Beauty Between Buildings

July 18, 2011

Have you seen the movie “Dirt!” ? Last year, I drove into Portland with a few friends to the SPACE Theater to see this really cool documentary about the importance of, well, dirt. The film covered a lot of critical issues, like soil depletion and erosion, our non-sustainable food system, and the local food movement. It also covered the development of community gardens in cities, and the importance of creating these green spaces in the otherwise uninterrupted slab of concrete that cities often become.

A small garden in Brooklyn, nestled in between a busy city block.

One part of the movie that really stuck out to me was when a local environmental leader organized a project to “de-concrete” school yards, returning the asphalt playgrounds and basketball courts to the grass and soil they once were. A reporter asked something along the lines of, “But if you take away the concrete, where will the kids play?!”. What many people forget is that children and adults alike LOVE to play in dirt. I’ll never forget when my Environmental Science teacher in high school, before teaching a unit on soil, told our class to go home and dig a hole in our backyard and observe that we found. A strange homework assignment, perhaps, but it held incredible power.

I’ve had the opportunity to work in community gardens throughout New York City this summer, and it’s been a really unique and amazing way to get to know these otherwise completely developed, urbanized areas. Green spaces provide a place for people to work together, talk, sit, and enjoy where they live. As someone who is used to the mountains and forests of Maine and New Jersey, it’s certainly been a saving grace to discover that there are so many places like this right in the city.

Here are some photos of a few gardens and green spaces that I’ve come to love (along with a few shameless promotional photos of the garden I’m helping to build!). Enjoy!