Gardening: From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic

Over the 4th of July weekend I enjoyed a visit from Michelle Lin, landscape architect and former Detroiter who now lives in NYC and builds rooftop gardens.

As we talked, I thought about how new societies evolve from gardening, and about how ingenious human beings have been over the millennia in finding new spaces for gardening when space on the ground becomes unavailable.

Two and a half million years ago, when Agricultural/ Neolithic societies evolved from Hunting and Gathering/Paleolithic ones, all the great religions were born, each with a version of the Golden Rule.

About ten years ago children’s author Paul Fleishmann write Seedfolks, a book about the community that evolved out of the planting of a seed by a little Vietnamese girl in a vacant lot in a desolate Cleveland neighborhood.

I wrote a column about the book entitled ”Growing Vegetables and Spirituality.” Here is an excerpt:

“Thirteen very different individuals - old, young, Haitian, Hispanic, Asian, African American. Living near a rat-infested, garbage-filled vacant lot in Cleveland, Ohio. They are transformed from strangers into neighbors because Kim, a little girl from Vietnam, dug into the hard-packed soil to plant a few bean seeds in memory of her deceased father.”

In prehistoric times, it happened with hunters and gatherers . A few decades ago, in this book, it happened with ethnically very diverse new Americans.

And now it is happening in Detroit and all over the nation with community gardens that have made urban agriculture today’s fastest growing movement.