew, stronger communities, reclaimed land.Today’s community gardening advocates often explicitlyinvoke this history: a statistic that 40 percent of the food sup-ply was provided by urban gardens during World War II isrepeated as a kind of mantra, implying that if Americans coulddo it in the past, then we can do it now. What is less discussedis that almost none of these earlier efforts survived; when thecrisis passed, so too did widespread interest in – and institu-

Roosevelt, Daniel, and Quincy,

youths from the South Chicago Art

Center, harvest from the Artists’

Garden hoop house.

portion of the garden set asidefor personal plots, but thesewere soon converted to thecurrent communal beds due tolack of interest.) In addition to producing food, Ginkgo pro-vides a number of other needs for its community. It is a spacefor performances, hosting poetry readings and outdoor the-ater. The front of the garden, with its path and shady sittingarea, doubles as a small neighborhood park. It has evenbecome a laboratory, serving as a research site to study beesand other plant pollinators.

Having been founded in 1994, Ginkgo is pretty old for acommunity garden. It enjoys a permanency and support mostgardens only dream of. Its land is protected by NeighborSpace,a nonprofit land trust that also provides liability insurance and maintains a dedicated water source. In its seventeen yearsof existence, Ginkgo has built up a strong organization thatcan raise money and oversee the steady stream of volunteers.Its supporters have had the time and the resources to fine-tune the garden, installing an arched, wrought-iron gate; ashed that is now covered with vines; espaliered fruit trees; and,most recently, a flagstone patio in the shade.

Most gardens are not so fortunate. Just south of Ginkgo isone that clings to the side of a commuter rail line. The land isslated for a train stop, so the future of this particular garden isvery uncertain. It has neither fence nor sign, and the gardenersmust draw their water from a neighboring public-housingcomplex. The site is an abstract quilt of plots that suggests arange of origins and expertise among its cultivators: lettuce inrows here, squash overgrowing the paths there, Thai basil in aneat triangle bounded by carpet scraps. Bean vines climb upelectrical lines and an American flag flutters nearby.

The site, which has been cultivated for about fifteen years, islocally referred to as the Seniors’ Garden. Most of the plots aretended by older Asian and Russian immigrants who live closeby in public housing. The food grown here is not to give awayor to sell: it is grown for personal consumption. There are novolunteer groups coming to help, no public events that invitethe broader community to come to the garden. On a recentvisit, one of this piece’s authors was lectured by an elderly gar-dener in a language he didn’t understand, but the mimed message was very clear: “I worked this land, planted the seeds,and tended the crops. These are mine and not yours.”

While it is unknown exactly how much food is produced atthe Seniors’ Garden, it is clear that none of these gardeners aresubsisting on what’s grown here. They are, however, able tosignificantly supplement their kitchens during the relatively

short Chicago growing season. And some are able to growfoods particularly meaningful to their culture – foods that oth-erwise may not be easily available to them. Gardening can provide immigrants from agrarian societies with a visceral con-nection with their home country. A gardener at a nearby gar-den that hosts a Nepali immigrant community explained, “Theland is our humanity – when you can dig into the soil it is a reassurance. . . the earth is part of our home and is part ofwhere you come from.”

Perhaps equally important, the garden provides hours ofcompanionship, purposeful activity, and light exercise for agroup of individuals who might otherwise be alone in theirapartments. The preciousness of this precarious space is obvi-ous in its gardners’ loyalty to it, even though they’ve been toldthe soil is probably contaminated. That disturbing fact appearsto be less important than the threat of not being able to gar-den. Fortunately, a couple of neighborhood activists and sym-pathetic politicians are working quietly to find alternative gardening locations in advance of the garden’s inevitable dis-placement.

Most community gardens supply multiple food functions –food to donate, food for personal consumption, food to sell,food to eat together, food to learn from. On Chicago’s FarSoutheast Side, what many call simply “the garden” was estab-

lished in 2004 by the South Chicago ArtsCenter as part of its mission to provide safeplaces for children after school. In a com-munity that has seen sharp racial dividesand conflicts, the garden lies directlybetween a Section 8 housing facility inhabit-ed mainly by African Americans and a block housing mostly first-generationMexican immigrants. Evidence of the gar-den’s weekly summertime art classes iseverywhere. Colorful mosaic benches linethe wide mulch path that leads towards asmall, organic structure hung with sculp-tures swaying in the breeze. Around this hut,the garden spreads out in all directions with large, irregularly shaped beds definedby wooden planks.

The garden’s harvest follows a few differ-ent paths. Some is donated to the nearbyAda McKinley food pantry to provide freshproduce to those who otherwise would not

have access to it or be able to afford it; this neighborhood isconsidered a food desert. Much of the harvest finds its wayhome with the youth volunteers, as the art center holds weeklycooking demonstrations and then sends students home withfresh ingredients and recipes. Helping teenagers develop ataste for healthy dishes and some skill in preparing them is one way to combat the obesity epidemic. Lastly, the gardendoes have some individual allotment spaces. One gardener,who also raises chickens at his home, showed off the rows oftiny peach trees he was growing to sell.

In a neighborhood with high numbers of families livingbelow national poverty levels, the garden provides the commu-nity with some organic produce, encourages residents to growtheir own crops, and educates youths on the importance of healthy eating. However, “more important than the produceitself are the interactions and relationships forged betweenneighbors,” writes the art center’s founder. “The garden isproving to be a place where neighbors can meet and worktogether on a common goal.” Growing food is that commongoal, but in building a garden these neighbors are also build-ing a community.

On their own, community gardens can’t solve the food crisis.They cannot single-handedly be expected to solve the obesityepidemic or eliminate food deserts. These crises are com-plex problems with tangled roots. The obesity epidemic, forexample, has multiple causes: larger portions, fast food, the

8

Artists’ Garden site in 2003, before

it was developed (see front cover

for Artists’ Garden in 2010).

lure of the computer, the simple fact that many children nolonger walk to school. Food deserts have more to do with alack of grocery stores and prohibitive school vendor contractsthan with the availability of locally grown produce.

At the same time, a community garden’s inadequacy as acomprehensive solution to an array of food-related societalproblems doesn’t mean that it can’t be an important partner ina broad effort to solve those problems. It can, for example,connect hundreds of volunteers and children to the process ofgrowing food, which research shows leads directly to choosinghealthier eating options.

A community garden can also model an ideal food environ-ment, often in stark contrast to the world around it. The fami-ly dinner has been on the decline for decades. More and more,we eat on the go or in front of a screen. But in communitygardens, people reclaim the social life surrounding their foodwith communal meals. In one survey done in New York City,more than 60 percent of the gardeners who responded saidthat they host barbecues and picnics in their gardens. All

around the country, communi-ty gardens are providing aplace where people can eattogether, and they are oftenserving carrots that didn’t trav-el fifteen hundred miles to

reach the picnic table alongside the store-bought chips. When the recession passes and unemployment goes down,

what will become of the thousands of community gardens thathave sprouted up in the last few years? Will they survive, orwill they go the way of vacant-lot gardens, war gardens, victorygardens, and many of the 1970s community gardens? If weview these gardens not as quick fixes to the present crises butinstead as part of larger efforts to make neighborhoods andcommunities more livable, their chances of survival will be fargreater. Thankfully, more and more municipalities are begin-ning to recognize and support community gardens for whatthey are: places of resiliency that allow for permanent change.

“By providing multiple social, economic, and healthbenefits,” argues Peter Harnik, director of the Center for CityPark Excellence, in his recent book, Urban Green: InnovativeParks for Resurgent Cities, “community gardens present a newmodel of the ‘neighborhood common’ that should be consid-ered a part of the neighborhood infrastructure, similar to thebasic necessity of neighborhood parks, playgrounds, commu-nity centers, schools, and libraries.”

In cities like Chicago and San Francisco, structures arebeing put in place to enable community gardens to persist inperpetuity. Many cities are formally recognizing communitygardens and urban agriculture in zoning codes. This officialrecognition represents a new watermark in the history of

urban gardening. Histori-cally, lack of land securityhas been the fundamentalproblem of community gar-dens; they were consideredtemporary. Now, in majorcities, land trusts are step-ping up to permanentlysecure land for gardens.

And yet a plot of land or apersuasively argued grantproposal is not all that’sneeded to create a successfulgarden; a community gardenneeds to speak to the variedand ever-changing needs ofits community to survive andthrive. The gardeners will be

the ones not only to determine its capacity but also its direc-tion, for if their needs are not being met, they will drift awayand the garden will be reclaimed by nature and the city.Indeed, surveys show a lack of interest is the main reason gar-dens fail. In other words, it is the process by which peoplecontinually create and re-create community gardens that givesthem their strength. Ideally, city dwellers will continue to bedrawn to these unique urban landscapes – even if they arenourished by them in different ways and see in them differentpossibilities. As a recent study in Landscape Journal concluded,“The successful community garden is less about a granddesign than about facilitating a dialogue whereby the commu-

nity identifies, priorities, andvisualizes its garden.”

The fact that gardens springup in the city again and again

suggests that there will always be a need for them. They are arepository of our urban ideals, hopes, dreams, and possibili-ties. They offer responses to seemingly intractable problems,but on a scale that appeals to American traditions of self-suffi-ciency; the core belief that individuals and communities cantake control of and improve their own lives. It is thereforeimportant to be accurate about what they can and cannotaccomplish in moments of crisis. At the same time, we mustremember that the larger cultural concerns they address –from obesity to global warming – are ongoing, and that com-munity gardens will continue to influence our approaches tothese challenges in both profound and nuanced ways. – Ben Helphand and Laura Lawson

9

View of a decorative arbor and

a cement dog sculpture created by

local artist Roman Villarreal

and teenager interns from the

South Chicago Art Center.

Youth gardener Deja clears debris

during a spring work day in the

Artists’ Garden.

Rooftop Revolution: Culinary Gardening Aloft in New York City

High above New York, a quiet revolution is takingplace on urban rooftops. Time was that most roofgardens were purely decorative, the privilegedenclaves of a few well-heeled city dwellers. Suchgardens still flourish but today the roof has become

the frontier for large-scale edible gardening. There will alwaysbe New Yorkers who lovingly tend small pots of herbs on theirwindow sills and take pride in cultivating a single tomato vine perched on the rung of a fire escape, but now there is alsoa new generation of imaginative, ambitious gardeners usingroofs – usually on top of large commercial buildings – to growvegetables and fruit, make compost, breed chickens, and evenkeep bees. Most of the food produced in these ventures endsup for sale somewhere – on the plate at a high-end restaurant,say, or in the display case of a gourmet food store. But thatdoes not mean that these burgeoning rooftop enterprises arenecessarily cost-effective. Designing and maintaining a sophis-ticated vegetable garden is not so very different from design-ing and maintaining a perennial garden – to do so requirespassion, time, and a serious outlay of cash.

Annie Novak, the co-founder and head farmer of EagleStreet Rooftop Farm, is one such urban garden pioneer, andher six-thousand-foot, organic vegetable farm – perched on topof a soundstage warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with glo-rious views in every direction – is stunning. The farm, whichrequired sophisticated engineering, was designed by GoodeGreene in 2008 for Gina Argentino, the owner of the building;she in turn allows Novak to run it. Some two hundred thou-sand pounds of growing soil (a combination of compost, rockparticulates, and shale) was lifted by crane onto a two-inchlayer of polyethylene drainage matting tough enough to sup-port one and one-half inches of rainwater. Irrigation is provid-ed by plastic drip lines. (Novak is not a fan of conventionalwatering, believing that it can be harmful to plants exposed tointense sun.) During the summer months, Novak and a teamof between six to twelve regular apprentices and volunteerstend to more than thirty kinds of vegetables and fruits and doall their own composting. She both supplies local restaurantsand sells her produce at a weekly market, held on-site.

In addition to her commercial growing venture – which isself-supporting, although her landlord does not charge herany rent and many of her helpers are volunteers – Novak is thepart-time coordinator of the New York Botanical Garden’s

Children’s Gardening Program and also manages to fit in tak-ing care of a large, private, edible rooftop garden in BatteryPark. She travels among her various jobs by bicycle, thinksnothing of covering more than eighteen miles between bor-oughs in a day, and yet she still finds the time and energy topore over seed catalogues and worry about whether a saladgreen such as mizuna or mâche will fare better in her gardenthan Tokyo Bekana.

Novak, who sees herself not as an entrepreneur but as an“urban agriculturist,” is the founder and director of a non-profit enterprise, Growing Chefs, which organizes classes andworkshops on such topics as composting, beekeeping, seeds,and soil. Funds are raised through local events at the rooftopfarm. There is no “donate here” button on her website, shepointed out, but she is delighted to have received her firstfoundation grant recently. At the same time, Novak is adamantthat even if her rooftop farm could entirely support her, shewould never give up her other gardening ventures: she thriveson the variety.

Ben Flanner, an engineer who formerly worked on WallStreet, was the co-founder ofEagle Street. He has gone onto run an even larger andmore ambitious farm in LongIsland City, Queens, which issomewhat confusingly calledBrooklyn Grange. (Flannerhad originally planned toopen a farm in Brooklyn andkept the name when theplans fell through.) BrooklynGrange is forty thousandsquare feet (that’s almost anacre), and after some prob-lems with the Department ofBuildings over plans andpermits, it opened in June oflast year, becoming the firstCSA (Community SupportedAgriculture) farm in Queens;other CSA farm produce isavailable in the borough, butit is trucked in. Flannerwants to demonstrate thaturban farming can be aviable enterprise, andBrooklyn Grange sells itsproduce to restaurants, busi-

nesses, and individuals. Certainly the size is impressive but, as Novak points out, bigger is not always better: “larger farmsmay not be the answer since they require more labor, andthat’s the most expensive cost factor in gardening.”

Restaurateurs are beginning to understand what good senseit makes to grow fresh vegetables and herbs on top of theirkitchens and, in increasing numbers, they are getting onto theroof. Last April, the chef, sous chef, and manager of Maialino,Danny Meyer’s restaurant in the Gramercy Park Hotel, set up agarden on the roof of the hotel, using old wine buckets andsauce bowls as planters for their seedlings and constructingraised beds out of old floorboards, which they lined with oldtablecloths from the restaurant. They also devised an irrigationsystem that channels water from the building’s downspoutinto a fifty-five-gallon drum. By the end of the summer,rhubarb was growing in a former duck roasting pan, tomatoplants were sprouting out of reused paint buckets, andcucamelon (Mexican sour cucumber) vines were climbing upscrap metal from an old file cabinet. There is now a rooftoprestaurant opening onto the garden.

John Mooney is a restaurateur who planned and got hisown rooftop garden up and running in advance of opening hisrestaurant, Bell Book & Candle, in Greenwich Village at theend of last year. He sees it as an integral part of his kitchenand is growing over seventy kinds of fruits, vegetables, and

10

Vegetables and herbs growing in the

rainwater-irrigated garden atop

Gramercy Park Hotel all find their way

onto the menu of Maialino.

herbs six floors above his diners. Since the building is awalk-up, he uses a pulley system to lower the producedown to street level. This farm is hydroponic and plants aregrown on cylindrical towers, five to seven feet high, which sup-port plastic trellises. Mooney has sixty of these towers, andthey are heated with recycled water that is pumped through asystem of reservoir bases. This allows planting to begin asearly as March. “Absolutely, my garden saves me money,”Mooney maintains. “I have no transportation costs because Iam not moving my crops or storing my produce. I’m serving itright away, and what I have is not only fresher and better thanwhat I could buy, it is also far more cost-effective.”

Brewers and bakers are also taking to their roofs. At SixPoint Brewery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, chickens cluck andpeck in an outdoor pen set in a rooftop garden that is the pre-ferred summer lunchtime spot for the brewery staff. This gar-den is the brainchild of Shane Welch, who founded thebrewery in 2004 and wanted to find a use for his old, brokenkegs. (Six Points doesn’t use bottles but distributes its beer inkegs to bars and restaurants in and around New York City.)“The roof was a graveyard for broken kegs, but cut off theirtops and they make great planters,” says Cathy Erway, directorof communications for the brewery, who works with Welch onthe garden. “Now we grow peas, beans, cauliflowers and leafygreens, and use the produce to make lunch for the staff, whoare also invited to pick and take food home.” Corn didn’t growwell and has been discontinued but Welch is now growingfour different varieties of hops, which he hopes to use forexperimental brews and maybe even one day develop into “abotanical beer.”

Eli Zabar owns and farms two rooftops in Manhattan. Oneis on top of the Vinegar Factory, his food market at YorkAvenue and Ninetieth Street; the other is on top of a bakery heoperates in a commercial building immediately opposite.Together they occupy eleven thousand square feet and includefour greenhouses. The heat from the bread ovens providesmost of the heat for the greenhouses. Zabar’s bookkeeper,Monica Dandridge, has become his gardener-in-chief. “It allbegan with Eli wanting to get good tomatoes for the store tenyears ago,” she says. “I’m not a gardener by trade but Eli hasmade me one.” Today, the garden produces sixteen differentheirloom varieties of tomatoes, all of them sold in the store.“Yes, it’s cost-effective,” she says, “we sell everything we grow in

our stores and three restaurants.” Of course, the fact that thespace is free and the heating costs relatively low should beconsidered as part of the equation.

Beekeeping is another rooftop pursuit now in vogue. Sever-al years ago, the idea of keeping bees on a city rooftop came toDavid Graves, a farmer who lives in Becket, Massachusetts, and sells his produce at the Union Square Greenmarket. At thetime, he was having trouble with bears on his farm, and herealized he would not have this problem were his hives in thecity. First, he got permission to keep a hive on the roof of the Greenmarket office building on East Sixteenth Street, andnow he has hives on top of several houses in GreenwichVillage and on a hotel, whose name he will not divulge. Gravesis not entirely happy that beekeeping in the city was legalizedin 1996. “Too many people are now doing it and there’s notenough nectar to go round,” he says. His biggest problems,however, are the recent proliferation of cell towers (they emitelectromagnetic waves that cause bees to lose their way back totheir hives) and a Parks Department that is trying to stamp outJapanese knotweed. A cause of celebration for those who detestthis invasive plant but not for Graves: “They’re a favoritesource of nectar for my bees.”

Edible rooftop projects are gaining a lot of attention andthere is even a website (www.seglet.com) intended to connectowners wishing to rent out rooftops and urban gardenerslooking to farm them. In Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller,Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability(2009) David Owen argues that despite the lack of good soiland the pollution caused by trucks and traffic, New York is fargreener than its surrounding suburbs and is getting greenerevery day. He sees Manhattanites, in particular, as models of environmental responsibility. Eighty-two percent of them

travel to their place of work by foot, bicycle, or public trans-portation, and many do not own cars or consume gasoline.Lack of open space has always made it difficult for NewYorkers to grow their own food, but this drawback hasbecome the impetus for a range of wonderfully inventivedevelopments in the art of skyline gardening.

While offering many advantages such as reducing build-ing heat and lowering water run-off, the challenges ofrooftop farming should not be underestimated. First, astructural engineer must confirm the roof ’s ability to bearthe weight, and then there is the challenge of hauling thesoil up to the roof (with or without a crane), working outsuitable drainage, and successfully managing plants subjectto direct sunlight and high-wind conditions. Hydroponicfarming, which John Mooney strongly advocates, is anotherexciting possibility for the future. But, like all small-farmingventures, rooftop farms are not a quick way to get rich, andprofit margins depend on such variables as availability andcost of labor, access to consumers, and even good weather.At the same time, these new projects in New York City pointthe way to the future and are vital stepping stones if we wantto get serious about exploring the possibilities of large-scale,urban roof agriculture. – Jane Garmey

They Built a Fahm in Hahvud Yahd: A Tiny Garden Strives for Global Impact

In April 2010 a crew of students and workers from HarvardUniversity’s landscape services built a vegetable garden onthe lawn in front of Lowell House, an undergraduatedorm notable for its elaborate, blue-domed cupola. It hashoused, at various times, Robert Lowell, Harry Blackmun,

John Updike, David Souter, Nicholas Kristof, and MattDamon. Fronting Mt. Auburn Street, one of the main thor-oughfares of Harvard Square, the garden plot is flanked bytwo final clubs (exclusive private social clubs for Harvardundergraduates), the Phoenix and the Fly. A more presti-gious patch of ground – and a more public place to plantfood crops – would be hard to find in Massachusetts and,arguably, the world.

The size of the Harvard Community Garden (HCG) ismodest: 560 square feet of growing surface, roughly one-third of an acre. Twenty-four raised beds of different sizesand heights cluster together on a flat, stone-dust surface;roughly a third of them are wheelchair-accessible. The non-linear arrangement of these tablelike platforms creates

11

Eli Zabar in one of his rooftop

greenhouses above the Vinegar

Factory on 91st Street and York.

intriguing volumes of space, making it hard to assess the pre-cise size of the whole. On a brilliant day in early October,about six weeks before the end of the garden’s first growingseason, the last crops added a sensory dimension to the spatialgeometry: ruffle-edged lettuces, dark-veined beet greens, paleonion shoots, candy-colored stalks of rainbow chard. Beesworked the spires of basil flowers. Squashes ripened underleaves the size of dinner plates, and near the split-rail fencethat separates the garden from the sidewalk, the vines of a “Sungold” cherry tomato drooped under the weight of ripefruit.

Like many community gardens, this one is staffed largely byvolunteers (here, mostly students), and the food it produces isconsumed locally (primarily in the Faculty Club, about a quar-ter mile away). And yet its ambitions far exceed its acreage andits yield.

The HCG is a project of Harvard Medical School’s Centerfor Health and the Global Environment (CHGE), which isdirected by Eric Chivian, M.D. An assistant clinical professorof psychiatry at the medical school, Chivian founded CHGE in1996. He was convinced that “at the heart of the present envi-ronmental crisis is a fundamental disconnect between humanbeings and the environment,” he said in a recent telephoneinterview. “If people don’t see themselves as part of the naturalworld, it becomes OK to degrade soils and alter the atmos-phere and overfish the oceans, because there’s a sense that itwon’t affect us. Teaching students to recognize environmentalthreats to their physical well-being is a good way to correctthat misapprehension.”

Chivian and others – notably Alice Waters, who helped YaleUniversity establish a one-acre campus farm almost a decadeago – recognize that food is, for many of us, our most tangibleand intimate connection to that threatened world. CHGEoperates a Healthy and Sustainable Food program focused onthe fact that food production is touched by every environmen-tal scourge, from climate change to ozone depletion, and con-tributes to several others, such as loss of habitat and waterscarcity. On an individual level, the challenges and rewards ofgrowing things bring these problems into sharp relief. Inaddition, as Chivian points out, many other disciplines con-verge in the garden: “Whether students are studying insectzoology, biology, landscape design, or the economics of foodsecurity around the world, they can find no more direct way tounderstand these issues than by growing food.”

CHGE’s stated vision for the garden is to “bring togethermembers of the community to raise awareness about the criti-cal role that food plays in our environment and our health.”

Given the potentially unlimited size of the community, thatgoal is ambitious. Penetrating even the Harvard communitywill require breaching the myriad “silos” or domains within alarge, compartmentalized institution. And influencing theneighborhoods surrounding the university will require bridg-ing a moat of longstanding distrust based on vast differencesof class, wealth, and power. Should the garden and its pro-grams accomplish this, as Yale’s farm administrators claim tohave done to a remarkable extent over the past several years, amore permeable environment and a fluid exchange of knowl-edge might be the most meaningful outcome of HCG and ofthe broader campus farm movement – an outcome that might,in turn, affect meaningful change.

Inspired by the experience of running a small fruit orchard athis home in central Massachusetts, Chivian has dreamed ofstarting a farm at Harvard since at least April 2006, when hepresented the idea at a Harvard symposium. Independentlyand as yet unaware of Chivian’s discussions, the student-led

Environmental ActionCommittee (EAC) polledundergraduates and foundthat 60 percent of them werein favor of starting a gardenor a farm.

In early 2007 the universi-ty unveiled a plan to expandinto Allston, an ethnicallydiverse, largely blue-collarBoston neighborhood acrossthe Charles River, whereHarvard owns 359 acres (149acres more than in Cam-bridge) and is widely viewedwith suspicion and dislike.Again independently of oneanother, both EAC and the parties discussing a farmwith Chivian supportedlocating it in Allston tobenefit and positively engage

residents. The farm concept also dovetailed with the buddingsustainability movement on campus. In 2008 the universityannounced the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent below 2006 levels by 2016 and established the Officefor Sustainability to make it happen.

These various interests and advocacy groups converged in2009. In the spring EAC circulated a position paper advocatingfor a “multipurpose, multidisciplinary” garden in front ofLowell House, which could also provide space to demonstraterenewable-energy technology, display public art, host perfor-mances, and serve as an outdoor classroom and research station. In July, Chivian wrote to President Drew Gilpin Faustproposing to include a farm in the Allston expansion plan,arguing that a farm would promote “passionate studentinvolvement,” interdisciplinary educational opportunities, anda site for student and faculty research. A university farm wouldalso offer Allston “a resource for community engagement atHarvard.” (Unlike the EAC proposal, Chivian’s did not encom-pass the arts.) He also mentioned that he had already recruitedPrince Charles, an organic farmer with whom Chivian was col-laborating on several environmental and human-health pro-jects, to the project’s advisory board.

12

Harvard students and community

members plant the first seeds in the

Harvard Community Garden.

Chivian’s proposal invoked “Harvard’s rich history in theagricultural sciences,” which began with the establishment ofthe Bussey Institution, an undergraduate school of agricultureand horticulture, in Jamaica Plain in 1870. The institute, partof which later became the Arnold Arboretum, offered a multi-disciplinary program until 1908. At different times, its facultyincluded Charles Sprague Sargent and Charles Eliot. Theschool raised vegetables for the Harvard College food services.

Faust signed off on the project. A few months later, howev-er, the economy spiraled out of control and the universitypostponed the expansion. With Chivian’s blessing, KathleenFrith, assistant director of CHGE, kept the momentum goingby downsizing the farm concept to a garden plot in Cambridge,as EAC had proposed. The garden’s objectives, aside fromengaging Allston residents, remained much the same as thosefor the farm. By now EAC and the CHGE group had becomeaware of their parallel efforts and started working toward theircommon goal with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Officefor Sustainability, and Dining Services, as well as the presi-dent’s office.

Frith said that her team had considered other locationsbefore settling on Lowell House, factoring in not only publicvisibility but also the availability of water, sun, and other practical needs. As it turned out, the sunny spot near the side-walk in front of Lowell House was just close enough to an outdoor spigot in the dorm that gardeners could run a hosebetween them.

Like many urban landscape projects, this one posed chal-lenges of overlapping jurisdictions, underground utility lines,historical commission review, and proximity to an electric-power substation. Resolving these issues brought multipleparties together from thestart, which is common inlandscape architecture. Formost of those involved indeveloping this garden, how-ever, it was a new experience.“We kept hearing about howcrazy it was that all these dif-ferent departments andagencies were involved,” saidZachary C. M. Arnold,Harvard 2010, who was anactive member of EAC and a

13

the lab doesn’t do as well.” A mycologist, Anne Pringle, studiesfungal relationships in the garden.

Ideally, the garden will soon be as integrated into the acade-mic curriculum as its larger counterpart is at Yale, where pro-fessors teaching several dozen courses across disciplines –including African studies, psychology, gender studies, environ-mental biology, geology, and economics – have incorporatedthe garden into the curriculum. “It’s fine to have this cute littlething that newspapers cover,” Chivian said, “but most impor-tant is that it serves as hands-on educational experience forstudents and faculty, so that they can learn that fundamentalfact: that we’re connected to the natural world.” Although thepresent garden is too small to support many research projects,he still hopes to build a larger one when Harvard expands into Allston.

Were Harvard’s novice gardeners disappointed by the size oftheir plot? On the contrary, although the founding year’s yieldwas unrecorded, many students expressed amazement at theirgarden’s abundance. Throughout the growing season, they soldabout 90 percent of the garden’s produce to their dining ser-vices partner, the Harvard Faculty Club, where its vegetableswere spotlighted on the menus. The rest were consumed incommunity events at the garden and donated to local foodbanks. “This is only our first year, but we produced a ton,” saidLouisa Denison, one of the garden’s student co-managers, whohad spent a previous summer working on a farm. RebeccaCohen, the other co-manager, who confessed in an e-mail thatshe had come to the project with “zero experience,” alsoexpressed delight at the unanticipated bounty from such asmall space.

However fresh they are to growing food, the co-managershave no illusions about feeding the entire campus, even on amuch larger plot. Like the faculty and administrators I spokewith, they frame the garden’s success in terms of what they arelearning and the responses it has sparked in others. “In ourfirst season we mostly had undergraduates working in the gar-den, but from the management/administrative standpoint we have had an amazing amount of collaboration,” Cohen said,listing not only volunteers from the Graduate School ofDesign but also undergraduates and faculty from the School of Public Health, the Medical School, and the Law School.“Knowing how isolated the schools can be from one another, ithas been a great experience to work with faculty and studentsfrom across all the schools.” Meanwhile, in January, Frith and the students were making plans to double the size of the

garden volunteer. “Electrical workers were learning about thegoals of the food project and administrators and staff whogenerally don’t work with students were working with stu-dents. The grounds crew guys worked alongside students toinstall the beds.”

Frith continues to provide administrative oversight.“Everyone loves this project,” she told me during my tour ofthe garden in October. “There has been such generous givingof resources and time. It’s not just that faculty are comingtogether in the garden that’s exciting – it’s that faculty andstaff and students and community members are comingtogether.” The enthusiasm that the garden’s proponents haverepeatedly voiced about its power to unite such a wide spec-trum of people illuminates how sparse such connections gen-erally are in university life. “As with lots of large institutionswith many different disciplines and functions and depart-ments, it’s easy for folks to stay within their close community,”Frith admits. “Chances for multidisciplinary collaboration –which is one of President Faust’s big goals – are rare.”

Chivian believes that the human tendency to separate andcontain specialized knowledge is a huge obstacle to addressingworld problems. The garden’s potential to topple the silostherefore has exciting ramifications – both at Harvard andbeyond. “To really solve global environmental issues, you haveto bring together many people with different expertise andexperience,” he pointed out. “You can’t talk about biodiversityunless you talk about oceans, or climate change withoutatmospheric chemistry, so the more interfaculty, interschool,interdisciplinary efforts you have at a university, the better the chances are of bringing that cooperation to a larger arena.”

There is also something to be said for rendering theabstract tangible. DonaldPfister, Asa Gray Professor ofSystematic Botany, leads hisundergraduates through theraised beds for his coursePlants and Human Affairs. “Ido a tour in the garden andintroduce plant structure,”he says. “We might stop andlook at broccoli and cabbage,and I ask students why thesemight be classified together.They smell and taste theplants, look at the flowers,and start seeing similarities.It brings an immediacy thattaking the same plants intoThe Garden is maintained over the

summer by community volunteers

and two student interns.

garden in spring 2011. “We’realso working with design students again to add seatingand some kind of a vertical

growing space on the wall of the Phoenix,” she said. Devising awater catchment system is also high on the list, and she isreaching out to engineering students for help with that.

In addition, the garden’s organizers are planning activitiesto extend their influence beyond Harvard Yard. In October,their Harvest Festival drew hundreds of Cambridge residentsto the garden for live music, cider pressing, food demonstra-tions, and informational tours. “We were able to get peopleinto the garden, have them enjoy themselves, and get themthinking about the garden’s function and importance all at thesame time,” Denison said. She also stressed the success of theregular events hosted in the garden: cooking demonstrations,work days, compost discussions. As anticipated, the garden’sintentionally visible location hasn’t hurt. “People walk by andthey comment on the size of the kale or the height of thepeas,” she added. Maybe they will start thinking about wheretheir own produce is coming from, whether it is availablelocally, and how far it has had to travel to reach their table.

The 2011 growing season, which begins in April, will bringnew challenges for the student gardeners. They will need tomeet the modest goal of balancing the cost of seeds and soilwith income from the sale of produce. They will also need tomeet the demands of the marketplace: at the end of the 2010season, chefs from the Faculty Club met with gardeners torequest more unusual crops to feature on their menus. But the

marketplace will remain deliberately constrained; Frith stress-es that however much food the garden – or an eventual farmin Allston – yields, CHGE’s goal is not to compete with localfarmers. “Just the opposite,” she said. “We want to raise aware-ness of fresh, local food sources.”

Chivian chafes at any suggestion that the garden’s sizereduces it to a token gesture. “It’s very significant that this gar-den produces real food,” he said, emphasizing that it is theactual experience of growing something that engages people –whether they approach it as an engineer challenged to design ahoop house for growing vegetables in winter or as a foodiethrilled to be able to produce six kinds of basil. “It’s not fair tosay it’s just a symbol, because what it has done is energize anentire student movement,” he said. “It allows us, as the centerthat’s running it, to host various conferences about growingsustainable food at a university and to bring in people fromother universities to talk about everything from food pantriesto composting.”

Since 2003, when Yale broke ground for its farm, severalother Ivies – Brown, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton – plusDuke, Stanford, Wesleyan, and several state universities – haveeither started college gardens or farms or set aside funds forthem. Chivian and Frith have turned mainly to Yale for adviceon matters both practical and philosophical. Yet, in spite ofthe Yale farm’s long head start, direct involvement with AliceWaters, and acclaimed success, in terms of potential influenceHarvard’s garden has the advantage of being at Harvard.

As Arnold put it, “The elephant in the room in any educa-tive enterprise at Harvard is, ‘It’s Harvard.’ We are always awarethat what we do has more of a chance of being covered in theNew York Times or otherwise carried out into the world. Thesense of Harvard exceptionalism touches everything here. Thatincludes what we do internally to influence the student body;there is an understanding that these students will go off andbecome captains of industry and finance and politics, so wewant to capture them and inform their values.” Perhaps evenas they stroll past the garden to grab dinner at Lowell House,or to party at the Fly.

Although the garden has been around for less than a year,Frith gave me some examples of changes that have alreadytaken place. In an accidental object lesson, she discovered thisfall that students, staff, and faculty at Harvard Divinity School,about a mile from the undergraduate campus, had been culti-vating a small vegetable plot for two years. Neither group wasaware of the other. Excited by their discovery, the gardenersmade plans to share event schedules and other information.She has also worked with the Office for Sustainability tospread the garden idea to other Harvard schools, and recently

learned that staff and faculty and students at the Harvard Law School, about a mile away in Cambridge, and the MedicalSchool, in Boston, have been inspired to start their own gardens.

And how about the students leaving Harvard for the widerworld? Arnold, who now works developing green-technologyjobs in a low-income Boston neighborhood, was an environ-mentalist long before the raised beds arrived in the Yard lastspring – in fact, long before he himself arrived at Harvard. Buthe, too, learned an important lesson from HCG – about com-munity organizing. The garden attracted a new constituency ofstudents he’d never identified before – people who shared anenvironmental mindset but who hadn’t been involved in tradi-tional environmental activities on campus. “Maybe they aren’tcomfortable with activism or policy,” he mused. “But they feltit was meaningful to contribute through a garden.” – Jane Roy Brown

Lessons in the Dirt: School Gardens Grow in Brooklyn

Growing up in Oklahoma, I spent hours of my earlychildhood helping my mother in our backyard garden, where only a few strands of slack barbedwire separated our little plot from the adjoiningwheat fields. The tangy-sweet smell of an onion

flower, the slimy caress of an earthworm wriggling across mypalm, the juicy gems of button-sized strawberries half-hiddenin the leafy ground cover – these now-indelible recollectionswere part and parcel of life growing up as a semirural young-ster. At the time I was simply picking snap peas and pullingweeds; only later did I recognize the simple lessons reapedalong those rows. Plan well. Know your soil. Work hard. Learnfrom your failures. Remember that, with patience, bounty canspring forth from humble seeds.

Traditionally these lessons have been hard to come by forchildren reared in big cities, but that is beginning to change.Backyard gardens might often be beyond the space and timeconstraints of many urban families, but new opportunities arecropping up for children to discover some of these precepts in the soil. Even in Brooklyn, New York City’s most populousborough, gardens are sprouting in public schools from BayRidge to Crown Heights.

Some gardens are not much more than a few containersclustered in a rare, sunny corner. Others are cultivated lots,complete with paths and ornamental plantings. Some havebeen conceived and supported by larger organizations, such as

14

Harvard undergrad Zoe Tucker

shows off a salad harvested from

the garden.

Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Foundation, but most are home-grown efforts that are scraping by on piecemeal grants, admin-istrative goodwill, and the hard work of a few dedicated parents.

On a bright, cold Friday morning in November, half-a-dozenparents are gathered in the lot-sized yard next to P.S. 102 TheBayview, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Far down the R subway line,this historically Italian and Norwegian neighborhood is nowhome to a broader mix of families, including those of Asianand Middle Eastern descent.

The fenced-in space spent decades as a blighted and semia-bandoned lot, collecting trash and beer bottles from the bartraffic on the busy avenue nearby. More recently it has beenused to grow pumpkins for P.S. 102 students each fall. Nowevery Friday parents arrive at the garden to work on the spaceand help teachers with the classes cycling through. On theFriday I visited, some parents were mixing concrete in woodframes for tiles that the students would later decorate for thegarden; others were constructing a table out of reclaimedwood. The chain-link fence was adorned with bright paintingson wood panels.

Now in its second school year, the garden space looks wellcared for. A path skirts theperimeter of the lot; a com-posting barrel stands tuckedaway in a corner; and a smalltree is surrounded by a mod-est, year-round cactus garden.

More than half of the school’s fifty-five classes spent sometime in the garden last year, said Margaret Sheri, the school’sparent coordinator. And even though these five-to-ten-year-olds can be pretty rowdy on the playground (which sits onblacktop just behind the garden), when they’re in the gardenspace, Sheri said, “they’re really respectful.” Parent volunteersspend hours in the garden most weeks, taking care of the bigprojects: building tables, mixing cement, turning compost.The gardening is mostly left to the students. “The point is forthe kids to do it,” Sheri said. “They’re definitely taking a senseof ownership.” She also observed that integrating the gardeninto the curricula can help children retain lessons associatedwith their experiences: “Anything like that really sticks in yourhead because it’s different.”

P.S. 102 is unusual in that it has three classes of visuallyimpaired students. This gave parent volunteer Tom Mazzonethe idea of planting a fragrant, edible herb garden – what hecalled the “scratch-and-sniff garden.” Students, regardless oftheir visual acuity, can walk around the large square pluckingleaves of lemon balm, yarrow, and fennel, crushing thembetween their fingers and getting to know their names, tex-tures, and smells.

Sheri noted that the garden’s herbs have also connectedmany of the students to their cultural backgrounds by smellalone. Children from Italian families recognized the oreganoas the smell of their grandmother’s pasta sauce, and thosefrom some of the Middle Eastern families got excited becausethe sage reminded them of their parents’ aromatic tea. Inaddition to the fragrant plants, Mazzone said, “the smell of soil

calms your whole spirit.” It has already pro-vided some young students with a reflectiveattitude. Working with a second grade class,Mazzone asked them, “What does gardeningmean to you?’” One girl responded, “Itmeans patience.”

P.S. 102’s side lot was not always aneglected space. During World War II, it wasused for victory gardens, which were tendedby the students. Some of those mid-twenti-eth-century gardeners still live close by – onewoman right next door to the garden lot.She told Mazzone that her plot of beans atthe school’s victory garden was one of thethings that has kept her gardening in theneighborhood ever since. “There’s definitelyan effect that’s lifelong,” Mazzone said.

For young children, the draw of dirt doesnot appear to recognize any urban-rural

divide. “All the kids love the soil,” said Michele Israel, a parentat P.S. 107 John W. Kimball in Park Slope and a co-founder of the school garden there. Jonathan Blumberg, another parentand co-founder who grew up with a backyard garden in theMidwest, liked the idea of “giving every kid a chance to seewhere things come from.” Israel and Blumberg began planningthe garden in the spring of 2008, when they both had studentsin the first grade.

P.S. 107 did not have an ideal place for a garden, or even anysoil to work with. What it did have was a north-facing, concreteside yard, bordered on three sides by the school building. “Youhave to be creative,” Bloomberg said. The parents discoveredthat lack of arable land was not an insurmountable setback. Infact, even schools in the borough with tillable spaces oftenfind that they cannot plant crops in them because of high lev-els of lead and other contaminants; instead, clean dirt has tobe imported and placed in raised beds or containers.

Fortunately a planter box is all you need to convince kids toget their hands dirty. Using container planters that get onlypartial sunlight, the gardeners at P.S. 107 have still producedplenty of harvestable crops – as well as the accompanyingworms, slugs, and bugs that so fascinate most children. Not allof the plants have made it, of course, and when maintenancehad to be done on the school’s exterior, the necessary scaffold-ing ate up even more of the limited space and sunlight. Butthe heartier plants’ persistence was in itself a lesson. “You cangrow things with a short growing season,” Israel pointed out.“You can grow things in the shade. You can have a gardenwhere there’s no green space.”

Much of the recent momentum behind school gardenscomes from the burgeoning movement to improve children’seating habits – and thereby combat the rise of childhood obe-sity and related health problems – by acquainting kids withtheir fruits and veggies. Michelle Obama’s large vegetable gar-den at the White House, which produced more than a thou-sand pounds of produce its first year, is planted and harvestedwith the help of local schoolchildren.

The trend has also been fed by the expansion of farmers’markets and community gardens, and a growing interest in,and support for, local food. New York City’s urban gardeningprogram, GreenThumb, which is run through the Departmentof Parks & Recreation, has donated clean soil to school gar-dens throughout the city. And in Gravesend, Brooklyn, AliceWaters’s Chez Panisse Foundation is supporting a version of its California-based Edible Schoolyard project, a children’sgardening program whose mission is to “encourage awareness

15

Fourth graders at P.S. 102 in Bay

Ridge, Brooklyn, plant an azalea in

the school’s garden as part of a

school-wide celebration of Arbor

Day. Photograph by Rana Abu-Sbaih.

and appreciation of the transformative values of nourishment,community, and stewardship of the land.”

Despite not having enough space to grow crops to con-tribute to the school’s cafeteria, those behind the garden at P.S.107 were determined to forge a connection between theirgleanings and the students’ diet. So organizers held a taste testof various dishes made from the same herbs and vegetablesthe kids had been growing and let them vote on their favorite;the winner’s ingredients were then sourced from local growersand incorporated into the school’s rotating menu.

For some students, even a modest school garden is a rareplace of bounty. At P.S. 12 in Crown Heights, where 83 percentof the students qualify for free lunches, local parent KarenBucknor has been showing the school’s 340-plus students thegardening techniques she learned as a child from her grand-mother.

Bucknor told me with a laugh that she has been gardening“basically since I was born.” She had been working at a nearbycommunity garden when the principal at her children’s schoolsuggested she start a garden on the school’s grounds. Althoughthe principal had envisioned a flower garden, Bucknorthought a food garden would be even better for the students.“I asked them where the food comes from, and they said ‘thesupermarket,’” she recalled. So she got to work, putting in araised-bed vegetable garden behind the school, which sits on aresidential block in a neighborhood dotted with public hous-ing developments and storefront Baptist churches.

Bucknor planned the crops, which included, among otherofferings, eggplant, okra, onions, beans, basil, cabbage, and col-lard greens. But then she put the students to work. “I demon-strate first,” she explained, but then the kids “do everything”:dig, plant, water, and harvest.

Some argue that sending students out to tend tomatoes is awaste of valuable school time, especially for inner-city childrenwho may already face educational disadvantages. Writing inearly 2010 in The Atlantic, author Caitlin Flanagan critiquedthe “vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible forrobbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren ofhours they might other wise [sic] have spent reading importantbooks or learning higher math.” Indeed, reformers spentdecades in the nineteenth century lobbying to get kids out offields and factories and into the classroom. But even well-appointed classrooms lack some of the educational opportuni-ties that are native to a garden, proponents argue. Aside fromlessons about food, nutrition, and ecology, students in a gar-den can start “getting a sense of what the environment is likearound them,” said Katy Botta, a Connecticut-based educator

who uses a garden-centered curriculum. By providing anopening for curiosity as well as a palette for experimentation,Botta continued, gardens “help kids develop ownership oftheir environment.” And that sense of ownership can be espe-cially valuable for children growing up with little freedom ofmovement or control over their surroundings.

On a practical level, in public schools across Brooklyn andthe U.S., many gardens get used as do most school resourcesthese days: in as many ways as possible. Aside from valuing thehands-in-the-dirt and food- and environmental-awarenessaspects of the gardens, teachers are using them to engage stu-dents in writing, math, science, and art. While at the garden,“they do math, they write,” Bucknor said of students she workswith. “We collect seeds, then they count the seeds before theyplant.”

Tara Troxler, a first-grade teacher at P.S. 107, has been usingthe garden and indoor planters as a way to integrate scientificthinking into her curriculum. The students keep journals andfigure out what questions they want to answer. “They’re likelittle scientists,” she said. The hands-on aspect of the gardenhelped engage the kids and inspired diligence as they tendedto their individual tasks, she noted.

The garden learning has extended beyond the school day.Participants in after-school and summer-school programshave been working in many of the gardens. And some childrencome back – often bringing parents and other family mem-bers – even when programs are not in session, to water, weedor just wonder at the plants’ progress.

Community members who don’t have children at theseschools have been drawn in by the garden projects as well. InBay Ridge, neighbors have offered tomatoes, flowers, andmoral support to the school gardeners. And Bucknor reportedthat once her school garden in Crown Heights was up andrunning, “people from the neighborhood, they came by to helpout.”

Given the undeniable popularity of school gardens through-out the borough, Bucknor is frustrated that there is still anunmet need. “Every school needs to have a school garden,” shedeclared. Far from constituting a burden, working in the garden seems to be a joy for most children. In fact, makingenough time in the garden available to all those who want to visit is much more of a problem than finding willing hands.“When I’m out there,” she said, “everybody wants to come atthe same time.” – Katherine Harmon

Place Keeper

Twin Maples, Litchfield County, Connecticut

How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?Because the lovely little flower is freeDown to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;And so the grandeur of the Forest-treeComes not by casting in a formal mould,But from its own divine vitality.

– William Wordsworth, “A Poet! – He hath put his heart to school”

In this sonnet, Wordsworthcontrasts the freedom andstrength of meadowlandand forest with the formal-ity of aesthetic rules that

he believes weaken artisticcreativity. I recalled thispoem on a recent visit toTwin Maples, an estate in thenorthwest corner of Con-necticut, as I meanderedalong paths through fortyacres of wildflower meadowswith grasses and seed headstowering over me. I havelong admired naturally seed-ed roadside meadows alongthe Maine coast in late sum-mer for their preponderanceof Queen Anne’s lace, golden-rod, and fireweed. But here I was fascinated by an immensetract of meadow that had been very deliberately planted tobecome a major element in a vast garden scheme surroundedby forest. In this case, though, the rules governing the mead-ow’s seeding had released rather than hindered the naturalgrowth of the native perennials mixed among its annuals,biennials, and grasses.

For the early settler, such meadows and pastures were valuable for their uses in husbandry and agriculture. Theorderliness of fields and plantations and even orchards gaverise to horticulture in its more ornamental presentations. This particular expanse of more than four hundred acres was

16

Douglas Thomas. Photograph

courtesy of John Gruen.

originally a land grant from George III, and Wilmer and Douglas Thomas, who live there now, are only the thirdrecorded owners. Since the second owners treated the land asa conservancy, the character of the fields was intact when theThomases bought it, crisscrossed only by low stone walls.

Having left behind a perfect Georgian house in Palm Beach,Florida, the Thomases have reproduced its admirable qualitiesin Connecticut. The result is a manor house conceived withprecision and elegance by the architect and interior designerDavid Anthony Easton, who never failed to tweak conventionaldetailing to strengthen the house’s connection to the land andthe views beyond. Even inside feels like outside: one walksthrough the entry hall into an immense reception room cumwinter garden where all manner of plants thrive in full sunthroughout the year, from luxuriant baby tears to a hardy andvoluptuous collection of specimen begonias. A balcony justbeyond the Palladian windows overlooks a moon pond that isas pristine as the one at Studley Royal in Yorkshire. It marriesthe formal house to the surrounding wildflower fields.

Douglas Thomas, who was raised at Dockery Farms, thenineteenth-century family plantation that has been preservedin the Mississippi Delta, has a strong sense of the heritage ofland. She speaks admiringly of Dumbarton Oaks in Washing-ton, D.C., where Mr. and Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss worked with the landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand to create a seriesof formal garden rooms that drift into a wild north vista at the edges of Georgetown. Like them, she says, she has beeninspired “to create a major landscape in today’s world.”

Within the precincts of the house, the gardens remain for-mal, with a structural simplicity that complements the archi-tecture. In a long rectangular garden outside the west portico,a frame of low box hedges – a tribute to the style of RussellPage – contains perimeter plantings of Hydrangea paniculata‘Quick Fire.’ The corners are punctuated with yellow-fruitedcrab apple trees, and a handsome urn terminates the vista.

A moon gate encircled with Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris north of this garden frames a view of a rocky outcropon the wooded hillside behind the house. To prevent erosion,the horticulturalist, Deborah Munson, has imaginatively planted the rockery with combinations of lowbush blueberry,bearberry, cotoneaster, sweet fern, native potentilla, asters,Dutchman’s pipe, Solomon’s seal, American ginger, and helle-bores – the latter being the first to bloom after Christmas.

Along a garden wall east of the house, espaliered with pearsand apples, a long bed contains pink Sheffield chrysanthe-

mums that keep their bloom into late autumn. Within thewalled enclosure, a traditional herbal knot garden is dividedinto four segments edged by low wattle fencing; its perennialborders display a palette of blue, peach, white, and silver. Atthe foot of the garden stands a dark-green, arched pergola,modeled after one at Dumbarton Oaks, through which one canglimpse a majestic fern-leaved beech – a visual bridge to themysterious woodland beyond.

A second walled garden is a potager and cutting gardenleading directly into a sturdy greenhouse made in Canada. It isthe secret behind the eternal freshness of the householdplants; they rest and rejuvenate here between appearances. Thegreenhouse, which has several different climatic zones, con-tains a collection of irresistible beauty and rarity. Plantingbenches and a custom-made galvanized aluminum table pro-vide ample work spaces, but the pleasure is in the individualshapes and scents of the plants – each, like the prize-winning,cascading jade, with its own story.

However, all of these gardens are but a prelude to the truebrilliance of the landscape setting: the wildflower meadows.Larry Weaner, the Pennsylvania landscape designer who createdthem, believes in places with what he calls “natural character.”His visual concepts derive from the patterns and changes dis-

covered in the landscape rather than simply imposed upon it.While originally trained in ornamental horticulture at the

Pennsylvania College of Technology, in 1984 Weaner attended athree-day course on meadows at the Harvard UniversityGraduate School of Design. Given by the environmental land-scape architects A. E. Bye and Armistead W. Browning, Jr., it radically changed his approach to design. “I learned to seenature as not simply wild but as an interrelated scientificprocess of plants, soils and insects – and, furthermore, I sawhow to make good use of these elements,” he recalls. Bye him-self was famous for understanding how England’s eighteenth-century landscape designers became natural practitioners,believing, as Bye wrote, “that the native look of their land wasdisappearing, and that nature was not a threat to their securityas it was in earlier times.”

By the time Weaner arrived to study the land at TwinMaples, he already had to his credit seventy-five acres of mead-ow planting in zones along the New York Thruway. Unlike gar-den designers, who often approach the ground as a tabula rasa,Weaner first observed the land closely over time as an ecologi-cal habitat to determine what would grow there were it leftundisturbed. Only then did he combine this knowledge withan aesthetic in making his seed selections. “Garden design

overlaid on a scientific foun-dation,” he calls it.

For the plantings in 2000,a list was drawn up of aboutone hundred species, includ-ing grasses, perennials, andsome annuals or biennials,all of which could normallygrow on the property. Theactual seeding took place inearly summer to suppressweeds, which grow morequickly in spring. Weanersays dry infertile soil is best,and no compost. He uses theTruax seed drill (invented byJim Truax in the early 1970sto plant native prairie grass-es in Minnesota), which isspecially designed to accom-modate the widely varyingsizes and textures of nativeflower and grass seeds. Theseeds are stored according to

17

A late fall view of the wildflower

meadow looking south, with

birch grove and white pine in the

background.

the role of civic ritual,amusement parks, and archi-tectural follies in the forma-tion and reinforcement ofthe city’s racial geography – asegregated social landscapethat was brutally exposed inthe aftermath of HurricaneKatrina and in the unevendistribution of its impact.Another analyzes the deploy-ment of Federal EmergencyManagement Agency (FEMA)trailers – those toxic whiteboxes that came to representthe malfeasance of our gov-ernment’s response to thedisaster – and emphasizesthe instances of their inde-pendent appropriation.

In the wake of HurricaneKatrina, Verderber wrote this“manifesto” to guide archi-tects, city planners, and citi-zens in the remaking of NewOrleans and to offer lessonsto other cities grappling withurban change. His title callsout to the Dutch architectRem Koolhaas and his 1978book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto forManhattan. Koolhaas,though, was careful to quali-fy his use of manifesto “in an age disgusted with them.”His poetical text – evokingthe city’s grid, Coney Island,the skyscraper, and Rocke-feller Center – stressed richdescription and vivid analy-sis over prescriptions orpolemics. And, after all, itwas a manifesto for an urban

size in three separate boxes and fed directly to the drills. Themachine cuts furrows with eight separate tills; then the drillslocated behind the tills drop the seeds into the furrows and awheel presses them into the soil. About twenty-five differentflowers and five different grasses can be seeded during oneoperation.

That’s all there is to it. The first year, the new meadows atTwin Maples were mowed four times; thereafter, only once ayear, in April. Additional native species have periodically beenplanted in woodland, wetland, and garden areas since. Theresults are nothing short of spectacular – and, at times, unex-pected, which makes the meadow a fascinating friend in dailylife.

From the beginning the Thomases did some extensiveplanting of understory trees, which are now mature, eventuallyto replace what Douglas Thomas refers to as the “telephonepole” trees that had remained after the dramatic drive was laidout by her husband. The meadows appear framed withinstands of larches and groves of birch trees, which have beenlimbed up to reveal the stark whiteness of their trunks. Seenfrom the house, the meadows appear like long, crested wavesof color – yellow Rudbeckia, purple-blue Monarda fistulosa,deep pink Echinacea – among tall Indian and big bluestemgrasses, to name only a few. Last summer, to everyone’s sur-prise and delight, the annual fringed gentian bloomed, havingtaken its time to germinate over the preceding decade.

Larry Weaner told me he has another life as an amateurcomposer, and that he sees in music a rapport with gardendesign, especially in the creation of meadows. Indeed, hismeadows are certainly orchestral in composition, incorporat-ing many interrelated elements: on an early summer evening,the hues and whisperings of the perennials, annuals, andgrasses, like the string section, are complicated and comple-mented by the swoop of birds, the alighting of butterflies, andthe glimmer of fireflies among the long stems, together build-ing to a visual crescendo.

In early November, the effect was more muted, the palette arusset brown; seed heads clustered far above my head. The cir-cuitous mowed paths led me deep into the midst of this densesea of grasses, and just as I felt enclosed, the path would openup to a clearing with a labyrinth of stones – or, in anotherdirection, into an orchard of apple and peach trees whosegnarled trunks made them seem like ancient leftovers from anearlier farm. As I walked back to the house along the drive, Isuddenly turned around. A brisk wind rustled and bent the tallgrasses so that they did appear like an undulating sea, andbeyond, in the distance, rolling in unison, was the borrowedlandscape of the Litchfield Hills. – Paula Deitz

Books

Delirious New Orleans:Manifesto for anExtraordinary American CityBy Stephen VerderberAustin: University of TexasPress, 2009

When theYankeeDoodleclosed itsdoors in2008, NewHaven lostmore thanits mostfamousgreasyspoon. Thecity also losta fantastic piece of signagethat signaled the smalldiner’s presence at the inter-section of Elm and YorkStreets in the Broadwayshopping district. A strikingcomposition in red, white,and blue, the sign featured ajaunty figure wearing a but-toned tunic and folded toquewho, perched above thedoorway, strode purposefullyinto the space of the side-walk with a cup of steamingcoffee on a tray. The figureframed a carefully letteredtext – “Yankee Doodle Coffeeand Sandwich Shop” – thatbeckoned passersby into anintimate, vest-pocket spacewhere a dozen or so stoolsfaced the narrow lunchcounter; behind it werechrome fixtures, a soda foun-

tain, and an array of smallsigns that stated the menu.There were many reasons,not all of them made public,why “the Doodle” – afterthree generations and nearlysixty years of serving patronsfrom both sides of thetown/gown divide – finallycalled it quits. Suffice it tosay that nostalgia does not

pay therent and afamilybusiness isby natureidiosyn-cratic. Buteven if younevertucked intoa “Dandy”(doublehamburger

with bacon, lettuce, tomato),or delighted in a butter-frieddonut, you might still missthe presence and patina ofan old place and the vibrantsign that was its calling card.

Vintage signs delight usin part because they areanachronistic. Hand-letteredor rendered in a blaze ofneon, they are talismans of apassing age in retail and its tradition of small-scaleproprietorship. When localbusinesses succumb to well-heeled competition likechain stores and shoppingcenters, so recedes the stockof quirky, one-off signagedesigned to attract the pass-

ing pedestrian or motoriston the busy commercialstreet. As they grow scarcer,the old signs become collec-tor’s items. They appear inglamorous photographybooks that tantalize withgraphic appeal, neonemblems of a vanishingAmerica.

In Delirious New Orleans:A Manifesto for an Extraor-dinary City, the author’s maintheme is commercial vernac-ular architecture and theextraordinary, cumulativemeaning that these everyday,if offbeat, buildings, signs,and artifacts have in oursense of place and belong-ing. The project began whenarchitect Stephen Verderber,then teaching at TulaneUniversity’s School ofArchitecture, embarked on aself-described “delirious”mission to photograph thecity’s rich collection of road-side architecture and arti-facts that he had come toappreciate. After Katrina, thedisplaced author returned toNew Orleans and the specificsites of his original pho-tographs to document thewreckage. The first chapter isdevoted to this photographicrecord. In subsequent chap-ters, he goes on to look inmore detail at both thedevelopment of commercialvernacular architecture inNew Orleans and the muralsand other forms of “folkarchitecture” that, especiallyin the city’s African Ameri-can neighborhoods, con-tribute so much to the city’ssoul. One chapter explores

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future that was already, ifimperfectly, built. Verderber,in his nostalgia for the iconsand institutions of theAmerican roadside, is lesscoy about his belief in theimportance of recognizingand preserving them. In hisengaging and amply illus-trated book, he argues thatthe buildings and signs ofthe strip must be preservedbecause they are central tothe meaningful recovery andremaking of New Orleans.

Popular images of NewOrleans architecture includethe cast-iron balconies of theFrench Quarter, the above-ground tombs of the city’scemeteries, and the narrowshotgun houses that havehistorically housed the city’spoor. But Verderber callsattention to a feature of NewOrleans that, even if it iscomposed of completelyunique elements, is commonto most American cities – theindiscreet charms of thehighway strip. Among theauthor’s photographs of thecity’s exuberant signage areimages of the streamlinedneon of 1940s-era lounges,oversized sculptures of root-beer mugs for the regionalchain of Frostop drive-inrestaurants, starburst aes-thetic and theme motels ofthe 1950s, and a variety ofother artistic neon creationsfor businesses ranging fromflower shops to bakeries. Orconsider the case of SouthClaiborne Hardware. Some-time in the 1950s, propri-etors mounted an oversized

plywood pinup girl, in denimoveralls, on an adjustablemonkey wrench. “It has beenthe source of some dis-traction to motorists fordecades,” writes Verderber.

This type of study is awelcome addition to theresearch tradition that takesseriously the formation andmeaning of the ordinarylandscape, celebrating itsdiscord as opposed to insist-ing on its depravity. Histori-cally, the highway strip wasthe perennial bête noire ofurban critics. It representedthe reign of the unplannedand undesigned in theAmerican landscape, whatthe architect and critic PeterBlake called “God’s OwnJunkyard.” Grady Clay calledthe strip the “dirty old manof the urban scene,” and it was at the front line ofwhat planners ChristopherTunnard and Boris Push-karev identified as the battlebetween chaos and controlin the built environment. Asearly as 1931, in fact, BentonMacKaye and Lewis Mum-ford expressed the hope ofmany reformers with a proposal for “townless high-ways,” a model for limited-access parkways that wouldeliminate the clutter of pri-vate intrusions on the visualand social realms of thehighway.

Verderber rejects thepaternalistic view of the stripand takes inspiration from

writers like John Brincker-hoff Jackson, who saw anemerging American folk artin the “flamboyant entrancesand deliberately bizarre dec-orative effects” of highwayarchitecture and signage. Bytaking seriously the localinterventions of the com-mercial vernacular land-scape, Verderber placeshimself in league withRobert Venturi, Denise ScottBrown, and Steven Izenour,the influential trio whose1972 Learning from Las Vegas,based on the results of a YaleSchool of Architecture study,analyzed the spatial logic ofthe strip and its system ofcommunication based onsignage. If critics pointed tothe strip as a debased exam-ple of American hucksterismand throwaway culture, theVenturi, Scott Brown, andIzenour team found an“architecture of persuasion”that might even serve as amodel for new architecture.

One of the most interest-ing aspects of Delirious New Orleans is Verderber’sanalysis of how residentialbuildings are adapted tocommercial functions byadding what he calls “maskerbuildings” to the originalstructure. The Coin Laundryon South Claiborne, forexample, was originally across-gabled, Craftsman-stylehouse, probably built around1920. The original house wasset back from the street toallow for a modest frontyard. But the street soondeveloped as an important

automobile route and theowners of the house foundthemselves in a strategiclocation for commercialuses. City planners recog-nized this, too. As trafficbecame more intense onarteries such as SouthClaiborne, many of themwere rezoned to allow com-mercial or light-industrialuses. The owners could builda commercial extension tothe street – masking theoriginal facade – and contin-ue to live in the housebehind the new store. In thecase of the Coin Laundry, theaddition, executed in the late1920s or early 1930s, wasessentially a simple woodenbox with a stucco-clad fron-tispiece (a kind of mask ontop of a mask) that, with itshorizontal grooves and cen-tral parapet made of verticalstrips, gave the extension abit of art deco styling.Verderber produces a seriesof analytical drawings inaxonometric perspective toillustrate how each commer-cial mask is wrapped around,on top, or in front of anoriginal building, allowingnew programmatic opportu-nities (restaurant, hardwarestore, electronics serviceshop) and reintroducing thebuilding to the street. Thedrawings help explain acommon building process inAmerican cities and showhow the accumulation of

individual, small-scale adap-tations gives shape to ourstreets and neighborhoods.

If Verderber has a gener-ous appreciation for the ver-nacular, the indigenous, andthe bottom-up, it is matchedby his suspicion and down-right contempt for initiativesand grandiose schemes thatare imposed on a populationfrom the top down, whetherby government, philan-thropists, or real-estateinterests. Unfortunately, thedestruction wrought byHurricane Katrina exceededthe damage of even the mostmalevolent developer or ill-fated urban-renewal scheme.In the aftermath, FEMAshipped tens of thousands oftrailers to New Orleans toserve as temporary, emer-gency housing. While plan-ners and politicians debatedrebuilding strategies, thesetrailers became the de factobuilding blocks of an emerg-ing, post-Katrina urbanism.As physical homes, the trail-ers left a lot to be desired.They were cramped, poorlydesigned and constructed,ill-ventilated, and susceptibleto fire, all despite the consid-erable cost of producing anddeploying each unit. Evenmore distressing was thelack of coordination betweenFEMA’s many subcontrac-tors, leading to long delaysin distributing and installingthe trailers and in connect-ing them to electricity andother basic services. Thetrailers were not built forlong-term habitation. ButFEMA made living in them

even less hospitable bygrouping them in enclaveswithout adequate access tobasic amenities, especiallyfood. With the diagrammingtechnique he used to analyzethe “masking” architecture,Verderber scrutinizes thepatterns of FEMA trailerinstallation “across a deliri-ous and devastated land-scape,” and explores some ofthe NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) controversies thaterupted around the locationof these camps.

In the face of the govern-ment’s shocking incompe-tence, other forces steppedforward to try to respond tothe need. But in their ways,many of them were equallyproblematic. One such high-profile effort was spearhead-ed by actor Brad Pitt, who setout to rebuild houses in theLower Ninth Ward – an areaof the city that many plan-ners concede might not, andeven should not, come backas it was – by commissioningprestigious architects fromaround the globe to generatenew takes on the shotgunhouse. Architect AndrésDuany, a founder of theCongress for the New Urban-ism, also came to the GulfCoast to lead a series of“charrettes” (meetings ofplanners, architects, and thepublic) with communitymembers in several of thecity’s parishes. The charrettes

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took on a “delirious, surrealatmosphere all their own,”Verderber writes. “How was ahomeless, shell-shockedaudience to take seriously . . .the romanticized images ofcanals, idyllic footbridges,and pastoral town squarespresented to them by Duanyand his team?” Putting asidethe glaring question of whowas going to pay for all ofthose idyllic footbridges, theNew Urbanist approach –tastefully dressed up in thetrappings of an idealizedneighborhood – was anotherexample of a solution com-ing from outside the com-munity rather than being ahomegrown enterprise.

In a surprising twist,Verberber takes the FEMAtrailers and uses them as anexample of the city’s enter-prising spirit. While most ofthe trailers were grouped inmonotonous, isolated camps,there were instances of“untethered” trailers thatfound their way to the com-mercial strip, where propri-etors set up mom-and-popfood operations. And therewere renegade occupantswho defied FEMA’s rulesagainst personalizing oraltering the trailer’s exterior.“In roadside commercialcontexts, [they] applied neonsigns and related advertise-ments to the banal, charac-terless trailers.” In the messy,individualized appropria-tions of the trailer – unteth-ered from the often sterileand underserved enclaves in

which they were placed –Verderber recognized theseeds of urban rebirth in thetradition of the chaotic high-way strip that he unabashed-ly celebrates.

In the poignant essay thatcloses his book, Verderberveers a bit from his estab-lished themes to recall theplight of the St. FrancesXavier Cabrini Church in theGentilly district of NewOrleans. The church, erectedin 1963, was demolished in2007 despite having survivedKatrina in decent shape.Verderber was a parishionerat the church and worked atlength to preserve the struc-ture, which he saw as crucialto the parish’s sense of place.Despite establishing the his-toric significance of thechurch (designed by thenoted, regional-modernistfirm of Curtis & Davis), theavailability of alternativeplans that would haveaccommodated both thechurch and a new school tobe built there, and severalefforts to secure a legalinjunction, the diocese wentahead with the demolitionfor its own reasons. Theauthor was clearly stung, andhe speaks directly to thosewho oversaw the destructionof the church: “Shame on allof you who worked to bringabout the senseless loss ofCabrini Church and itsparishioners’ cultural andspiritual legacy.” This essay,

while moving, is also some-what jarring. Although this isa story about a failed preser-vation effort, a monumentaland high-design church hasvery little to do with the kindof streetwise, ad hoc urban-ism that Verderber haschampioned over the courseof his book. And yet this per-sonal remark again bringshome the fact that the placesin which we live, shop, andworship are at the core ofwho we really are.

Although many readerswill share the author’s affec-tion for the commerciallandscape so lushly docu-mented here, we remainuncertain of how to applythe question of preservationto commercial structures.The commercial landscape isby nature transient becausethe ways we buy and sell arealways changing and cannotbe frozen in time. In NewOrleans, these changes weredramatically exacerbated byHurricane Katrina, but thetruth is that the commercialstrip as celebrated byVerderber was already dying,replaced by both big-boxstores at one end of thespectrum and online shop-ping at the other, just as thearterial streets themselveshave been largely replaced byinterstate highways. We buildup sentimental and aestheticbonds to buildings and signage related to old busi-nesses, but who will befinancially responsible fortheir preservation when theyare no longer economically

viable? To be sure, there issome room in the contem-porary cultural economy ofcities for nostalgia, history,and curatorship of the builtenvironment. There aresome neighborhoods whereit is a sophisticated sign ofdistinction and authenticityfor a new store to preservethe vintage signage associat-ed with a previous tenant.But every commercial signcannot become a sentimentalrelic. If that were the case wewould live in a city full ofempty signifiers and mightlose a grip on precisely thatsense of place that the signshad at one point helped toproduce.

Still, there is no denyingthat, for many, the local baror diner can serve a functionlike that of a church – as acommon space where peoplecome together. I even thinkit’s possible that some NewHaveners came to worship atthe church of the YankeeDoodle, with its syrupyvanilla cokes pulled from thesoda fountain; to witnessLewis Beckwith, the founder,and then his son Lou, andfinally his grandson Rick,smear butter on a thin ham-burger patty hot off the grid-dle. Many will miss thesustenance it provided, bothgustatory and spiritual, for itrepresented the spirit of atime and place that is nowpast. Certainly the absence ofits sign near the corner ofElm and York Street was a

shock. But should it havebeen preserved in place? Aphantom presence that sig-nified local authenticitydespite the fact that itssource was gone? No matterhow much we miss theDoodle, it is difficult toimagine a satisfying way forthat sign to have been pre-served. The sign’s value as anobject was bound up withthe lives of the people whoran the enterprise and dis-played it. And if people, notsplendid signage, make upthe soul of a place, then thatspirit may as likely be foundin a FEMA trailer as in vividenamel and neon. – Elihu Rubin

Farm City: The Education of an Urban FarmerBy Novella Carpenter New York: Penguin Press,2009

The title of thisdelightful memoir aboutraising meatand potatoes inthe Oaklandghetto is not aneasy one toremember.Certain nouns –“country” and“girl,” “oil” and“slick” – pairtogether nicely,but “farm” and“city” are not among them.In fact the two words evenrepel each other slightly, sothat seeing them yokedtogether creates a jarring,

almost surreal effect, likeRobert Rauschenberg’sAngora goat with the tirearound its middle.

In one sense, NovellaCarpenter is out to changeall that. She is a full-fledgedurban farmer – growing mel-ons in the yard, extractinghoney in the living room,and slaughtering ducks inthe bathtub – and she’d loveit if more of us were doingthe same. But what makesthis book at once vastly plea-surable, deeply weird, andvery, very funny is that so farshe’s one of the few peoplecrazy enough to try it – andshe’s learning on the fly. In both her book and herapartment, she’s doing nothing less than remakingthe urban environment.Rauschenberg’s goat wouldbe right at home in her yard.

In 2003, when Carpenterand her boyfriend, Bill,

abandon Seattlefor Oakland,California, theirnew hometownhas the highestmurder rate inthe country: aman is shotdead just a fewblocks away theday they movein. On theupside, there’s aBuddhist tem-ple across the

street, a friendly vegetariannamed Lana with a pet

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guinea pig down the block,and a big vacant lot justbehind their apartment.Forsaken houses and ruinedbusinesses are so commonin the neighborhood, in fact,that the local residents call itGhost Town. To the newarrivals, though, the emptylot is not a memory but avegetable garden waiting tohappen.

Carpenter is no dewy-eyed sentimentalist, and shemakes that clear from thestart, just so nobody gets thewrong idea. “I have a farmon a dead-end street in theghetto,” she begins. “Mybackstairs are dotted withchicken turds. Bales of strawcome undone in the parkingarea next to my apartment.”She is, however, a romantic,and she believes that farm-ing is in her genes; her par-ents were back-to-the-landhippies who tried home-steading in Idaho soon aftershe and her sister were born.Unfortunately, the smoke-house burned down and thedog had to be shot; herfather would go off huntingfor days, leaving her motheralone with the children andchores. So why not farm intown, where there’s alwayssomething going on, and youcan be surrounded by otherpeople?

In Carpenter’s view, beingan urban farmer involvesmore than tending a fewstalks of corn and sometomato vines in the backyard. Even chickens don’treally count. It isn’t until the

author decides to raise herown turkeys for Thanks-giving dinner and orders acombo package of meatbirds from the MurrayMcMurray Hatchery websitethat she begins to feel likethe real thing. A few dayslater, the mail carrier drivesup with ten chicks, twoducklings, two goslings, andtwo turkeys – whom Lana’ssister promptly christensHarold and Maude.

Certainly, the arrival ofthe birds – and then the rab-bits, and then the pigs –keeps Carpenter hopping ather city farm, but of equalinterest are all the otherwarm-blooded animals mak-ing their homes on thisdead-end street. Lana, welearn, runs a speakeasy everyweek in her warehouse. Themonks cook large vats of riceon the sidewalk and sharetheir food with the hungry.Mr. Nguyen, the Vietnameseneighbor who lives down-stairs, tends his own smallpatch of taro and chrysan-themum. And Bobby, anelderly black man who sleepsin an abandoned car nearby,sweeps the glass off theblock every evening.

As the author becomesless wary of her new neigh-borhood she ventures further afield – by bike, onfoot – to look for delectableweeds for her rabbits, or topick wild plums from therotting roof of an abandoned

carport. The grocer talks toher about beekeeping inYemen and the local chil-dren show her how to shootdice. Slowly, too, the streetventures into the garden.Some people ask for food,others steal it. Neighborsdrop by to gossip, or withseeds for her to plant, or tocomplain about the smell ofthe pigs. Children comearound to marvel at the rab-bits. Friends arrive to helpher kill her first turkey.Carpenter’s tiny but thrivingenterprise becomes not analternative to the street’secology but a part of it. Farmcity.

Although readers mightinitially be distracted by theauthor’s agricultural machis-ma, she proves to be as muchat home in the library andthe kitchen as she is in thepigsty. Her narrative is pleas-ingly interspersed with refer-ences to Wendell Berry andHenry David Thoreau andAnthony Bourdain; nine-teenth-century market gar-dens in Paris; the history ofanimal husbandry; sharingbehaviors among primates.She pores over copies of TheWhole Earth Catalogue andStalking the Wild Asparagusand Charcuterie and FrenchPork Cookery. She even hec-tors Bill about the sins ofwastefulness by readingaloud passages from M. F. K.Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf.But finally the learning is in the doing, and Carpenteris appealingly game in her attempts to expand herexpertise. She gets up to

For Carpenter, a love offood leads to a love of farm-ing: it’s good to know whereyour dinner comes from.Conversely, as even the mostrudimentary vegetable gar-dener knows, nothing tastesquite like a tomato you’vesucceeded in growing your-self – and yes, for Carpenter,the same holds true forbacon. With animals, though,the equation is obviouslymore complicated, and shedoesn’t shy away from thosecomplications. There is a lotof death in this book, asthere is on any farm – someintentional, some accidental,some at her hands and someat the hands of others – andthe author’s musings aboutthe cycles of consuming andbeing consumed are unfail-ingly engaging.

Finally, however, it is theunexpected as much as theinevitable that makes thismemoir so seductive. In onesuspenseful scene in FarmCity, Maude, one of the her-itage turkeys, venturesbeyond the safety of her ownyard and flutters over a highfence to meet the neighborswho live behind the autoshop: a Rottweiler and a pitbull. The tale of a farm fowldying in the teeth of preda-tors is a familiar one, ofcourse, but it has never beentold quite like this – with along aside on the difficultiesof climbing a chain-linkfence to rescue your bird.Yes, Carpenter explains, as aghetto resident she has hadplenty of opportunities

a lot of things in this book,like winemaking and swarmcapturing, passing alonghelpful hints as she learnsthem herself. (Postal workersare alarmed by packages ofbees. A chicken tractor is aworthwhile investment.Don’t transport manure inyour car.)

One of the book’s ironicreversals is that just as manyrural farmers have becomedependent on urban centersto sell their goods, Carpentercan’t quite break all ties withthe country: every once in awhile she has to jump in thecar and leave town to go pickgrapes or buy a pig. Mostentertaining, though, are herattempts to have it all rightat home, such as when sheand Bill decide to feed theirpigs exclusively from thespectacularly varied cuisinesavailable in the city’s dump-sters, or when she tries tosubsist for the month of Julyentirely on the produce ofher farm, food received frombarter, and wild forage. “The100-yard diet had so height-ened my senses, I started tosee food everywhere. Everyshrub, tree, and weed Iencountered quivered withpotential usefulness,” sherecalls. “I could also smell a hot dog a mile away.”Hunger and moral right-eousness, she discovers, arenot an appealing combina-tion.

to watch and learn the tech-nique:

Every once in a whilethere is a car chase downMLK: squealing tires,police sirens, enginesopening up. If the pur-sued car careens aroundour corner, it soonencounters a dead end: aschoolyard circled by atwenty-foot-tall fence. Nothaving options, the carthieves usually throwopen the car door andsprint to the fence. Itimed them once: five sec-onds to get to the top.The cops got out of theircars, lights flashing, andwatched them climb awayto freedom.

But watching is not thesame as doing, and, inMaude’s moment of desper-ate need, Carpenter discoversthat she is a terrible fenceclimber:

I got a startling realitycheck into what remark-able physical strength ittook to scramble up achain-link fence. Themetal cut into my hands;my toes were jammedpainfully into the smallopenings. Once near thetop, I had to negotiate toan area without razorwire. My biceps quivered.I was a weak Spider-Woman. I yelled discour-aging words to the dogsin my best stern voice:“No. Bad dogs! No.”

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Unsurprisingly, Maude isbeyond rescue by the timeCarpenter hits the asphalt.(“There was only one waythat scenario – turkey meetsdogs – could have playedout.”) And yet the scene itselfis still surprising, becausethe author defeats our stylis-tic and thematic expecta-tions at every turn: thetension of a turkey’s murderis improbably drawn out byburning rubber and policesirens; the effort of protect-ing a farm animal inspiresrespect for the athleticprowess of a car thief; andthe impatient reader realizesthat there may be momentsin life when urban crimesuddenly seems less impor-tant than what’s happeningto a pea-brained turkey.

In the end, we come tothink of Carpenter herself asan amalgam of contradic-tions, a sort of gimlet-eyedutopian who believes that weare all, in a sense, living onborrowed land, and that weshould therefore perhapsredefine our notions of com-munity and survival. Takewhat you need, she suggests,and give back what you can.Surplus tomatoes for theBlack Panther tutoring pro-gram, honey for the Yemenigrocer. Wild plums whenyou’re hungry, fish guts and

discarded Yummy Housecakes for the pigs. Throwsome rotted horse manureon your dreams, don’t fenceout your neighbors, andsomething miraculous mighthappen, right on the streetwhere you live. – Alice Truax

Parks, Plants, and People By Lynden MillerNew York: Norton, 2009

Todayrenowned as adesigner ofpublic spaces,Lynden B.Miller’s pro-fessional turfis the urbanpark and citysquare. Herbook Parks,Plants, andPeople (2009)is in part thestory of her present career. Itbegan in 1982 in the Conser-vatory Garden at the Harlemend of Central Park, whenshe accepted the newlyformed Central Park Conser-vancy’s challenge to restore –or better, to re-create – thetripartite, Beaux Arts gardenthat Commissioner RobertMoses had inserted intoFrederick Law Olmsted andCalvert Vaux’s Romanticlandscape in 1936. Her suc-cess and the widespreadacclaim the garden receivedencouraged Miller, who wasthen a painter, to trade in

her artist’s palette for onecomprised of flats of plants.

Miller’s artist’s eye hasaided her over the past threedecades in her creation ofseveral public gardens thatadorn parks and campusesin New York City and else-where. Their painterly arrayof ornamental plants wouldnot have thrived under theconditions of heavy use andenvironmental stress if her

designs werenot groundedin sound hor-ticulturalknowledge.Parks, Plants,and People isthus both atour of severalbeautifiedpublic land-scapes and aprimer formaking gar-

den art, whether public orprivate.

Throughout she refers toElizabeth von Arnim,Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sack-ville-West, Louise BeebeWilder, and other earlier gar-den writers whom shecounts as her literary com-panions and mentors. For instance, in a long chap-ter titled “The Art of GardenDesign,” Miller starts off

by saying:

To my eye, the ideal com-position is one that looksalmost unplanned – butthis actually requires care-ful planning and experi-ence with plants. Thegreat English gardenerand writer Vita Sackville-West called this kind ofgardening “a kind of hap-hazard luxuriance, whichof course comes neitherby hap nor hazard at all.”This type of planting maylook as if some invisiblehand had just droppedthe plants here and there,but the effect takes con-siderable organizationand definition.

The mixed border – along bed in which bulbs,perennials, annuals, shrubs,and low-growing trees com-bine to create a tapestry ofplants – is Miller’s particularspecialty. During the 1970swhen she lived in Englandshe looked with an attentiveeye at the mixed borderscontained within a structuralframework of paths, walls,and hedges at Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst,Christopher Lloyd’s GreatDixter, and LawrenceJohnson’s Hidcote – allplaces where gardening isdemonstrated to be one ofthe fine arts. Practicing thelessons she learned fromtheir creators and other pro-ponents of this form of gar-den design – Rosemary Vereyand Penelope Hobhouse, to

shade-loving species, with anod to her reliable favorites:Helleborus, Alchemilla,Anemone, Geranium, Salvia,Sedum, Thalictrum, Hosta, andYucca); one to grasses, suchas several varieties ofMiscanthus sinensis alongwith oat grass (Helictotrichonsempervirens) and goldenJapanese forest grass(Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’);one to annuals, including astar performer, Ageratumhoustonianum ‘Blue Horizon’(floss flower); one to bienni-als like Digitalis (foxglove);one to bulbs, includingAllium, the ornamentalonion plant; one to nativeplants, with Hydrangea quer-cifolia (oakleaf hydrangea)being her favorite.

Once you have yourpalette – this means a largecatalogue of mental imagesof plants and an informedsense of their seasonalgrowth habits – you thenneed to master the elementsof design: foliage contrast,repetition, form, line, scale,and color. Here Miller showshow the large, smooth, blueleaves of a hosta contrastwith the “thin, yellow-greenstrappy leaves” of goldenJapanese forest grass; howsoftly undulating grassesrepeat the flow of fallingwater; how the necessary“crisp discipline” of an edgeis softened by the way a plantis allowed to spill over it;how hedges create sight linesand at the same time serve to

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name the most recent –Miller aims to teach herreaders how to create com-positions of plants that pro-vide visual interest duringthe four seasons of the year.To do this, of course,requires an approach to gar-dening as a science in whichthe variables of time andweather need to be under-stood. “If you know yourplants well,” she writes, “youwill have no reason to leave apark or garden devoid ofplant pleasures in winter.Evergreen foliage, interestingbark, and colorful berries arethe joys of the season.”

The words “if you knowyour plants well” are, ofcourse, key. As Jekyllobserved, “Many peoplebegin their gardening bythinking that the makingand maintaining of a well-filled flower border is quitean easy matter. In fact it isone of the most difficultproblems in the whole rangeof horticultural practice.” Tomake her borders, Millerthinks of form, texture, andcolor, giving one section totrees and shrubs, with flow-ering dogwoods, magnolias,and broad-leaved evergreenssuch as holly (for wintercolor) taking pride of place;one to perennials, which shecalls “the flesh” on the gar-den’s “bones” (here she rec-ommends a host of sun- and

contain exuberant plantings;how complementary colorssuch as blue and orange or asingle color in many differ-ent shades can create aneffective design.

Like other good gardenwriters she cannot omit dis-cussing soil: “Ideally itshould be dark brown andsmell fresh, and it shouldmake a ball in your handwhen you squeeze it. If thesoil is in good conditionyour hands will hold mil-lions of invisible micro-organisms, more than thereare people on the face of the planet.” She recommendssoil testing by one’s stateextension service or a privatecompany; soil amendment torelieve compaction, poordrainage, or nutrient defi-ciencies; and various types ofcompost – the gardener’sgold – to meet the demandsof different kinds of plants.

Public sector gardenersmust deal with the samevagaries of weather and infu-riating depredations of garden pests as private gar-deners. But they have otherchallenges to overcome aswell, as Miller makes clear ina final chapter devoted to thesubject. Having on site anenthusiastic, trained garden-er capable of communicatingwith the public; selecting theright kinds of plants, prefer-

ably ones that are beautifulduring at least three seasons;protecting them with unob-trusive temporary fencingwhile they are getting estab-lished; and preventing inju-rious salt and chemicalsused to remove snow onpaths from leaching into thesoil are just some of thethings that must be added toregular good maintenancepractices such as watering,weeding, pruning, mulching,and so forth. Miller believesthat public gardens are cyno-sures of the city and symbolsof good urbanism. In thisrespect, the word “people” inher title is significant. “Well-maintained parks tell peoplethat their city cares aboutthem and give them a com-pelling reason to remain inthe city,” she concludes, abelief she affirms with ananecdote:

A visitor once said to me,after experiencing theConservatory Garden forthe first time, that she hadintended to leave NewYork, but if there was aplace like this in the city,she wasn’t leaving. . . .With so much to divideus, one thing seems com-mon to us all: everyoneloves to be surrounded bysomething beautiful.

Her motto is “Make itgorgeous and they will come;keep it that way and they will help you.” – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

author of City Bountiful: A Century of CommunityGardening in America(University of CaliforniaPress, 2005) and coauthor,with Jeff Hou and Julie M.Johnson, of Greening Cities,Growing Communities:Learning from Seattle’s UrbanCommunity Gardens (Univer-sity of Washington Press,2009).

Elihu Rubin, Ph.D., is anarchitectural historian, cityplanner, and documentaryfilmmaker. Since 2007 he hasserved as the Daniel RoseVisiting Assistant Professorof Urbanism at the YaleSchool of Architecture. Hereceived a doctorate in architecture and a master’sin city planning from theUniversity of California,Berkeley, and a bachelor ofarts from Yale. His docu-mentary films include OnBroadway: A New HavenStreetscape and Rudolph andRenewal.

Alice Truax is a freelance edi-tor, writer, and writinginstructor at Sarah LawrenceCollege. A former editor atThe New Yorker, she has been the associate editor ofSite/Lines since 2008.

Katherine Harmon is anaward-winning writer livingin New York City. Her workhas appeared in newspapers,magazines and literary jour-nals. Currently a reporter forScientific American, she has an honors graduate degreefrom the Missouri School ofJournalism. Growing up in Oklahoma, she worked ingardens big and small.

Ben Helphand is the execu-tive director of Neighbor-Space, a nonprofit, urbanland trust dedicated to pre-serving and sustaining com-munity-managed openspaces in Chicago. He is onthe board of the ActiveTransportation Alliance andcurrently serves as presidentof the board of the Friendsof the Bloomingdale Trail, acommunity group that advo-cates for the conversion of an elevated rail viaduct onChicago’s northwest sideinto a multi-use linear park.

Laura Lawson is professorand chair in the Departmentof Landscape Architecture atRutgers, The State Universityof New Jersey. Her researchsubjects include historicaland contemporary commu-nity open space, with partic-ular focus on communitygardens and the changingroles of parks in low-incomecommunities. She is the

Contributors

Timothy Beatley is the TeresaHeinz Professor of Sustain-able Communities in theDepartment of Urban andEnvironmental Planning ofthe School of Architecture ofthe University of Virginia,where he has taught for thelast twenty-four years. Hehas written more thanfifteen books about sustain-able cities and place making,including, most recently,Biophilic Cities: IntegratingNature into Urban Design(Island Press, 2010). ForPlanning Magazine, Beatleywrites a regular column, EverGreen, about environmentaland sustainability matters.He also recently collaboratedon a documentary film aboutgreen cities, entitled TheNature of Cities, which hasbeen shown on PBS stationsaround the U.S.

Jane Roy Brown is an award-winning writer, editor, andlandscape historian. She is aLandscape ArchitectureMagazine contributing editorand the director of educa-tional outreach at the Libraryof American LandscapeHistory, a nonprofit organi-zation that produces booksand exhibitions aboutAmerican landscape history.She is coauthor with Susan

Haltom of One Writer’sGarden: Eudora Welty’s HomePlace, forthcoming in fall2011 from the UniversityPress of Mississippi.

Paula Deitz is editor of theHudson Review, a magazineof literature and the artspublished in New York City.As a cultural critic, shewrites about art, architecture,and landscape design fornewspapers and magazineshere and abroad. Of Gardens,a collection of her essays, has recently been publishedby the University of Penn-sylvania Press.

Jane Garmey is a noted gar-den writer and a contributorto the New York Times. Born in England, she is theauthor of Private Gardens of Connecticut (MonacelliPress, 2010), The Writer in theGarden (Algonquin Books,1999), Great British Cooking: AWell-Kept Secret (WilliamMorrow Cookbooks, 1992),and Great New BritishCooking (Simon & Schuster,1985). She lives in New Yorkand in Cornwall, Connecti-cut.

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Volume vi, Number iiSpring 2011

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Vincent BuonannoKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombTherese O’MalleyLaurie D. OlinJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy Editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Timothy BeatleyJane Roy BrownPaula DeitzJane GarmeyKatherine HarmonBen Helphand Laura LawsonElihu RubinAlice Truax

For more information about theFoundation for Landscape Studies, visit www.foundationfor landscapestudies.org., or contact elizabethbarlowrogers@gmail.com

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