Kate Brown’s ‘Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A History of Urban Resilience’ — our March Book of the Month — argues the case for making gardeners of all of us, writes Tallulah Brennan.
In 2021, the University of Sussex published their pilot study into urban food production across Brighton and Hove. In a season, growers were able to harvest 1kg of insect-pollinated fruit and veg per square metre. With very limited use of pesticides, they were each growing an average of £550 worth of produce between March and October. I was living in the city when I read this study, on a waiting list, like so many others, and feeling trapped. These allotments were largely invisible to me, since I wasn’t a tenant on one, and my day-to-day life kept me from green space, and in the slog of the city’s hospitality industry. There I was, each afternoon and evening, serving plates of food shipped from many miles away, alienated in every way from the agricultural powerhouses which surrounded me via slices of allotment land and green space. An allotment holds promise — it is a solution which is already here. A solution not only to a broken food system, but to broken, lonely, and alienated people too.
It is hard to imagine that such a city as this could double up not only as a system of food production, but a place where people can feel intimately connected to the land — and yet it is a story which Tiny Gardens Everywhere shows can be found in human centres across the world. No city has any reason to be lacking these gardens, in fact. In a world of depleted soils, the possibilities of urban space are not only logical, but urgent. The examples are abundant — in Russia, small-hold gardeners grew 91.9% of the country’s potatoes, and gardens were a defence against the worst of the post-Soviet famine — gardeners’ share of agricultural production doubled in the 1990s from 26% to 52%, whilst only occupying 1.5% of arable land. In Paris, in 1900, farmers cultivated 2,100 acres and 300 kilometers of fruit walls. When an American agronomist calculated the efficiency of these urban farms, he found the yields were beyond what could have been imagined — this Marais system of food production appeared to be ‘one of the most productive ever documented.’
The utility of a garden goes well beyond yield though. In my soon-to-be-published subscriber interview with Kate, we discussed urban gardens as a health measure, for example — researchers find that people change their diets when they grow gardens, eating more fruits, nuts, and vegetables, not to mention that food grown in organic soils can have 25% more nutrients than from industrial farming. People tend to waste less when they know where their food comes from, and in turn, share it. This is also partly a solution to the cost of living crisis — allotments allow one to be self-sufficient to some degree, a quality which also comes in handy in negotiating for better pay and working conditions. The multitude of examples in the book show that a garden is an act of communion with other species too, turning cities into multi-species ventures, instead of grey, concrete, lonely spaces. All that aside, the potential tiny gardens hold for transforming our mental health, and thus our ability to be in community, is perhaps the most pressing argument of all.
In the UK, all of this knowledge can be met with the story of loss. Since their peak in the 1950s, there’s been a 65% decrease in allotment land across Britain, and there is a huge disparity to be found amongst this wholesale of land. In Surrey, you will wait 6 years for an allotment. In Islington, the wait is 15 years. Bristol has the longest waiting list, with Sunderland, Portsmouth, Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester following behind. The vast majority of us live in cities, and the vast majority of those who long for tiny gardens to grow, are mere names on a local council document. The facts are startling and waiting lists are as disenchanting as they are disempowering. And this problem isn’t going away; since Labour took office in 2024, the government has approved the sale of eight more allotment sites to help fund new housing. So, what now?
Between the Westway and the shadow of Grenfell Tower, you can find what is now the Grenfell Garden of Peace, or the Hope Garden. Tayshan Hayden-Smith started planting it here after the fire, searching for a way to cope with its impact on the surrounding community. This has led to ‘Grow2Know’, a campaign to close the green gap, and work towards equality of access. The gardening that happens here has paved the way for many further conversations around greening London, and a garden named after the Mangrove Nine going on display at the Chelsea Gardens Show, in the same borough the tower once stood.
“I felt so at home in the garden, but so out of place” says Hayden Smith, never imagining before that horticulture would be in his vocabulary. As the success of the garden grew, Hayden-Smith was given a role at the Royal Horticultural Society, which he has since left, frustrated with the institution’s unwillingness to change. The garden, meanwhile, prevails; a testament to the caring power of grassroots gardening. In the process of growing, we remake ourselves, and according to different rules to those which have been set for us. Our bodies, the material reality of their needs, often feel like the last priority in planned space. When we are allotted space, it is planned, as Kate tells me in our interview, according to the smallest allowances that can be made. This kind of logic can’t help but to leak into housing too — Grenfell Tower being the most obvious and violent embodiment of state neglect. This green space in its spectre, however, exemplifies the power of guerilla gardening — space has to be taken, claimed. It is in gardens that people not only get to ‘retain the ability to imagine themselves not as others would have them, but as they want to be’, but cities too are reimagined, are made into spaces not sterile, but teeming with life.
There is an understanding now, amongst scientists, that having our hands in the soil is transformative; people whose lives (and whose living conditions) revolve around a garden, share so much in common that they experience a greater social intimacy. In the book, we meet the residents East of the River in Washington DC, who took advantage of unpaved streets and free-flowing streams above ground to grow fruit trees and set up an alternative city infrastructure: guided by caring gestures, which respond to a different impulse to the profit motive, or to the destructive economy. In memory after memory, residents East of the River spoke of the strength of their community and how much it gave them: ‘Their communities were biological as well as social; the bonds they built cultured a rich brew of connections and collectives that saw people through tough times.’
At the end of Tiny Gardens Everywhere, we visit Almere, a Dutch city home to a large migrant population. In a community greenhouse there, Brown finds a ‘botanical globalism’ — Dutch cabbages and potatoes grew next to peppers and tropical greens. By the pear trees sprouted Suraminese mangoes. ‘Onze’, the name of this community garden, means ‘ours’ in Dutch. Indeed, in the deep belly of the beast, Berlin’s arbor colonies did not fly the swastika, they flew the green flag of the association. In a world which actively encourages division, and instills in us the belief that we are atomised individuals, set quite apart as though we are not always colliding, growing a garden together is a conciliatory, neighbourly endeavour. A plant is not a mere object, a piece of furniture, but an intrinsically connective thing, and a garden full of them holds up a mirror image of ourselves. Suddenly, you need a whole community to come together to tend to what is growing, and in turn to make something out of what is grown. Plants are needy, much like us. They require time and attention, and we know ours needs re-directing — perhaps most of all back to each other. Each of the gardeners we meet in the book — prisoners; migrants; the middle-class: the ordinary in every way — have, through their gardens, put new life in places devoid of it.
Tiny Gardens… takes us from Berlin, to Paris, to Alabama, to Estonia, to find that the story is just the same. In turn, in London, under the Westway, the story repeats. Truthfully in fact, the resonances run so far and wide that it feels at times intimidating. Gardens sandwiched between fossil fuels in the sky and fossil fuels in the soil, gardens resisted and razed to the ground. Gardens robbed from people, and people robbed from their gardens. And yet, if repression has a precedent, the fight against it does too. What is there to lose? Perhaps we can, for example, follow Tallinn, Estonia’s green city’s example: the green belts surrounding Tallinn airport might provide an instruction. The new airport runways we will have to look in the eye in the coming years, can be guerrilla gardened and turned into ‘thick, green, edible corridors’. It simply takes some duality — a resilient world cannot contain these anti-life monuments in the future, but whilst they do exist, the task is to bombard them with the most life-giving monuments we can build, gardens however small or mighty as necessary.
If plants are, as landscape architects Thomas Rainer and Claudia West have it, to be the centre of our next renaissance of human culture, then we have a huge, but necessary and worthy, task ahead. ‘Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political and economic liberty, emanates from the minority’, reads the mosaic exhibited at the Grenfell Hope Garden. The point, then, is to take what is now a mission of the minority — the hands reaching for prohibited soil, the guerrilla gardeners in a city built according to rules and the cordoning off of public space — and turn it into a mission in which the majority have a stake. In other words, to get the majority’s hands dirty, to make gardeners out of each and every one of us.
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Kate Brown’s ‘Tiny Gardens Everywhere: A History of Urban Resilience’ is out now and available here (£20.90), published by The Bodley Head.
Tallulah Brennan is a writer based in the North of England, interested in the relationships between humans and their environment, and how they in turn shape each other. She is also a contributing editor at Caught by the River. Follow Tallulah’s Substack here.