Public Gardens and Private Life: New Book on how Gardens Improve Cities

A new book by Sharon Lee (standing, right), pictured here at home with her family, explores the essential role public gardens can play in improving urban life. Photo courtesy of Sharon Lee

Swarthmore resident Sharon Lee started gardening in the 1970s, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her husband, Phil Lebowitz, was in law school, and Lee got a job as a legislative aide for the Speaker of the Wisconsin General Assembly. “We were on a very slim budget,” Lee recalls, “and vegetable gardening was important.”

Now, after a varied career culminating in the deputy directorship of the American Public Gardens Association, Lee has published her second book about public gardens. The first was a textbook focused on the operations of a public garden. The new book, released by Cornell University Press last November, focuses on the essential role public gardens can play in improving urban life. 

Lee co-authored “Public Gardens and Livable Cities” (available in paperback and Kindle editions) with Donald Rakow, a Cornell University integrative plant sciences professor, and Meghan Gough, an urban studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Through case studies, the book explores partnerships among public gardens, other community institutions, and government agencies. It provides a roadmap for collaboration in addressing a variety of social issues, including neighborhood safety, quality science education, and access to healthy food.

Bartram’s Garden

One case study treats Bartram’s Garden. Located in the Grays Ferry section of Philadelphia, it is the oldest botanical garden in the U.S. It’s also one of Lee’s favorite examples of gardens that improve their community. Ever since John Bartram founded it in 1728, the garden has served the city’s residents, Lee says. A friend of Benjamin Franklin, Bartram was a plant explorer and popularizer, searching out interesting New World specimens and shipping specimens to England. He also cultivated plants to use locally. As Lee explains, “Bartram provided medicinals to neighbors in the area.”

Today, the garden serves its neighbors in a different way. To address food insecurity among the largely West African population nearby, the garden launched Sankofa Community Farm. The farm teaches horticultural skills to local teens, who help grow 15,000 pounds of fresh produce annually. It also provides plots to dozens of local families and runs a farmers market where neighbors can buy fresh, low-cost food, including West African vegetables not commonly available in the U.S.

Begun in 2011, today’s program is successful in part because it engaged the community at every stage of the process, Lee reports, identifying local needs and evolving as circumstances changed. “One of the pieces of advice we give is to start with the residents,” she says. “What you have perceived as a problem: do they perceive it as a problem?”

Roots to Re-entry

Public gardens also can play a useful role in job training. Lee’s book chronicles a number of successful programs around the country, including one in Philadelphia focused on helping formerly incarcerated teenagers return to their communities. Roots to Re-entry — known as R2R — is a project of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which Lee calls “a powerhouse in terms of what it does for the entire region.” (The society is involved in Sankofa Farm as well.)

R2R teaches skills like horticulture, landscape maintenance, and carpentry to young men nearing the end of sentences for non-violent crimes. Halfway through the 12-week training, the participants are paroled, and the program helps them transition to life outside prison. If they finish the course, they are connected to paid work with area landscapers. 

“It’s quite an incredible operation,” Lee says. “When you’re in prison, to be able to go outside, to connect to nature, to see the cycle of life … it gives people hope.”

The program has changed over time, which Lee sees as a strength. “There is not a straight line to success,” in community programming, she notes. “There are going to be problems, and you have to adjust.”

One problem R2R ran into was that many of its participants were functionally illiterate. “You have to read seed packets,” Lee observes. “You have to know how to measure. You have to figure out the number of seeds you need.” So R2R began providing mentors to teach literacy. R2R also connects participants to housing and mental health services. 

Over the decade it has been in operation, the program has proven successful: Criminal recidivism for the program’s graduates is 30%, Lee says, compared to 65% for the general Philadelphia prison population.

Growing Into Horticulture

Lee grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and studied English literature at Furman University in South Carolina. After graduating, she taught English, first in Canterbury, England, and then at Upper Merion Senior High School. Wanting something different, she signed up for graduate film courses at Temple University. She later earned a master’s degree at Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she learned to write radio and TV scripts and to make films. 

Syracuse was where she met Lebowitz. After earning her M.A., she followed him to Madison, where, after working for the Speaker of the Wisconsin General Assembly, she became the public information officer for the Wisconsin Arts Board. In 1982, the couple moved to the Philadelphia area, driving across the country with a one-month-old baby and a dog. “We chose Swarthmore because it was a town, and had sidewalks, and was active as a town,” she recalls. They also liked the architectural variety and the fact that the borough was home to people from a range of income groups.

Shortly after the move, Lee started working for the American Public Gardens Association, then based at the Scott Arboretum. “We had the offices under the old observatory dome,” she recalls. Her first job was to upgrade the organization’s written materials and create a new magazine for professionals at the country’s approximately 700 public gardens. Eventually, the job expanded until she was in charge of all the organization’s publications and outreach.

Lee is passionate about the mission and potential of public gardens. “They are museums with living collections,” she explains, “eager to work with partners to improve the health and livability of the communities around them.”

A Saving Grace

Now, 15 years after retiring from the public garden association, Lee runs a consulting business. She also helps look after her young grandchildren, 4 and 6, who live in Philadelphia. “They come here and roll on the grass,” she says. “They find these secret hiding places behind bushes.” She has shown them how to plant seeds in egg cartons, then transplant the seedlings outside. 

One of the first times they worked in the garden together, her granddaughter cried because she got dirt on her shoes. “So I dropped dirt on my shoes,” Lee recalls, “and I put my hands in the pot to get dirt all over me and said, ‘It’s just fine! It’ll wash off.’” These days, when the 6-year-old comes over, she “just casually goes into my garden and picks some mint and chews on it.”

Lee says gardening has been her saving grace in the COVID-19 pandemic. “To be able to go out, and prune, and putter,” she says. “To move plants around, and see that life is still normal in the garden — it gives you a sense of the cycle of life.”