cover image A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners

A Patch of Eden: America's Inner-City Gardeners

H. Patricia Hynes. Chelsea Green Publishing Company, $18.95 (185pp) ISBN 978-0-930031-80-0

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. (June)