While sightseeing in Manhattan last week we accidentally discovered a cure for going crazy while stuck in traffic there- counting greenhouses, window boxes, or other evidences of apartment gardening in high rise buildings. Try it sometime! I guarantee you you will be surprised to see how many people living in apartments are cultivating a green thumb.
Our window box/balcony garden counting adventure began after a leisurely morning working up an appetite cruising Henry Hudson Parkway. We stopped for lunch on 73rd street. Brenda went off to the Red Fort Tandoori on 74th and I went to the famous Finnegan’s Wake Restaurant and to a creative bakery across the street for a very traditional Irish desert of a chocolate scone. Thus well fed, we headed uptown thinking we were going to conquer the East Side, but suddenly we found ourselves snarled in endless traffic. It was while stuck at 1st and 96th that we started noticing how many urban gardeners live in that area, and after that whenever we found ourselves stationary we passed the time counting window boxes on balconies in whatever area we were in.
It is very humbling always to visit any great city and to witness the miracle of human harmony that it represents. However I think that land use planners have made it unnecessarily difficult for city inhabitants to enjoy gardening as a social networking activity, and thereby miss out on an opportunity to diminish social unrest and urban ennui.
Home Grown Food Network is striving to ensure that access to an urban garden for everyone is provided for in future. Seeing how interested even high rise apartment dwellers in New York, one of the most densely populated cities on earth, have in growing flowers and food, there might be a lot of support for it.
Peter Naughton, Manager, Home Grown Food Network
Filed under: Flower Power 2009, Partnering with Nature, Renewal, YAWNS
