Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives

In this book of photographs and commentary on gardens built by homeless or impoverished New York City inhabitants, Diana Balmori and Margaret Morton liberate the work garden from its transitional association with wealth and leisure, and connect it to a more ephemeral but not less powerful group of constructions made by people deprived of their basic needs. In their reuse of nearly everything discarded, their sparing use of water and plant materials and their economical treatment of space, these gardens speak the languages of our times. All the gardens documented here are or were on the Lower East Side of New York and were built by either the homeless or by tenement dwellers and squatters who appropriated the spaces and turned them to their own use. They are not subsistence gardens, but gardens made up of found objects in an effort to mark off a space for pleasure, social activity or private retreat.