A Garden in Concrete

Yesterday when I wrote about childhood memoirs, I later remembered "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith. It's period predates McCourt's memoirs by perhaps a couple of decades, and covers a lot of the same territory. Those two and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh share a similar story of grinding poverty and being raised by the mother alone with an ineffectual and distant father.

All three of them seem to have survived the ordeal, and the story of an Ailanthus tree sprouting in the cracks is a good symbol for them.

Today I found a wonderful New York Times article about a whole garden growing amidst the concrete in Brooklyn, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/garden/06garden.html. And there's a whole blog about such gardens at http://66squarefeet.blogspot.com/.

There are a lot of city gardens in Pittsburgh as well, and I'm digging into the soil here in the suburbs.