A regular feature on the Saturday Projo Commentary page is Scott Turner's column. He has been writing about nature for Projo for a while now, and I look forward to each column. It's good to see the world through his eyes.
September 6, the theme was "Lessons from field and street," a comparison of how he spent his summers in 1968 and in 2008 ~ the former in the Bronx in that incendiary summer, the latter in tranquil New Hampshire. It is sobering to think of what children in our cities experience ~ and don't experience. If you've seen any of the HBO series, The Wire, or if you drive around parts of Rhode Island's urban landscape, you have some idea of the Bronx in 1968 ~ its bleakness, hopelessness, and death ~ hardly a plant in sight ~ not even weeds. Another recent commentary, "Fragrance, Friendship, and Fast Living," June 21, 2008 also described an event from his childhood ~ how a friend excitedly introduced him to what might as well have been a different planet:
MY BEST FRIEND, Jamie, with the long eyelashes and thick brown hair, led me on a 20-block walk along teeming, tree-less, four-lane Fordham Road in the Bronx. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but I trusted Jamie enough to let him surprise me. “You gotta see what I found,” he said.
That late June morning in 1968 was bright and sunny as we slipped our bony, soon-to-be-10-year-old bodies through two bent wrought-iron bars on Southern Boulevard, sneaking into the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG)....
Take a look at Scott's commentaries, especially this one about NYBG and find out how their adventure turned out. You can find very recent ones on Projo through their search function [search on "Scott Turner"], or try Google ~ this search turned up a lot of Turner's columns:
Providence is indeed fortunate that more than 25 years ago, some folks decided there should be a land trust here that encouraged urban agriculture. Clifford Street in Providence now looks very different from The Wire's streets. I learned recently that the site of City Farm was once a chop shop for processing stolen cars. Now it looks like this:
Southside Community Land Trust has been running afterschool Youth Garden Club programs at two Providence elementary schools for four years now, in addition to other programs and their hundreds of community garden plots. City Farm has open houses through October on Thursdays around 6pm, and out at Urban Edge Farm in Cranston on Saturday, September 13, 2008, it's the very fun fund raiser for SCLT, the annual hoedown. 
The current newsletter describes the Youth Garden Clubs, and the website has the hoedown info, as does What Grows On in Rhode Island ~ Rhode Island's most comprehensive environmental calendar. SCLT is working on acquiring more land for urban gardens to meet the needs of their long waiting list for plots. For the land and for the garden clubs they can use all the funds they can get. The fields are now surrounded by Providence streets. Kids today, all kids, who are just like Jamie and Scott, ought to grow up in gardens.
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