[Sca-cooks] Greetings from Edmonton, Alberta

[Ted Eisenstein]

>> What is an "allotment garden"?
>        It is a fine British tradition, the history of which I
>know lamentably little, whereby significant areas within
>a city boundary are give over to cultivation by residents,
>each of whom has their own small plot within the large field.
>I speculate that the practise goes back to the Industrial
>Revolution, when people moving into the cities were given
>land to cultivate as they would have had in the country,
>to make up for the lack of gardens associated with the
>city houses?

. . . and, strangely enough, there was a variation of this
in downtown DC, a couple of blocks from where my parents
live. There was a plot of land on a corner owned by (I think)
a Senator, who, for reasons known only to herself, offered it
out to the local residents for purposes of gardening. For a number
of years there were vegetables and flowers and nice plants
growing on very nicely kept small plots on that land; eventually
<sigh> it was sold off, and two? three? cramped houses were
put up in the garden's place.
....but it was a nice thing to do, and brought a small piece of
country to an incredibly urban landscape.

Alban