I live in a small city in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. We are lucky enough to have an enormous public park with baseball diamonds, a football field, basketball and tennis courts, a skate park, three dog parks, picnic areas, ponds (stocked), and…
As long as I can remember, my mother, Shirley, has planted the same vegetable garden plot and separate flower beds in the backyard of the house she and my father, Bill, have lived in since 1969 in Mason City, Iowa. Planting, growing, and harvesting…
Today our grandkids might think planting vegetables in a cemetery smacks of the gothic and macabre and perhaps such a garden hints at vestiges of the Addams Family somewhere in our genealogy tree. But they need to examine the circumstances and the…
The Ancestral Roots Community Garden is in Chattanooga’s Menlo Park Neighborhood. The garden plantings and design are inspired by traditional Southern African American yards and home gardens. Greens, beans, okra, muscadine, herbs, corn, watermelons…
The urban campus of American University in Washington, DC is known for its green spaces. Its grounds serve as an arboretum, caring for nearly 400 different species and varieties of woody plants. During this Spring’s Campus Beautification Day, a new…
Last year I said goodbye to my gardening hero. Back in the day, sometime in the early 70s, my Dad became a foot soldier in the Crockett's Victory Garden brigade, eager to try this whole new “organic gardening” thing, upend the typical grass-dominated…
The Bradley and Leila Barnes Grounds & Victorian Gardens are part of the historic Barnes Museum Homestead. Located in the heart of downtown Southington, Connecticut, the property was purchased in 1836 by Bradley Barnes’ grandparents, Amon and…
I’ve sometimes wondered about the importance of space in one’s life. For me, my home filled with family photos, colorful art works, plants, and books is the place that provides comfort and peace and is the space I can always count on. Bridge Gardens,…
Some of my earliest memories involve strawberries and corn. While I know that the garden of my youth had more than that, those plants stand out vividly. I remember the tall stalks of corn in two straight rows along one end of a rectangular garden.…
A wet Saturday morning dawned for the May “Saturdays in the Garden” lecture recently. “The Garden” in the lecture title is Loudoun’s Extension Master Gardener Demonstration Garden at Ida Lee Park and Recreation Center. In this space, our volunteer…
The Garden Path ~ Green, Growing, and Blooming Project emerged as a tangible remembered connection and, consequently, a pathway to engagement following my mother’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, thereby, enlarging her narrowing view of her world. She had…
I am Dolores Isom Olds. I was born in 1929 and grew up in Hurricane, Utah. My parents were Eugenia Walker McAllister and Thomas Irving Isom. My Dad was a farmer and mainly grew fruit trees. He and his three brothers each had an orchard. Uncle Leslie…
My mother was born in rural West Virginia in 1917 and was a young girl when the Great Depression hit. In order to feed their family of eight children, her family grew an abundance of fruits and vegetables. My mother married at the beginning of World…
I come from many gardens. My parents used to have a long strip of red clay in the Hickory Flats, and I remember picking peas from it in the summer, covered in sweat and bees. In fall, we would shuck an acre of corn and the cows would wait on the…
Ours is a story of how the two communities of Algonquin and Lake in the Hills came together to build vegetable gardens that feed local families in need, educate new gardeners, and provide a peaceful artistic space.
In 2012 the Algonquin Lake in the…
Before this year, I never thought I would grow my own food on a plot of land. When I was a teenager, my grandmother grew, and taught me to grow, vegetables in our backyard garden. She also canned tomatoes, peaches, apples and other fruits/vegetables,…
Come autumn, my mother starts acting like her seventy-something year-old self – that is, grouchy, itchy, and nostalgic. The season has always been an anomaly to her tropical body and soul. What was up with the brightly colored leaves? Taunting her…
In 1843, Luke Gannon and his family, immigrants from Ireland, built a log cabin in what is now Crystal Lake, Illinois. The restored cabin was moved to Union, Illinois in 1966 on the grounds of the McHenry County Historical Society. Two years ago, in…
Woodend Sanctuary is a 40 acre property in Chevy Chase, Maryland, bequeathed to and now headquarters of the Audubon Naturalist Society of the Mid-Atlantic States. The mission of the Audubon Naturalist Society is to inspire residents of the greater…
The Farm Bureau/Extension Community Garden was established in 2004 with the help of the Woodstock (Illinois) Noon Rotary, who paid for the materials to build sixteen raised beds on the property owned by the McHenry County Farm Bureau. The garden is…
Libby Area Community Garden is a grassroots project (founded by Linda Alkire), now in its fifth growing/thriving season with a membership of over seventy active members on about a quarter acre of school property in beautiful Libby, Montana. The…
Our family began gardening in 2008 and in 2016 we took it to Facebook to help other amateur gardeners. It is our passion, growing heirloom tomatoes, herbs, squash, and other vegetables. Blackberries and blueberries grow alongside the house and our…
Nestled within the thirty acres of one of the most beautiful zoos sits a small parcel of land dedicated to education, conservation and promotion of gardening at the Santa Barbara Zoo. The idea of an onsite garden had been bounced back and forth among…
This organic garden at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Arlington, Virginia was created as a Girl Scout Silver Award project by Cadette Troop 557. The garden was built over the course of a few years, with the bulk of it constructed in 2012-2013. A…
“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.” ―Vandana Shiva
If building soil health, growing organically, and sharing fresh food with our neighbors is…
Greenhouse 17 (GH17) is a forty-acre domestic violence emergency shelter and farm that has become a healing oasis to thousands of women and families since 2004. Greenhouse 17 is a Grow Appalachia success story for its innovative therapeutic farm…
Love for good food, love for the Earth we grow it in, and love for the communities we share it with, can only lead to one thing—more love. At Grow Appalachia, that love is initiated in the grants we give out to partner sites, is passed on in the…
Our Garden Retreat
We have been partners in our community garden in Longmeadow, Massachusetts for 15 years. Our love of gardening stems from our childhood. Our heritage is one of farmers—Linda’s grandparents had a farm in Monson, Massachusetts and…
I was a very little girl during the early 1940s and our country was at war. There were air raid drills and black-out curtains and black outs. People bought War Bonds to show their patriotism. I remember rationing of gasoline and sugar and other…
Gardening was an important part of my grandparents’ life on their farmstead in western Iowa where my father grew up and also where I grew up. Originally the area around the house was bare of plants but with time Grandpa Henry and Grandma Olga planted…
My father Nicola, emigrated to the United States in December 1965. He came to live with his brothers and sisters who had already established themselves in Flushing, New York. In September of 1967 he traveled back to his hometown of Mola di Bari,…
In the fall of 2012, a group of environmentally-conscious high school students in Memphis, Tennessee, gathered around an idea. We wanted a vegetable garden to grow in our public high school, White Station, one of the largest schools in the state.…
The catalpa tree in the front yard of our family farm is still living today. As far as we know our parents planted the tree.
There are six of us. Pa and Ma referred to us children as “first and second crop hay” as they had two girls and a boy (like…
Brooklyn, New York, 1948. My immigrant father, Francesco Pietanza, a merchant steward and cook from Mola di Bari, Italy arrived at Ellis Island on the S.S. Coronado in search of his younger brother. Despite the racketeering longshore waterfront and…
In the 1960s I learned everything I needed to know about gardening and cooking from one of the original organic gardeners and foodies: my grandmother. After World War II she noticed that it was hard to get good produce anymore; the peddlers who used…
We have three Community Gardens in St. Cloud, Florida. Our Girl Scout troop has rented a plot for almost a year now. We have grown organic food for our local food pantry. Our last crop was twenty-five pounds of organic carrots. We have sweet potatoes…
My parents were married in my grandparents’ backyard in Darnestown, Maryland on June 2, 1973. I grew up looking at the photos in their wedding album and obsessing over the 70’s fashion on view in their Super 8 wedding film. It was a true hippie,…
The garden at Hickory Hill, a historic site in Georgia, grew out of a desire to share the site's agricultural history with kids who visited the site on field trips and came for summer camps. We soon realized that children did not know where their…
The garden I am writing about is across the street, and two doors down, at my neighbor's house. Our garden is not in yet, so I can not write about it. It is in her front yard, at the bottom of the hill. It runs down next to their barn driveway, about…
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…
I grew up gardening with my mother. She is an avid gardener with an encyclopedic knowledge of plants. One of my favorite childhood games to play with her was to point at plants and ask "what's that?" More often than not, she would recite the common…
The Green Thumbs Garden is a contribution to the community effort to enhance downtown Newark, Ohio and its offerings. It is located on property owned by The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art, and Technology. The Green Thumbs Garden is both a…
As a child Heisi watched her father grow various vegetables in their backyard in Washington, D,C. It was then that she realized she would like to follow in her father’s footsteps and grow a garden of her own. Though her father was an expert in…
I spent a lot of time alone outdoors as a kid, and the component parts of plants were a source of deep fascination. I dismantled flowers to get to the tiniest parts and I loved anything with lots of seeds that could be collected - dandelions, tall…
Durhamites Valerie K. and her family, plus their neighbor, Jeni H., decided to take on a DIY gardening project to ensure that their family would eat more local, organic fruits and vegetables. They installed three raised garden beds, each 4 ft. x 16…
Brothers Tom and Louis have gardening in their blood. How did it get there? They have fond memories of growing up with gardens. During their childhood, it seemed that everyone in the family grew a vegetable garden and many home gardens had…
I've been thinking about my mother, as Mother's Day has just passed. And I've been thinking about the Smithsonian Gardens' new project Community of Gardens. And now the two are intersecting, as things often do in unexpected ways. My mother loved…
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.…
Sixteen teenagers. Four iPads. Two days. One summer on an urban farm in Washington, D.C. Lots of questions. Every summer Common Good City Farm welcomes a group of local teens as part of their Summer Youth Program. The teens in this employment program…
I have built a raised garden bed out of previously utilized pallets. This garden is approximately 46 square feet in surface area and raised approximately 20 inches. Currently started there are beets, radishes, bush beans, carrots, cucumbers and…
Hard to believe that my mother has been gone thirty-four years now, she was born in 1911 and seemed as though she could grow anything. She would be 103 years old this October. I was born her youngest child when she was forty-five years of age. She…
When I was a young girl, Mom had two gardens (circa 1955-1966) in a rural area near Wilmington, Illinois, one at home behind the house, and one on my grandparents' farm 1.5 miles away. I cannot believe not a single photo exists. We spent nearly the…
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…
Chewonki is a non-profit environmental education center in Wiscasset, Maine, with a semester school for high school juniors, an Outdoor Classroom program for visiting school groups, and a summer camp for boys on its 400-acre saltwater peninsula,…
In January 2014 Michelle interviewed her neighbor Kelly, a first-time beekeeper in Watertown, Massachusetts. The transcript of their conversation follows.
Michelle: Tell me a little bit about your garden?
Kelly: We have a pretty small urban…
For the past three years, Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum has been leading a collaborative Smithsonian project on Urban Waterways. The project comes out of a desire to explore the various issues facing urban communities and document the…
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…
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done…
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done…
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…
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done…
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have Done…
Founded in 1876, W. Atlee Burpee & Company grew to be the largest seed company in the world by the early twentieth century. In 1924 the company advertised a contest in its Seed Annual asking customers to write in about “What Burpee’s Seeds Have…
