Elder & Sage Community Gardens: An Urban Uprising

A tenacious group of wayside gardeners in Asheville, North Carolina, became the official stakeholders in a blazing hot gravel lot on June 1, 2017. We began as a diverse gathering of neighbors and friends guided by an urgency to reclaim and repurpose a vacant city lot in our downtown neighborhood. Our vision was to transform the gravel-laden ground into a welcoming community garden providing habitat for trees, plants, birds, and beneficial insects, affirming their right to continued existence in our densely developing urban environment. This story is a people's history, one that needs telling. It is a tribute to the people who showed up, the plants that persisted, the trees that pushed up through the gravel. It is a way to share some of the stories that unfolded on our way from gravel to green as we reclaimed space for the precious diversity of the natural world.