Category — Photos

“Sow and Grow” poster, Cleveland Public Schools Horticulture program.

Feeding Cleveland: Urban Agriculture

Cleveland State University Libraries presents The Cleveland Memory Project

A recurring theme in 20th century Cleveland that continues to the present day is that during difficult economic periods communities of people have come together to  raise food crops on city land. The working men’s farms during the Great Depression, the victory gardens during World War II, community gardens established during the years of urban renewal, and the present day market gardeners of the local food movement, all provide examples of revivals of urban agriculture as a response to economic difficulties. 

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Trengwainton House, near Penzance, Cornwall. Gardens are open to the public. All photos. NTPL/Andrew Butler

Kitchen garden crops are gradually being reintroduced into the productive area. Visitors can climb on to a raised platform to take in the scale of the walled gardens and their unique raised beds, built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark, as described in The Bible.

See photos of the Kitchen Garden. Follow – “Read More”.

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Photo by Michael Levenston. Chestnuts up in the tree. Porcupine quill-like burs encase the nuts.

Most people find Horse Chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum) lying on the ground in the Fall. They are a beautiful, shiny brown nuts but inedible. However, there are in Vancouver a few Spanish Chestnut or Sweet Chestnut trees (Castanea saliva), the nuts of which are edible, and elderly Asian and European residents are quick to harvest them as they fall to the ground. They often use long poles to hit them out of the trees.

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An exterior view of the Tower of London showing Middle Tower with guards and a vegetable garden in the foreground.
Photographer: York and Son
Larger image here.

Cultivate vegetables!

A. Kuznetsova, A. Magitson, ca. 1930
Publisher: AChR, Moscow

Workers are encouraged to cultivate vegetables near factories. On the poster, a realistic still life is combined with a modern constructivist background. It is issued by the publishing company of AChR, the Association of Revolutionary Artists. This organization is the main promotor of Socialist Realism and develops a stranglehold on the visual arts.
From the International Institute of Social History.

Jin Meisheng
1959, February
The vegetables are green, the cucumbers plumb, the yield is abundant
Cailü guafei chanliang duo

Great Leap Forward (1956-1960)

In the three years of crop failures and famine following the Great Leap Forward, this poster with its abundant food is reprinted over and over again. The total number of copies runs to over a million.
From Chinese Posters Net.

1900-1914
Elizabeth Peabody House
Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Children gardening in the community vegetable garden at the corner of Charles and Poplar Street, near the Elizabeth Peabody House in Boston’s West End neighborhood.

Five more wonderful photos of the children on the next page.

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Photographs of the New York city schools.
Schauffler, Alfred Theodore, 1839-1915 

Larger image here.

See larger image here.
Lydia Williams feeding chickens in the garden of her cottage at Carlyle Street, Napier, [ca 1889]

Photographer William Williams.
Glass negative
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library

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Larger image here.

Photo: Vegetable garden, Dawson, Y.T., August 19th, 1905.

Album contains photographs of the Experimental Farm in Ottawa, Ontario, fruit orchards in Ontario and Quebec and vegetable gardens and miners’ houses in Dawson City, Yukon. Photographs by Horatio Needham Topley.

For 15 years, Mr. English, 55, has been growing neatly planted rows of vegetables in a public housing project in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Buster English: The Green Thumb

Interviewed and produced by Rogene Fisher and Sarah Kramer.
Photographed by Todd Heisler

Mr. English began gardening as a teenager with his grandfather in South Carolina, then took it up again to “stay out of trouble” after moving to the Walt Whitman Houses. He lives with his three teenage daughters (his son lives with a grandmother), and calls his plot of land the Cabbage Patch.

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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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Live Dining is a planting, harvesting, preparing, composting, cooking, dining performance, a concept

Nicole Fournier
Visual, Interdisplinary and Performance Artist
Founder and Executive Director of InTerreArt

It is about creating a context of integrating a dining-kitchen room installation in a location where plants grow, and where the dining kitchen furniture touch the earth (the ground). Within the dining-kitchen room installation, participants perform the outdoor actions of harvesting, in the same location as the indoor domestic and intimate actions of preparing, cooking and eating.

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Photo by Michael Levenston

On a sunny weekend, as I take a stroll with my wife, I see lots of yard sales in my neighbourhood. But on a recent walk I counted three people selling something other than old records, books and clothing.

Honey, flowers and plums!

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UA Magazine is published two times a year by the Network of Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF), under the Cities Farming for the Future Programme, which is financed by DGIS, the Netherlands, and IDRC, Canada.

Issue 22

“Resilient cities are cities that can effectively operate and provide services under conditions of distress. Resilient cities can better absorb the type of shocks and stresses as identified above. Rather than focusing on vulnerability, a focus on resilience means putting emphasis on what can be done by a city or a community itself, building on existing natural, social, political, human, financial, and physical capital, while at the same time strengthening its capacities.

“Urban agriculture can play a role in building more resilient cities. Growing food in cities reduces the dependency on (rural) food supplies, which can easily be affected by disrupted transport, armed conflicts, droughts or flooding and increasing food prices.

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By Elizabeth Orton Jones 1945

The warm sun is shining in our garden.
That’s where I planted seeds not long ago.
Such little wrinkled things they were
As I held them in my hand!
Now they have grown into vegetables,
Many shapes, many colors, many tastes.

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Casa Frela Gallery presents The Fruitful Wound, photographs by Dennis Santella. The exhibition runs from July 18th through August 22nd, 2009 in Manhattan, New York.

The Fruitful Wound

For a full year, Dennis Santella has been searching out and photographing gardens and green places across Harlem using a special panoramic camera manufactured by Siciliano Camera Works of Brooklyn. His large richly detailed gelatin silver prints draw on the improvised beauty of Harlem’s open spaces — from cultivated areas such as community gardens, to empty lots, and neglected border areas where plants struggle to survive.

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The Gardener. by Giuseppe Arcimbold

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (also spelled Arcimboldi; 1527 – July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books — that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognisable likeness of the portrait subject.

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The slideshow above gives an overview of Urban Agriculture Projects in the Chicago Area and was released for the June 5, 2009 symposium “Urban Agriculture: Feeding the Movement” in Chicago.

Some of the speakers and topics for that event:

Overview/Urban Agriculture framework and expected outcomes
Rose Hayden-Smith, M.A. Ed., M.A., Ph.D. Candidate, County Director University of California CE and Food and Society Policy Fellow

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Lima, Peru; Community Garden on Former Soccer Field; Funded by CARE USA; 1991

These 26 photos are part of a larger collection of documents soon to be housed at Ryerson University in Toronto in the Jac Smit Memorial Library of Urban Agriculture.

“Under the merger arrangement, TUAN’s (The Urban Agriculture Network’s) comprehensive library of documents and materials on urban agriculture will be transferred to Toronto, Canada and supervised by Joe Nasr. Once it is re-established, the collection will be named the Jac Smit Memorial Library of Urban Agriculture and will be made available for use of researchers and practitioners worldwide.

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