Brown believes that a return to small-scale gardening, where town and city dwellers grow their own food on whatever patches of land they can, would be a tonic for community cohesion.

Do not be misled by the title. This book is neither a history of small city gardens, nor of the plants that survive in cities – its author, Kate Brown, is an American academic, and so uses the word “gardens” in its transatlantic rather than Edenic sense, as practical places where people grow food. As an environmental historian, her interest is in how backyard vegetable beds, allotments, dachas, com munity farms and the like have supported underprivileged communities in Europe, the US and Soviet Russia over the past two centuries or so.

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