New York’s community garden movement began during the 1970s. It was a difficult era, when the city’s population was declining and many city-owned lots were trash-filled, rat-infested eyesores. Erica Packard is with the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, which raise money to buy urban green space and transfer ownership into community hands. The city offered to give the lots to organized groups in exchange for improving and maintaining them.

"Those neighborhoods were, and still are, least served by the existing parks system," says Packard. "So they provide some of the only open accessible green space, particularly for seniors and children in low income neighborhoods."

A milestone in the movement was the creation of Operation GreenThumb. It’s a program within the city’s Department of Parks that offers free gardening classes and light equipment like shovels and rakes. Still, in leaner times, many communities have had to fight to keep control of their gardens when the city wanted to auction the plots to tax-paying real estate developers. Some green spaces have been lost this way because people couldn’t maintain them properly.

Community garden organizer Catherine Wint, of the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, says that because gardens are governed by grassroots volunteers with diverse interests, keeping them going is an exercise in democracy.

Alexandra Patz gardens with her son, Douglas.

"It’s different than a park because individuals in a community garden have to have a relationship and they have to work democratically," says Wint. "And they have to come up with procedures to enable them to share this very small space in a way that’s going to benefit everyone."