"This book is about hope in the inner cities, and about the hopemakers themselves, who have created earth where there was rubble. They have planted gardens of food and flowers among the broken streets, and brought together a community of women and men who have refused to allow the devastations of their neighborhoods to defeat them. This book will make you happy." -Grace Paley, author of Enormous Changes at the Last Minute To judge from the TV news, our cities have become a morass of drug addiction, brutal crime, and official corruption. This story of urban disaster has been ceaselessly belabored by the media. Out of the spotlights' glare, however, in every metropolitan area of the country, city dwellers have been planting flowers, vegetables, trees, and herbs—with astonishing results. These community gardens may be modest in scale, but their contributions to the rejuvenation of America's inner cities must not be overlooked. The gardeners of these "patches of Eden" include children and elders, immigrants, and "low-income and no-income people." And their gardens are overflowing with healthy food and beautiful flowers—dramatic evidence of an entirely new kind of ecological devotion, one expressed not in expeditions to the wilderness but in the transformation of blighted lots into green sanctuaries. A Patch of Eden celebrates the achievements of the inner-city gardeners, relating in detail the stories of community gardens in Harlem, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago.