I have been working on this series of photographs depicting a wide variety of community-based urban gardening projects around the world since 2005.  My interest in these gardens is quite varied…

One goal of this project is straightforward: to document gardening cultures across the globe. Thus far travels have taken my camera and me to numerous sites.  These include community gardens across the United States, Cuba’s cooperative organopónicos, Mongolia’s new ‘tsetserlegs’, zahrádkářské colonies of the Czech Republic, and fringe agriculture or shimin noen in Japan.

These gardens are normally quite different from landscaped parks or farms.  The gardens range from the completely utilitarian to the entirely aesthetic.  These gardens clearly fulfill a variety of functions for their cultivators and their presumed uses are as diverse as the environments and cultures that they are grown within.  Some have the straightforward goal of providing the only fresh produce that a family will eat each year.  Others gardens are more whimsical and serve a different function as private refuges of green in the city or more communal meeting places.

Recent environmental movements and political situations have popularized some of the gardening movements I have photographed while other gardens are tied to other historic eras.  These environmental movements are important in the face of globalization, but I also hope that my photographs might serve to shed light on the deep historical human connection to cultivating the land and human nature.  In the gardens, master gardens familiar with the world’s gardening traditions and naïve city-dwellers work the land side-by-side.

The sites I have chosen to photograph portray horticulture and gardening at an intimate scale, a patch of earth that one man can cultivate without the aid of machines.  Through this series of photographs, I hope to weave together these tiny gardens in the face of the challenges of globalization. I have found that many stark contrasts exist in these sites. The gardens illustrate our need to intimately care for and understand these personal spaces while striving for a more integrated and sustainable global community.  To “act locally but think globally.”

Through these photographs, I strive to relate the spaces of these gardens to the world beyond the garden’s fence and my photograph’s framing.  I hope to depict a world where the natural and the civilized are not thought of as mutually exclusive dichotomies, but as ideas and places that can sustainably coexist.