pic by Rick Gush
This garden , wedge between a route and a 15 - foot bead , has been in Maria ’s family for generations .
Maria tends an 8 - foot - wide by 50 - yard - long strip that is wedged between the independent route and a 15 - ft drop . The garden is always tidy and full of sizable - look plants . I ’ve been driving past it for 10 years now and ultimately decided I had to stop and shoot the breeze with the proprietor .
Maria told me that the garden has been work by her kinfolk for many generations , which mean that this piddling strip of a garden has witnessed a outstanding deal of story and undoubtedly experienced a whole wad of poaching from passing soldier . Maria ’s garden runs justly alongside the road called Via Aurelia , which is the north - south route that the Romans establish . Armies have been butt on up and down this road since before Hannibal brought his elephants here , and everybody from Napoleon to the Holy Roman Emperors and the Normans to the Nazis have used this road as the main thoroughfare lead to southerly Italy .
When people think of a veggie garden , the paradigm that first comes to thinker is a nice , full-grown , flat area with rows and rows of vegetable flora . But in truth , a whole lot of horticulture is accomplished in other types of spaces . Little recess , petite residential district garden plots , pot on terrace and narrow urban strip probably make up as much as half of the garden locations around the man . mass garden where they can , not where they wish they could .
I ’ve always mat up pleasure in seeing the many ways in which gardener have conform non - optimum spaces for polish . I recall my shock at seeing Thomas Jefferson ’s vegetable garden in Virginia — 50 yards all-encompassing and 1,000 yards long . It was almost too secure ! Any fool could grow a garden there .
On the other hand , one of the most telling gardens I ’ve ever seen was an abandoned mickle behind a tyre service department in Chicago , where a mathematical group of dispossessed people was growing a few zucchini and beans . Here in Liguria , Italy , I ’ve even seen a few gardens that are 4 feet satisfying and correct on the border of a cliff that drops 200 feet into the ocean . I do like all the vegetable that we get from our own garden , but I ’m most proud of the improbableness of the steep cliff website .
To have wrestle a wonderfully blooming garden from that uncongenial clump of rock-and-roll was an routine of horticultural machismo , and I ’m just dorky enough to appreciate that fact .
I ’d love to see your gardens . Please unite me on theUrban Farmforum , where you’re able to send your garden photos !
