The Berwyn Heights Community Garden Planning Committee (Planning Committee) is an outgrowth of the Berwyn Heights Green Team (Green Team) in Berwyn Heights, a town of approximately 3,123 residents in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In 2012, the Town Council established the Green Team to help the municipality become “Sustainable Maryland Certified” (SMC), and support activities […]
I was gardening in our community garden, located in Washington DC, just ten blocks from the Capitol Building, the home of the U.S. Congress. Our community garden is an oasis of peacefulness and my soul is refreshed when I garden there. On 9/11, after the planes hit the Trade Center’s twin towers in New York […]
Initially, a group of Lafayette Community members came together to form the Local Foods Group under the inspired leadership of local “green” activists. From 2008 through 2011 the group searched Lafayette for an appropriate site to establish a community garden and outdoor learning center. The goal was to create an inviting community space where citizens […]
The mission of the Well Fed Community Garden is listed on the Irregardless Café website: “To provide an opportunity for community members to learn how to grow their own food, to reinforce the community’s ties to the environment; and to increase food access and food security within our community.” Some of the community benefits include […]
North Austin Community Garden is a partnership between the City of Austin and YMCA of Austin. Local artists Lucy Begg and Robert Gay of Thoughtbarn were commissioned by Austin’s Art in Public Places program to design and build the garden. Although the garden only opened recently, the community’s response has been overwhelmingly positive and plans […]
Motivated by Mahatma Gandhi’s famous quote “you must be the change you wish to see in the world,” Trenton-based artist collective and non-profit organization S.A.G.E. Coalition (“Styles Advancing Graffiti’s Evolution”) transformed an abandoned lot next to their artist studio into a community garden. The most prominent artwork in the garden is its namesake, the mural […]
Note from the Artist and founder: “Before you read the story of the Please Touch Garden I would like to dedicate this story with a thank you to the many that helped make it possible. I did pour my heart into making the Please Touch Community Garden a reality, but it was truly the many […]
Sunflower Village, a community garden in the Franklin Square neighborhood of Baltimore, has been growing strong since 2010, when the Franklin Square Community Association decided to take over a large abandoned lot. Several years before, five houses stood where the Sunflower Village now resides. When they were torn down, all that remained was the neglected […]
When the abandoned gas station that had been owned by artist Vickie Jo Sowell’s long-time neighbor Big Daddy Green burned down in 2001, the City of Emeryville asked her what she thought should be done with the site. Big Daddy’s Complete Rejuvenating Community Garden is the result, the name a riff on Mr. Green’s original […]
My oldest and I have been eyeing the Kirk of Kildaire Community Garden for a while now, and finally took the leap to volunteer there last weekend. The garden is on the property of Kirk of Kildaire Presbyterian Church in Cary, North Carolina. Community gardens are pretty awesome for several reasons: -The ability to meet […]
Until late winter of 2007, my only productive interactions with plants had been with the most common houseplants. Neither our family’s efforts during my childhood to grow tomatoes nor my obstinate individual ones to grow watermelons in conditions I later realized were completely ill-suited to the plant had been successful. But in 2007, after having […]
Las Parcelas, a community garden in the Norris Square neighborhood of Philadelphia, began with brushes and paint, rather than shovels and seeds. Plans for the space began in the 1980s. It was not until a summer day in 1992, however, that a “massive multi-agency, anti-drug raid” in “The Badlands” (so called because of the area’s […]
When mayor Hazen S. Pingree (1840-1901) began his term, he did not plan to make Detroit a garden city. An influential reformer on many fronts, he became a major proponent of vacant lot cultivation during the economic crisis of 1893, which left him searching for solutions to help unemployed laborers in the city, many of […]
In the summer of 1902, the land that would become New York City’s DeWitt Clinton Park, just a few blocks from Central Park, was described as a place so run-down that even “The most vivid imagination could not have conceived a more desolate spot than this…Approached form the east, through filthy streets…it loomed up a […]