The gardeners of these "patches of Eden" include children and elders, immigrants, and "low-income and no-income people." And their gardens are overflowing with healthy food and beautiful flowers -- dramatic evidence of an entirely new kind of ecological devotion, one expressed not in expeditions to the wilderness but in the transformation of blighted lots into green sanctuaries. A Patch of Eden celebrates the achievements of the inner-city gardeners, relating in detail the stories of community gardens in Harlem, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
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Amazon.com Review
This is the delightful story of the resurgence in urban community gardening, describing the rehabilitation of jail inmates through raising organic vegetables, teaching inner city youngsters where food comes from, and laying out an inspirational plan to help all of us world-worn urbanites get involved once again in raising delicious food in the midst of our paved-over, formerly bleak, urban landscapes. This is about making the World a Better Place, about getting our fingers in the dirt, touching our planet with loving hands, and creating a vision of hope for our cities and our children.
From Publishers Weekly
Hynes, an environmental engineer who teaches at Boston University, became interested in urban gardens during a slide show on the subject in 1992. For her, these were not transplanted suburban flower plots but "cities reimagined and rehabilitated, lot by lot in some cases, block by block in others." She began to interview the people (women mostly) behind the Greening of Harlem Coalition, San Francisco Horticulture and Garden Projects, numerous Philadelphia community gardens, Chicago's Cabrini Greens and Inner-City-Horticulture Foundation. Plantings range from trees, to flowers to designer vegetables bought by restaurants like Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. The gardeners are 3-5-year-olds from a shelter, inmates, children from projects and deterimined reform-minded adults. Hynes's text, with well-integrated material from interviewees, is smart, inspiring, sympathetic but never sappy. There's plenty of history and practical detail about how gardens are planted, maintained (gang members are one problem, environmental degradation, another) and funded. What is it about these gardens? It's two things: as one woman says "you're not hanging out on a corner where you could be shot" when you're gardening. But it is also about bringing nature to populations for whom it is alien: "Where do you get the milk from?" Philadelphia reformer Rachel Bagby, founder of Philadelphia Community Rehabilitation Corporation, asked a child. "'I get it from the store.' R.B.: 'Where does the store get it?' Child: 'I think they get it from the truck.'" As one San Francisco inmate said of working on gardens, "I learn respect for life." Illustrations.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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