Community

A view of Barbara Ganley’s amazing Open View Gardens. (Photo by Barbara Ganley, and used under a Creative Commons license.)

I’ve been surrounded by gardeners all my life–it’s a peril of having spent three decades in the western half of California, where year-round growing is pretty easy. In my perambulations around the country and the web, however, I’ve come to know (as friends or merely as a website lurker) some people who have a really deep relationship with their gardens, and I’d like to give some of them a shout-out here, as they’re an inspiration.

First, if we’re talking about floriculture, my mom is at the very top of my gardening idols. Her yard boasts a few dozen lovely and fragrant rosebushes and I’m guessing at least a dozen varieties of begonia. My parents have lived in their Southern California home since 1968, so they’ve had plenty of time to improve the soil, and it shows–her garden blossoms year-round thanks to nearly a hundred tall and prolific perennials whose names I never seem able to remember.

Next on my floriculture list would be a number of women you’ve likely never heard of–none of them are alive today–but who all contributed in one way or another to California floriculture or to the understanding of California’s native plants: Lester Rowntree, Theodosia Shepherd, Alice Eastwood, Gerda Isenberg, Susanna Bixby Bryant, and Kate Sessions. (I’m in the process of becoming a California garden historian of sorts, so admiring late floricultural and horticultural pioneers is becoming a vocational hazard.)

If we’re going to talk about edible horticulture, however, then I’m eager to list people I’ve met and people I want to meet but thus far know only online.

My friend Barbara Ganley runs Open View Gardens adjacent to her home in rural Vermont. While she’s not technically an urban gardener, Barbara’s methods are applicable to intensive gardening of food, and her passion for her work is inspirational. I admire the way she has launched a business that supports her passions through truly one-of-a-kind cooking workshops, a lovely shop packed with dried herbs and peppers, syrups, jams, jellies, condiments, and more from her garden and kitchen, and subscriptions to special ingredients from Barbara’s kitchen, as well as recipes and menus that call for those ingredients. Her site also boasts a ton of recipes drawn from cuisines around the world–and all infused with Barbara’s brilliance as a gardener, chef, and all-around creative thinker.

I’ve had the pleasure of crossing paths with Bryan Alexander at a number of education technology conferences; he lives just up the mountain from Barbara, but–as he emphasized in a guest post on Barbara’s blog–his gardening takes on additional urgency in the face of the isolation winter brings to his community. Bryan blogs about the Gothic at Infocult (not a site for the queasy of stomach or those prone to nightmares, I assure you) and is the author of The New Digital Storytelling, but for gardeners his most interesting site is likely Scaling the Peak, “a blog about peak oil and a family attempting to cope.” On that blog he chronicles his family’s agricultural adventures on what he affectionately terms “the doomstead.” Again, Bryan’s homestead isn’t urban, but his experiments remain relevant to those of us in cities and suburbs; check out, for example, his post on early July homestead activities or planting potatoes in June.

When I lived in California, I found the blogs of northern denizens like Barbara and Bryan to be really interesting and inspiring. Since my move to Idaho, I’ve found them instructional as well. Definitely add them to your feed reader or bookmarks, especially if like me you’re challenged by a late last frost date and a short growing season.

My pseudonymous friend Garden Grrrl, who blogs at Gardensong, is always ready and willing to ease my muddling through the garden. Like me, she has a passion for informal science education and the democratization of knowledge about horticulture and the natural world. Though she hasn’t been the most prolific blogger lately, I’m delighted to number her among my good friends–and thrilled that I have her phone number for good conversation and garden emergencies.

I’ve never met the Dervaes family, but I hope one of my regular visits to Southern California will soon take me by their Pasadena urban homestead (a term the family has registered as a trademark, to much chagrin–OK, indignation–in the urban ag community). On one-tenth of an acre, the Dervaes produce more than three tons of organic food annually.

I’m just learning about the saga of the South Central farmers of Los Angeles. They’ve seen their community farm’s acreage decline dramatically, and they’re fighting to retain access to one final sliver of land. Check out their site to see how you might help.

I also admire the myriad community gardeners in Oakland, California. (Urban farming and community gardening has absolutely taken off in the San Francisco Bay Area.) There are Oakland neighborhoods without a grocery store, so it’s difficult to get fresh produce. Activists, neighbors, and entrepreneurs have teamed up to bring ultra-local fresh food to the residents in the form of gardens and urban farms.

Which gardeners do you admire, and why?

If there’s one word that captures the potential of urban gardening, it’s transformative. Even if I didn’t love gardening, I would be compelled to write about urban gardening and urban agriculture just because I find so alluring this transformative potential.

I’m not pulling this adjective out of thin air–there’s a ton of research backing up my claim. Here are the highlights:

According to the Royal Horticulture Society’s report (PDF) on urban gardening, gardens make cities more sustainable and increase city dwellers’ quality of life because

plants and trees in an urban environment cool the air and temper urban heat waves.
strategically placed vegetation around homes can decrease residents’ energy consumption by serving as a wind break for cold air, and by serving as a form of insulation.
gardens can prevent flooding in cities by slowing runoff, which would otherwise speed toward urban drains.
gardening requires regular exercise, which can reduce stress and contribute to both physical and psychological well-being.
even urban gardens attract and support an impressive range of wildlife. Says the report, “Some animal species are now more common in cities, and particularly domestic gardens, than in rural areas.”

These aren’t the only benefits of urban gardening, however. Members of the Community Food Security Coalition’s North American Initiative on Urban Agriculture published a paper (PDF) on the health benefits of urban gardening. Among them are

People who grow food consume it, and the food grown in home gardens tends to be closer to the organic end of the food production spectrum than food grown on large commercial farms.
Urban agriculture and gardening promote the development of safe, healthy, green neighborhoods, sometimes transforming residential yards, school campuses, and abandoned areas into informal neighborhood meeting spaces.

Some researchers have suggested that urban gardening is a sound solution (PDF) to brownfields.

Sprouts in the Sidewalk offers another list of benefits. Socially, Sprouts points out, urban gardening strengthens communities; connects individuals with food production and empowers them to take responsibility for their food’s security; greens the city; teaches self-sufficiency; creates jobs, income, and food; combats hunger in communities; and instills respect for safe, green food production. Environmentally, gardens clean the urban air and water, slows erosion, decreases a community’s garden footprint because food need not be trucked in, encourages composting, and directly impacts urban ecological health. Gardening, Sprouts emphasizes, also has economic benefits: It creates jobs and income from spaces that may previously have been abandoned or otherwise unproductive, helps people regardless of socioeconomic class, creates a vibrant local food economy, and allows people to pool resources (particularly those, such as compost, that would otherwise go to waste in an urban environment).

Gardening’s impact on urban communities can’t be overestimated. Gardening brings people out into their yards–and increasingly their front and side yards, where they may be visible to their neighbors. In some cases, these connections spark small businesses, as entrepreneurial neighbors collaborate to create community-supported agriculture subscriptions.

What about you? What draws you to urban gardening or urban agriculture? How has gardening changed your yard, your immediate neighborhood, or your larger community?

Garden photo by Irene Kightley, and used under a Creative Commons license

Some gardeners I admire

Why Urban Gardening Matters

Urban Gardening Matters!

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