Rhubarb on the Roundabout

There are those who will always garden- for food, for pleasure, for the feeling of productivity, for health and exercise, for nutrition, for love of the outdoors. There are thousands of reasons why people find a relationship with plants important.

It is also true that some people need gardens and seek them out wherever they are, while others do not feel that pull.

City-dwellers are not fundamentally different from those who live in less populated areas, in that they too want healthy food and a chance to spend time outdoors in lush, green spaces.

Cities draw people for many reasons- be it potential for financial success, access to knowledge, art, literature, other human beings, a desire for a close community with little need for transportation, the list goes on and on.

On May 23, 2007 for the first time in human history, the world population became more urban than rural. That is, more people live in cities and towns than in less inhabited areas. Between now and 2030 nearly all population growth will be in urban areas of developing nations, where some cities are growing two or three times faster than the country’s overall population. This trend is equivalent to adding a city of one million residents every week (UN-HABITAT 2004).

Gardening has been in and out of style throughout history and culture. Sometimes it is integral to survival as in the gardens of the Jewish ghettos of Europe in the 1930s and 40s. Sometimes it brings simple pleasure as in the lush gardens of the Roman and Arabic cultures and before in ancient cultures.

Since the settlement of nomadic peoples into settlements and communities, cities have been inextricably connected with the crops that sustain them. Food production had to take place close to cities because transportation was slow and food was perishable. Food was grown either within or directly bordering the limits of the town. Many civilizations had complex and efficient forms of growing and transporting foods to sustain cities.

In ancient Sumer, said to be one of the first agrarian civilisations in the fertile cresent, about 90% of the population, living in cities ,were food-producing peasants working in the surrounding well irrigated fields.

Large cities are not new. More than a thousand years ago, Baghdad was home to in excess of one million people and the floating islands of Mexico city fed its population of 200,000. These were the megacities of the past. Archeologists frequently find sites with incredible earth and water works in and around ancient cities.

Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan city in what is now Peru was well known for supporting its self on terraced and irrigated fields surrounding the mountain city.

There were frequently kitchen gardens and orchards within the walls of medieval fortesses.

In Pompeii each household had its own gardens used not only for food but also as a central place for the family to socialise.

Arabs grew beautiful gardens full of fruit trees and ornamental irrigation in the form of pools and streams throughout their towns and cities, and spread these gardens to every place they moved around the Mediterranean and into Europe.

Historically, people have used urban agriculture for more than just supplying food.

Excrement and wastewater may be bad for human health, but they can be excellent for fertilising crops. In nineteenth-century Paris, gardeners found an excellent way to turn unwanted horse manure from all over the city into valuable salad greens that were available year-round. Every year they turned over one million tons of stable horse manure (the city’s transportation service) into 100,000 tons of out-of-season salad, harvested 3 to 6 times a year. So much salad was produced that every person in paris could have eaten 50kg per year. The production was biggest in the last third of the 1800’s. Today there is a Marais district, but the name is all that is left of the expansive market gardens that covered a sixth of the city.

War gardens played an important role in the nation-wide effort in both the two world wars. These victory gardens made gardening a patriot activity and introduced gardening as an activity for everyone, not just those too poor to buy their own food.

Later, in the late 1960s and 1970s, community gardening started to make a comeback as a hobby. Organic gardening and community farms became popular and many cities around the country started community garden schemes for their residents. Not only were urban gardens important for food, but also to bring pleasure and and create a community space in the community.Urban allotments have also sprung up in many urban and metropolitan areas.

Urban agriculture can be done in a wide variety of places: vacant sites, back yards, rooftops, window containers, city parks, roadside verges, steep slopes, river banks,beneath high tension lines, beside railway lines , in schoolyards, hospitals, at the boundary of cities, even underground or up the sides of buildings.

So what are you waiting for. Get Digging.

(Source; Gratefully acknowledged- Sprouts in The Sidewalk Blog 2008)