Category — europe

Women Planting Pea Stakes, 1891

Camille Pissarro

Excerpt from Biography.com

Born July 10, 1830 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. Camille Pissarro was sent to Paris to study as a boy, where he earned acclaim for his budding talent as an artist. He was obligated to return to St. Thomas in 1847 to help his father run his general store, but by 1855, he had convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.

Camille Pissarro returned to Paris, where the landscapes of Camille Corot and other members of the Barbizon group made a huge impression on him at the World’s Fair. The concept of working directly from nature appealed to the young artist, and he gravitated toward landscape painting. Over the next 10 years, he studied at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Suisse, where classes were free.

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Clodagh and Dick Handscombe gardening authors living in Spain for 20 years.

Vegetables for the concrete jungle

Michelle Obama y Verónica Berlusconi convirtieron en tendencia las huertas urbanas. En Galicia ya están pegando fuerte y este mes nacerán dos asociaciones

By Alfonso Andrade
La voz de Galicia
6/2/2010 In Spanish

Es verdad que pocos privilegiados disponen en el hogar de un currunchiño de cien metros cuadrados para plantar sus lechugas como la hortelana Michelle en la Casa Blanca, pero tampoco es necesario. La primera dama americana, Verónica Berlusconi y otras celebridades han impulsado una moda absolutamente implantada en Canadá y el norte de Europa que llega ahora con fuerza a Galicia. El minifundio se estila también en las huertas urbanas que empiezan a poblar el paisaje gris de las principales ciudades para hacer realidad un viejo sueño del burgués: regresar al campo.

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Agriculture and Food Availability
Cultivating the City: Mapping and Characterizing Urban Agriculture with Satellite Imagery – Lisbon, Portugal

By Sérgio Freire, T. Santos, and J. A. Tenedório,
posted on November 26th, 2009
in Agriculture, Articles, Biodiversity, Earth Observation, Sustainability

Excerpts:

The city of Lisbon, Portugal, has historically expanded towards areas occupied by farms, orchards, and olive groves, thus integrating some rural character. This process was complemented by the influx of immigrants from the rural countryside or from abroad who had farming habits. While until recently this land use activity was perceived as marginal and simply tolerated by public officials, there are now municipal plans to expand it, organize it, and integrate it in the city planning process.

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Excerpts from the Metropolitan Agriculture website:

What is metropolitan agriculture?

Many farmers perceive the city as a threat to agriculture. The encroachment of urbanisation places pressure on farmland, while the great concentration of people in activities leads to stiff competition for water, nutrients and energy. In addition large groups of urban consumers are becoming ever more demanding about their food and the way in which it is produced. Equally, many urban dwellers have a romanticised idea of agriculture that no longer squares with present-day reality. The concern over animal diseases and environmentally-polluting activities means that many urban dwellers would prefer to see the exclusion of agricultural activities from their metropolitan environment.

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Larger photo here.

Photos by Lamiot

“Bruggen naar Rabot” is the name used to designate several rehabilitation projects in Gent (Belgium), opening up the development of a district considered the poorest in Flanders. In 2008-2009 a re-development of an abandoned neighbourhood, “Rabot-Blaisantvest”, was begun behind the courthouse. A large urban agriculture community garden was established which comprised of micro-plots raised above the ground on concrete slabs that had once supported the now destroyed Alcatel factory.

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Photo by LunaModule

Just 10 minutes from Canary Wharf (London’s second financial district and home of the UK’s three tallest buildings) on the Isle of Dogs, is a wonderful city farm – Mudchute Farm. On 32 acres of fertile land (nutrient-rich as it is just next to the Thames) live 200 animals, mostly rare breeds. Mudchute Farm is also home to 70 community allotments, a farm kitchen and restaurant, horse stables, and smokehouse. Wood from the farm is used in the smokehouse where butter, geese, and cheese are often smoked.

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Beatrix Potter, ‘Benjamin Bunny nibbling lettuce leaf’ © Frederick Warne & Co. 2006

The Real Mr. McGregor’s Garden

Written by Victoria and Albert Museum

“Before she married in 1913, Beatrix Potter would accompany her family on three-month summer holidays in the countryside. In 1903 the Potters rented Fawe Park, a large, comfortable house in the Lake District, on the edge of Lake Derwentwater. Here, Potter was able to escape outdoors, sketching the terraced gardens that sloped down towards the lake and the beautiful fells beyond. The kitchen garden, with its greenhouses, cold frames and potting shed was a favourite retreat and inspired the setting for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904).

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Larger image here.

A Flemish Kitchen Garden: La Coupeuse de Choux

By Henri De Braekeleer (1840-88)
ca. 1864 (painted)
oil on canvas
Place of origin:
Antwerp (possibly, painted)

The Antwerp artist Henri de Braekeleer belonged to a family of painters. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch genre paintings, he specialised in humble scenes of everyday life, as in this example, in which a woman in peasant dress bends over to cut a cabbage. These were popular in a period of increasing industrialisation.

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Berlin. An oasis in the middle of the city: All over the country — whether on the outskirts of cities or in otherwise hard-to-use spaces, such as next to train tracks — you will find little garden plots, known as Schrebergarten, which can be rented from cities for a few hundred euros per year. By Verlag W. Wächter / Brigitte Einführ

Urban Farming Under Threat
Popular Mini-Gardens in Berlin May Soon Be Paved Over

By Christian Schwägerl
Spiegel Online
Oct 15, 2009

Tiny urban gardens are everywhere in Berlin and they have been for decades. But now, the city government is threatening to level many of them to make way for new construction. A battle is looming.

Berlin prides itself on being in the vanguard of a number of trends — and it might have found itself another one. In this case, it’s what climate experts and city planners call “urban farming.” Many see the drive to produce foodstuffs within cities — rather than carting them in from far away — as the farming of the future.

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Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535) sketch by Holbein. Thomas More’s Utopia was written in Latin towards the close of 1515.

The gardens in Amaurot, the capital city of Utopia

“There lie gardens behind all their houses.  These are large, but enclosed with buildings, that on all hands face the streets, so that every house has both a door to the street and a back door to the garden. 

“They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have both vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered and so finely kept that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs.  And this humour of ordering their gardens so well is not only kept up by the pleasure they find in it, but also by an emulation between the inhabitants of the several streets, who vie with each other.  And there is, indeed, nothing belonging to the whole town that is both more useful and more pleasant. 

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Photo: very local wine called “Côte de Rodeløkka”

The Wine Farm in Rodeløkka

There’s nothing wrong with red or black currants, but grapevines are both more fun and inspire more cooperation. Just ask Olav and Betsy Heen, who make wine from self-grown grapes in Rodeløkka, Oslo.

Olav and Betsy Heen managed to convince their neighbors in Oslo, Norway, to join them in growing grapes on the south facing walls of their houses. The result is a very local wine called “Côte de Rodeløkka”. They’ve had record crops of 75 kilos of grapes between them, but normally end up with 30 – 40 kilos, enough for 25 to 30 litres of wine.  At 60 degrees North, comparable to Labrador or Anchorage, cultivating grapes is pretty impressive. 

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Midmar Drive Allotments by Sandy Gemmill
Larger image here.

By Jake Butcher
This research was conducted as part of an Ecology (conservation and management) dissertation at the University of Edinburgh.
16,000 word dissertation. Complete paper on-line. Link on next page.

Summary

A recent increase in urban food production has been stimulated by both the recognised advantages which it brings in terms of health, recreation and urban sustainability and by the solution which it represents to the many problems associated with the globalisation of the food system, urbanisation and increasingly intensified agriculture.

The City of Edinburgh has experienced not only a growth in the number and diversity of urban food growing projects over recent years but also a rise in waste, carbon emissions and both human and environmental health problems.

This study aimed to address these problems by assessing current food production and subsequently quantifying the room for expansion of food growing in the city. Case studies were conducted detailing information on 16 different food production projects within the City.

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Joan Miró. The Vegetable Garden with Donkey. (Huerto con Asno) 1918
This picture depicts the rural landcape of Montroig.
Larger image here.

“Approximately in 1918 Joan Miro enters the so-called ‘detailistic phase’ (the term was introduced by Rofols, a fellow member of the Courbet group). Jacques Dupin, Miros biographer, called this period ‘poetic realism’. Landscapes, painted in Montroig, where the artist spent the summer at his parents’ farm, have deep perspectives which are full of methodically painted details.”

Gardens at Hammersmith Allotments by Francis Dodd, 1929

The Good Life – 100 Years of Growing Your Own

6th October 2009 – 7th March 2010

2009 has been a year of ‘Growing Your Own’ – from allotments to balconies and window-boxes, people throughout Britain are growing their own and enjoying a slice of ‘The Good Life’.

Our winter exhibition traces the story of growing food in Britain over 100 years. Starting with the Allotment Act of 1908 and visiting key moments such as the Dig For Victory campaign of the Second World War and the Self-Sufficiency movement through the 1970s, paintings, photographs, personal memoirs and even the odd home-spun sweater will tell the story of why, how and what we have grown.

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Location: Paris, MuCEM, Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée

Potager du Roi

From Wikipedia

The Potager du Roi (fr: Kitchen Garden of the King), near the Palace of Versailles, produced fresh vegetables and fruits for the table of the court of Louis XIV. It was created between 1678 and 1783 by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, the director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens. Today it is run by the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage, the high state school in France for the training of landscape architects. It is listed by the French Ministry of Culture as one of the Notable Gardens of France.

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By Jan-Eelco Jansma

The city of Almere (30 km east of Amsterdam) has to double in size (190,000 towards 350,000 inhabitants) over the next 20 years. This summer Almere launched its plans for this so called ‘Scale Jump Almere 2030′ (Almere 2.0). East of the city on approximately 3.000 ha. Almere wants to develop a district (Almere Oosterwold) where urban agriculture will be the driver of city development.

Will this district become reality? This will become clear by the end of 2009, when Almere, the national government and the regional authorities, decides how the planned growth and urban expansion will be realised and what role urban-rural development will play in that regard.

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Photo by Franco Zecchin. Paris, the urban beekeeper Jean Paucton removing frames from the hive atop the Opera Garnier.

By Charles Bremner in Paris
The Times
August 18, 2009

Tourists are not the only species swarming on the Champs Élysées this August. Also enjoying the sunshine are squadrons of bees, part of a fast-multiplying population that is making honey a new Parisian industry.

The Tuileries, Luxembourg and other lesser gardens of Paris are now home to hundreds of thousands of bees that are far more productive than their country cousins.

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Denmark has more leisure and allotment gardeners for its population than any other country. The tradition for this type of gardening dates back to the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the aim of the leisure and allotment gardens was to secure better conditions for working people and in 1884 the first association of leisure and allotment owners was founded.

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Waterford will host the launch of a new national food-grower’s network called GIY Ireland on Saturday, September 12th 2009 as part of the Waterford Harvest Festival.

As the interest in home-produced food reaches fever pitch, a new organisation called GIY Ireland is aiming to inspire people to get growing and give them the knowledge they need to do so successfully.  On September 12th 2009 Waterford Institute of Technology will be the venue for the launch of this unique organisation which aims to establish food growers groups in every town and county in Ireland.  GIY networks aims to recreate the camaraderie of allotment growing for back-garden vegetable growers by getting them together on a regular basis to talk, learn from each other and exchange tips, war-stories and produce.

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