Tiny Gardens Everywhere

In the heart of bustling European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant corner of resilience, ingenuity and magic: our gardens.

From pre-industrial England to modern-day Ohio, via the Paris Commune, Barackia in pre-war Berlin, Soviet allotments in Estonia, the orchards tended by Black migrants in Washington and food forests in contemporary Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other and with nature, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Over the past three hundred years, these tiny gardens, often born from necessity and shaped by precarity, immigration and environmental crisis, have thrived by recycling nutrients, remedying contaminated soil and transforming how we think about our relationship to the earth.

Tiny Gardens Everywhere is a hymn to the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history, showing that it occurred not on farms – the product of gigantic exertions of fossil fuels and technology – but with little effort in small garden beds. And the resourcefulness, intuition and inherited methods of their growers accomplished many of today’s sustainability goals by producing local, diverse and organic food.

Acclaimed historian Kate Brown unearths the long and battered story of gardeners and their gardens, asking what happens when these urban Edens are not seen as retreats from the city but become part of its social fabric, alive with histories of displacement, conflict and resistance. This is a book about land, but also about community, repair and the quiet revolutions that begin when someone plants a seed in unloved ground.