By Vikki Warner

Federal Hill
Providence, Rhode Island

The city garden is a reclaiming of dirt, restoring a piece of the urban landscape not easily salvaged. City ground is used to being treated like shit, with all the paving, parking and dumping people do daily. People become haggard and disheartened when they're treated "like dirt," and the ground, too, bears the scars of callous mistreatment. We only hope that with proper therapy and a caring hand, we can bring them both back around. That's my goal for my own little plot of land: to restore its character and productivity, to stop the crisis.

My plan was to cultivate a little urban ground in Providence, an old industrial city where the detritus of manufacturing companies that have deserted or disbanded streaks the streets. Empty lots and burned-out houses betray the "Renaissance City" nickname our leaders have given it. The further one strays from its well-manicured downtown, the more desolately beautiful the city becomes. Mills, dilapidated houses, warehouses, and low cement buildings blend timeframes and cultures. And within minutes of city limits, nature rules again; the rivers run and the trees are tall.

A mile or so from downtown Providence, every house—including mine—is surrounded by old concrete. My backyard is a scrap of land, lined with chain-link fencing, overlooking parking lots and triple-deckers. When I bought my house—a three-family with enough room for a bunch of live-in friends—the yard was covered with shards of glass and overgrown with weeds. The entire pantheon of snack food packaging was represented among the litter caught in the fence and between the weeds. Hundreds of little plastic crack bags were ground into the dirt. I took in the whole scene with disbelief, wondering how it got this way, wondering if it could be salvaged. I imagined toxins loitering in the sandy soil, festering, conspiring. I wanted to grow food, but the dirt seemed barren and tainted—I couldn't imagine eating anything that came out of it.

My "yard"—and it's so small you'd barely call it that—wants to produce. It ekes out parasitic trees, enormous weeds, and a lovely little grove of tiger lilies, on its own. With a reasonable amount of care, it's easily persuaded to bust out perennials, vegetables, herbs. Litter blows in from the surrounding lots, and the glass still bubbles up when it rains, but the yard is ours and we use it daily, smoking midnight cigarettes surrounded by greenery, or yapping around the fire pit. The vegetable beds are now fenced in from the rats, and we have a well-tended compost area. In the early mornings, I often wake to find my housemate, John, watering, weeding and tending the plants, his dog following close behind. Some moments, it seems idyllic in this urban sprawl.

Starting a garden is beautiful and idealistic, the sort of thing you get excited about but easily overwhelmed by. I was sure the forces of the grand old earth would work against me, withering away anything I managed to coax out of the ground. My first year there was mostly taken up with clearing out the sludge—and tenacious chunks of glass and metal. It was like they were rising out of the earth every time it rained. By the time fall rolled around, the yard turned to mud again and I had to wait for spring before I could make any more progress.

The next year, I had a better plan. With the help of some landscaper friends, my housemates and I planted perennials, plants that survive indefinitely over a period of time—sedum, butterfly bushes, fothergilla, switchgrass, St. John's Wort, self-heal, meadow rue—and a few arborvitae trees. Then it got hot, and even with plenty of watering, the trees turned crispy and died. This year, my fourth in the house, we seem to have worked out the kinks. The perennials keep coming back, growing so big they're crowding each other out, and we've started a backyard plot with raised beds, where the fennel, berries, kale, and onions are popping out. They taste good, and nobody's sick from eating them, despite this plot’s checkered history. It’s exciting, like I’m learning a new language.

I venture out to see what other people in my city are doing with their slices of cement and wire. The desolation of this city can be overwhelming: the dirty vinyl siding, the wind whipping garbage through the streets, and the omnipresence of concrete. I'm not naïve. I know that city gardening is not all about beauty: the Italian guy next door to me plants tomatoes in faded buckets, originally filled with powdered laundry detergent. He's got a rusty old arbor and shares his Concord grape harvest with us. He doesn't bother with grass; he's packing a huge amount of growing into a concrete lot the size of a shed. The realities of urban living often create resourcefulness in more ways than one.

People live through their gardens as well; they consciously and creatively tailor their little land fragments, refining them year after year, to provide beautiful, useful slices of green space. Urban gardeners are happy when you get them to talk about their gardens or walk you through. They know the names of every plant, can tell you why they planted it where they did and how it’s done from year to year. This is pride. It's making something that can show you who you are.

There's community, too: the Italian guy and I don't say much to each other (he speaks only a little English), but he admires our garden, we admire his and he offers us seedlings and tomatoes, handing them over the fence. We've got a nice thing going.

Within a couple of streets of my house, there are some bigger operations. There's a small greenhouse tended by some local farmers who make their living selling vegetables at the farmers' markets and to restaurants. There's also a larger garden, a community garden as far as I can tell, set back a bit from the street, fenced in and well cared for. And there are other tiny gardens like my own—spaces resourcefully wedged in between parking spots, in buckets, and in window boxes.

There's another peculiarly rebellious lot garden in a barren location, between a shopping/restaurant district and the highway. It's well-organized, and fashioned entirely out of recycled materials: branches gathered from the woods, an old door, a bunch of dented metal poles. I'm trying to figure out who's tending it. It’s been screened out from nosy passers-by—opaque plastic slats woven into the chain-link fence—and I have to crane my neck and position myself just right to look between the slats. I idly wonder why I care about it so much, why I bother to observe it this way, and suddenly I'm smacked with a realization: I'm fascinated when I see someone doing something improbable. These are people who don't care about the odds of success, who don't care that nobody else in their neighborhood knows the difference between a calla lily and a calabaza. So what if the soil's questionable, and the rats might get in. There are no awards, no high profiles, no status points for turning your dirt lot into a garden. Just the satisfaction of having resuscitated "dead" land, of putting effort in and getting substance out, that's your reward. In the city, farming's focus isn't taming the wilderness; it's wrestling with humanity's trash and toxins.

This activity, this creation of something out of nothing, is not unlike making art, or music. It's hard work with a satisfying result—it is primal. It calls on a person to participate, and they may not always know why. It is compelling, addictive, and even euphoric. We rescue dirt, and it rescues us in return.