Cambridge Massachusetts’s green thumbs spotlight local community gardens
Book: A two-year endeavor documents city’s urban islands of green
By William J. Dowd
Wicked Local
Apr 6, 2022
Excerpt:
Members of the Cambridge Plant and Garden Club have published a 72-page booklet, shining a spotlight on the city’s 14 community gardens.
“Cambridge Community Gardens Today” dedicates four pages to each community garden, supplying readers with photographs, short histories, profiles, an idea of what’s grown in each, among other factoids about these oases across the city.
“We just wanted to do this to raise awareness among residents that we have these beautiful gardens,” said Marty Mauzy, co-chair of the club’s Community Gardens Project. “They’re totally managed and organized by the community around them.”
The two-year endeavor fulfills the Cambridge Plant and Garden Club’s mission of increasing “knowledge of and to stimulate interest in all elements of horticulture, botany, and design and to support conservation and community improvement in the urban setting of Cambridge.”
Urban community gardens are one way that residents beautify their neighborhoods, improve access to fresh produce, increase biodiversity, swap ideas, forge fellowship – but their historical roots are steeped in utility.
“In the 1970s, spurred on by the common need of its diverse population and the community power movement of the 1960s, the Cambridge Community Garden Program we know today began to take shape,” reads the club’s book. “The 1970s were a heyday of the community gardens movement.”
