(See references to Manzanita Village and Colleen Sorensen near the bottom of article)
The Architecture of Gardening
Ah, Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. Just the very thought of pausing with our families from the normal hustle and bustle of life to consider all that we are grateful for is excuse enough for a holiday. However, while I also appreciate the fact that Thanksgiving is one of our country’s least commercialized holidays, what I really like about it is the food.
I have been thinking a lot about food these days. I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
”, which is the practice of eating food produced within the radius of the immediate bioregion. Their year long odyssey covers topics ranging from the average American’s consumption of 54.8 gallons of soft drinks per year, to the insidious invasion of genetically modified plants and seed, to the 1500 miles that the average American supermarket vegetable travels, and the national policy for support of large agribusiness over small organic farms (see our Green Activist
for more on that topic). 
As Andrea Ward states in her article entitled “Asphalt Garden
” from Greensource magazine: “With nearly 80% of Americans now living in urban areas, and food transportation energy accounting for as much as two thirds of the energy required to grow it, there’s a powerful argument to be made for keeping the foods we grow, buy and eat even closer to home.” We can see this phenomenon springing up across the country in the most unlikely of places, such as the city of Detroit. The recession, along with many decades preceding the recession, has not been particularly kind to Detroit. Vast areas of the city, by some accounts amounting to over 40 square miles, contain blighted areas with vacant lots where abandoned houses once stood. In a sort of double blessing, community gardens are beginning to fill the voids left by vacant lots, thus providing nourishing, fresh, seasonal food for people in the immediate neighborhood. The city is slowly transforming itself into a grid of gardens
which have the power to sustain the urban population, while fostering a sense of entrepreneurship and providing added green space to the communities that they are in.
Closer to home, our state of Arizona has been referred to as a “food desert”, a place where fast food chains are plentiful but wholesome food, particularly for lower income people, is hard to access. As Gary Nabham states in his book Coming Home to Eat
In many of the projects that I am involved with, people are increasingly finding opportunities to grow their own food. One example is at Arcosanti
, where a new 3,344 square foot greenhouse is being designed. It will be added to the three existing greenhouses, which already provide much of the fresh produce used in the café and throughout the community. In a high desert environment, greenhouses are a way of providing an intensively productive agricultural environment, which uses much less water than open field agriculture. In addition, water from the community above the greenhouses, be it rainwater, gray water, or even sewage, can be treated to be used for irrigation. And the heat from the greenhouses can be used in the winter to help warm the residences above.
At the Manzanita Village Cohousing Community
, several large water harvesting tanks have been set in place and more are planned for the future, thus capturing the natural precipitation to be used for the irrigation of the organic gardens. Food scraps are also collected on a community wide basis, to create compost to enrich the soil, and there is even a community vermiculture bin, where worms are employed to further enhance the quality of the soil. Each year, the organic garden increases in size, and the bountiful harvest is shared with the entire community.
My personal hero, though, is my neighbor at Manzanita Village, a woman named Colleen Sorensen. For years, Colleen has championed the cause of creating a community garden within the City of Prescott. After persevering through rejection and reiteration, she finally succeeded in securing a piece of land near the center of town within which, people will be able to participate in the growing of their own food, while coming together to socialize and trade green thumb secrets. Hopefully, this is the first of many such gardens.
On a personal note, with regard to putting food on the table, I am grateful that I have had the privilege to practice architecture in Arizona for almost thirty years now. I have enjoyed raising my family in Prescott, and consider it an honor to be called upon time and again to be entrusted with the design of your built environment. So, in the spirit of the season, I thank you.