First panel reads:
The garden (old time) and it’s resident fairy — “Mary, Mary, quite contrary”.

Second panel reads:
The garden (war time) and it’s fairy — “Marian, Marian, Utilitarian”. Signs in garden read Beetroot, Cabbages, Potatoes.

Cartoons by W.K. Haselden
Daily Mirror 1916
Note same message today. Landscapes move from ornamentals to food.

Photo: Staff of NTT Facilities, Junko Kariu (left) and Masahiro Nagata, check the roof-top potato farm in Tokyo, in October. Launched by two subsidiaries of Japan’s telecommunications giant NTT Corp., “Green Potato” project could help prevent overheating of Tokyo as well as harvest sweet potatoes in autumn. By TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/ AFP/

Crops planted on rooftops, underground create new jobs, lower temperatures

BY Harumi Ozawa
Agence France-Presse Nov 5, 2008

TOKYO — Tomohiro Kitazawa makes an unlikely farmer. He works neither under the sun nor in the fields, instead reporting for duty in the bustling heart of Tokyo.

As Japan’s capital city struggles with problems from food safety to global warming to unemployment, a growing number of people in the famously crowded metropolis are becoming city farmers, planting crops atop tall buildings or deep underground.

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