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Victory Gardens Gardening in the city—now that’s a victory. By Becky Rupp ust to be clear here, I’m not a city gardener. I live in the country. The closest city to us, here in far northern Vermont, is Burlington (population 42,000) which our oldest son, who lives in New York City (population 8.6 million), tells us barely deserves the name. When it comes to gardening, all I have to do is walk out the front door to find someplace to dig. If we had the time, energy, and inclination, we’ve got room for an acre of potatoes, a turnip field, and a couple of cows. Granted, I could do with a little less clay and a lot fewer rocks—this is, after all, Vermont—but the truth is that gardening, where we live, practically falls in our laps. Not like all those city gardeners, who have to blast a hole in concrete to plant a tomato. There’s a surprisingly lush literature on city gardening, and all of it describes the triumph of Country Mouse hope, optimism, and determination over great and awful odds. Take, for example, Rumer is my kind of Godden’s now-classic An Episode of Sparrows, people—but, first published in 1955. The book’s main from a garden character is young Lovejoy Mason, a street standpoint, kid from South London, who nicks a package of cornflower seeds and starts a garden in Town Mouse the rubble of a church that was destroyed in is a hero. the Blitz. Rubble is lousy ground for plants, so Lovejoy’s passion for her hidden garden ropes in other kids from the neighborhood—notably Tip Malone, leader of the local gang of boys—and leads to stealing dirt from a local private park. But eventually—because of that charmer of a garden—there’s a 48