Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.

1147402784
Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.

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Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

by Kate Brown
Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

by Kate Brown

Hardcover

$31.99 
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Overview

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781324105831
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 02/17/2026
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Kate Brown is Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at MIT and author of four previous prize-winning books, including A Manual for Survival, an NBCC Award finalist. She currently plants her gardens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.
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