Book review: Tiny Gardens Everywhere outlines three centuries of urban gardens

In 2022, the community garden I volunteered for in the Frog Hollow section of Hartford was asked to abandon the veggie beds that had been tended by generations of Hartford kids for almost 20 years. The non-profit community development organization that held the deed after the last owner passed finally decided to build new owner-occupied two-family buildings, their stock in trade after buying up many derelict properties in the 1990s.

I remember the blazing, steamy-hot growing seasons I worked there, getting to know neighbors on the street, negotiating with the fire department to deliver water to our tank, carefully picking up needles, tires, and empty nipper bottles, the flotsam of the nightlife in a tough part of town. 

We freely gave away our fresh produce, children’s books, and shelf-stable foods. The wider neighborhood has several small grocery stores within walking distance, but many residents were disabled, and most were constantly short on cash. We didn’t offer a life-changing amount of fresh veggies, but we tried to fit into the gaps and make things at least a little bit better.

Connecticut as a whole is one of the wealthiest states in the US, and yet suffers the highest hunger rates in the New England region. Food insecurity in Connecticut has grown by 40% since 2020, to be in line with the national average. Meanwhile, one hydroponics entrepreneur told me that by his estimate, Connecticut grows only about 3% of the food we eat. 

It’s hard to argue against adding four new homes in a neighborhood severely impacted by poverty and all its attendant symptoms. But the way our scrappy, hardworking group was dismissed, instead of incorporated into the project, and left with nowhere to even store our tools, stung nevertheless, and reinforced our wariness of working with the ecosystem of “community development” organizations that operate throughout the city.

What transformation might have taken place with arms-length support from the deep pocketed non-profits, so that residents could grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers right outside their door? 

Tiny Gardens Everywhere is out today from Norton, and may I tell you: I devoured it in about 12 hours, experienced a roller coaster of emotions, learned so much, and feel so hopeful right now.

As an environmental historian and a gardener herself, Kate Brown has woven together a dense map of histories, reportage, and memoir that is thought-provoking and pleasant to read. And, I think, it is quietly subversive.

While Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass connected Western science to indigenous ways of being on earth, and Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black brought forward the Black agricultural traditions of the US to call for land tenure and food sovereignty, ultimately neither of these books can successfully bring white people back into relationship with the earth - as much as they continue to appeal to a white audience.

The entire project of whiteness holds people at a distance from the rest of non-human nature here in North America. Brown points out that European immigrants to this continent were scrappy but dedicated in finding ways to grow produce close to home in unfamiliar new cities and in rural kitchen gardens– until specific ethnic identities were flattened into whiteness, and the linking of turf lawns with upward mobility made subsistence gardening grubby and shameful. 

Popular books like Braiding Sweetgrass can be understood on a surface level, can be inspiring and spiritually mollifying, but cannot actually bring white people back into relationship with land and water because we’ve been stripped of place-based identity. Whiteness, capitalism, patriarchy, all the hierarchies, require us to hold ourselves above and separate from the rest of the planet and each other.

In addition to a detailed and awe-inspiring history of autonomous Deanwood and Marshall Heights in Washington, DC, Tiny Gardens Everywhere shows us a very recent, Western European history of subsistence and land praxis– specifically of urban food sovereignty. 

The history of cooperative gardening on small lots is not a recent response to postwar industrial agriculture - it’s an almost continuous tradition around Europe for several hundred years, with even earlier ties to feudal village life and ancient civilizations as well.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere shows that settlements designed around biodiverse food production are not solely the province of indigenous cultures, self-empowered Black communities, nor right-wing, isolationist homesteaders. Brown emphasizes that small-space, city gardening relies on communal mutual aid and closed loops of composting and repurposed building materials. Unlike suburban landscaping and hobby gardening, resources and labor are relational, shared, and efficient.

While Tiny Gardens Everywhere is not militant, nor is it even a how-to guide, it shows us that we can rebalance our role in nature in the heart of dense suburbs and cities while nourishing ourselves, regenerating soils, and building community. As such, it’s an important read in this era of food price inflation, mass layoffs, housing precarity, and climate risk denial. 

And if you're into tiny gardens, I'm writing a book about front yard gardens on small lots - the teaser e-book is free for you to download here.