Planet earth: How the world went crazy for allotments

United States by Leonard Doyle

Coming home late on a cold winter's night in Washington, DC, I noticed something moving in a neighbour's front garden. Initially, I mistook it for a deer, but peering over the hedge, I saw my neighbour, Mary O'Hara, secateurs in hand, in search of sprigs of rosemary for a stew.

All day, she told me, she had been preparing to plant lettuce, runner beans and carrots. She'd had some help from her small son Benjamin, who managed to dig some of last year's carrots out of the friable earth. The carrots had survived the harsh frosts, as had some rocket, a bunch of which was thrust into my hands. And now that winter has released its icy grip on the soil, there is plenty of work to be done in Mary's front garden.

Vegetable patches don't come to mind when thinking of Washington. But there are plenty of them. High achievers need to relax, and a good way is to get the fingers dirty in the rich alluvial earth. Today, the city is enjoying a renaissance in community gardening as interest grows in fresh organic food.

There is huge demand for "community plots", and in the leafy north-west of the city, it can take years for one to become available. And when the desirable plots do become free, they're usually a tangled mess of bindweed. That does not stop the weekly inspections by a dreaded garden "committee", usually followed by a fusillade of emails insisting that obscure weeds be removed – under pain of eviction. Only an American bureaucrat with too much time on his/her hands knows how to write these missives. When an English acquaintance, Louise, finally got hold of a plot in Rock Creek Park, it did not take long for the cranky emails to arrive. "The weeds they were complaining about were so obscure that I had to look them up," she told me.

Arthur Allen, a friend of Mary's and a noted DC-based writer, is far advanced on his new book about the humble tomato. He now has a basement full of exotic tomato plants. Naturally, I volunteered to adopt some. Elsewhere, gardeners help to keep inner-city spaces safe by building community. They gently push crime out and help residents to get to know one another. Which brings me back to Mary – someone I might never have got to know but for her late-night dash outside for some rosemary.

Australia by Kathy Marks

The Australian dream is to own a house on a quarter-acre block, complete with a sizeable back garden. In reality, many people live in flats, or just have a concrete courtyard. But most urban neighbourhoods have one or two "community gardens". In Sydney and its surrounding area, there are nearly 50 of them.

Some are one large expanse, worked on by all the gardeners together. Others take the British model – individual plots for each set of green fingers to tend. The garden at the Addison Road Centre in Marrickville is a hybrid. On a site with an array of community buildings, it has existed since 2000. Volunteers grow bananas, sweet potatoes, coffee, herbs and vegetables such as aubergines, chillies, lettuces and beans. There are also almond, lemon, peach and cherry trees. The garden is run on the principles of permaculture and organics. "Everything is recycled," says Natalie McCarthy, a volunteer. "All the weeds we put in compost bins. Vegetable scraps go into worm farms. We get mulch from a local stables."

Rather than use insecticides, these city gardeners plant marigolds and nasturtiums, which help to keep away insects. There are also plans to procure chickens, which eat snails and keep the weeds down. Companion plants, such as tomato and basil, are grown together. Rainwater tanks and solar pumps provide irrigation.

And the benefits of all this back-straining labour? Volunteers get to take their delicious produce home, and those who commit for three months can create their own plot. "There's a social aspect to it, and we share information," says McCarthy. "I've learnt a lot."

Russia by Shaun Walker

Every weekend in the summer, the roads out of Moscow and other big Russian cities are clogged with families escaping to the "dacha", a wonderfully romantic term that can refer to anything from a ramshackle shed in a field to an oligarchic mansion. The dacha in the country provides a contrast to the claustrophobia of Soviet-era apartments, where city-dwellers can enjoy the clean air and work the land.

How pleasurable that work is depends largely on geography. In Russia's warmer climes, such as on the Black Sea coast, gardening is possible all year round. David, a resident of the resort city of Sochi, grows tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer and, in the winter, cabbages that are turned into borscht or other traditional soups. "It always tastes better when you've grown the ingredients yourself," he says.

For Muscovites and Siberians, dacha gardening is restricted to the summer months, but the harvest can be pickled and canned for year-round use – many a winter vodka session is accompanied by a jar of salted dacha cucumbers from a crop picked months before.

But growing your own used to have a more serious role. In the 1990s, the produce gleaned from dacha plots was the key to survival for many families. Many babushkas can still be found in Moscow underpasses selling home-grown fruit and vegetables to make ends meet. But for those who have become wealthy in Russia's economic boom, the country garden serves a purpose similar to the British allotment – it offers relaxation and nourishment for the soul.

"Moscow is such a dirty, grey, monstrous city," says Alexander, a Moscow banker in his early fifties. "But my dacha is surrounded by green fields and fresh air. I try to go there every weekend in the summer." He grows berries, tomatoes and carrots, which are given to his elderly mother to turn into tasty snacks. "I can afford whatever I want in the supermarket," he says. "But there's something quite spiritual about eating what you've grown yourself."

Kenya by Steve Bloomfield

It isn't exactly an allotment as most Britons would know it. For Michael Karomo, a 34-year-old chef in Nairobi, the plot on which he and his family tend fruit and vegetables is valuable not because it provides a slice of the quiet life, but because it generates extra cash.

Michael is one of six brothers living on a six-acre plot in the town of Ruaka, a 30-minute drive north of Nairobi. The Karomo siblings use their patch of reddish-brown earth to grow bananas, maize, coffee and sugar cane. For many in Kenya, a piece of land to call your own is highly prized – much of the recent fighting has been over land.

Fertile ground is in particularly short supply. A carefully cultivated "shamba" (a Swahili word for small farm or plot) can provide basic vegetables for the family and sometimes a bit of much-needed extra income. Indeed, Michael's family sell most of what they grow in the sun-baked earth. They don't call themselves farmers; he and his wife, who is a teacher, have good jobs that pay relatively well. "Some we eat ourselves, some we sell at the market," he says.

His land, which has a stream on one edge, belonged to his father, and to his father before that. It has been divided between Michael and his five brothers. (In this sense, his shamba is a communal garden of sorts.) All six have sons, who will expect to receive a piece of the land when they grow up. "At the end, there will be no land," Michael laughs. "We will have to buy them some land somewhere else."

But there are other options. Michael's plot lies just off the main road to Nairobi. New buildings – blocks of apartments, a small shopping centre – are being built on the other side of the road. "People are cutting their land into plots and turning it into commercial buildings," says Michael. "Things are changing here."

Germany by Tony Paterson

Albert Einstein is probably Germany's most famous allotment-holder. In the 1920s, before he was forced to flee the Nazis, he kept one on a lake near the suburban town of Spandau, close to Berlin. He referred to it as "my Spandau Castle," which, if nothing else, suggests a rather majestic shed.

There are still about 1.4 million allotments in Germany, most of them rather less grand than Einstein's perhaps was. But it is in Berlin that communal gardening has been embraced most enthusiastically. In 1946, the city was home to more than 200,000 allotments as the defeated population struggled to stave off starvation by growing vegetables.

Photographs from the summer of that year show Berliners planting potatoes in allotments hastily dug in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the city centre. Soon, beds, stoves and kitchens were joining the root vegetables as bombed-out residents built shacks in allotment gardens, which soon became permanent addresses for thousands of people. Today, 1,500 Berliners still live on allotments but, for sanitation reasons, the city's government is trying to phase out the practice.

During the Cold War, these plots gained a special significance for West Berliners barred from the surrounding countryside by the Wall. For many, allotments were the only way to escape tenement life.

Thousands of Berliners have built weekend retreats on their allotments, which are now used more to relax than to grow vegetables. There are about 80,000 allotments within the city limits, and their holders pay a small rent to the city government, which permits the holders to spend the night on them.

How far all this is from the earnest roots of the German allotment garden movement, which was started in the city of Leipzig in the 1860s by the philanthropist and medical doctor Daniel Schreber. His idea was to help the urban poor of the city by offering them a degree of self-sufficiency – and, to this day, allotments in Germany are still referred to as Schrebergarten.

Japan by David McNeill

Noriko Nishino, 61, was an early convert to the grow-your-own movement. Thirty-five years ago, the primary-school teacher began planting her allotment in a western Tokyo suburb with tomato seeds. Urbanisation and huge population growth had strained Japan's dwindling arable land and launched a food import boom that continues to this day. "I wanted to grow vegetables without chemicals for my two daughters," Nishino recalls. "I told them we were helping the country."

Today, she grows Chinese lettuce, spinach, spring onions and Italian tomatoes on her small but exquisitely neat plot. Her children have taken her lessons of thrift and self-reliance to heart. "My younger daughter fixes her own clothes and darns her own socks, which is very unusual in Japan."

Nishino still uses garbage for compost and refuses to buy seeds "as they probably contain chemicals". With Japan's food self-sufficiency down to 38 per cent, she believes more people would copy her example if they could. But, as construction swallows up the last parcels of land in Tokyo and Osaka, city plots have become scarce. There is no equivalent of Britain's protected allotments.

In the countryside, a boom in allotments is under way as elderly farmers try to lure city folk to rented farmland. The government recognised the rural allotment trend with a series of recent allotment promotion laws, designed to reverse the slow death of the once lush Japanese countryside. Nishino-san agrees: "We must have respect for the land."

Northern Ireland by David McKittrick

In today's more peaceful Northern Ireland, keeping an allotment has never been more popular. So attractive is the idea of spending a weekend digging the damp earth or fixing the roof of a shed that there are now ludicrously long waiting lists for plots maintained by the local council – so a growing number of enthusiasts are turning to the private sector.

Maurice Patton, a cheerful and passionate fifth-generation farmer from Comber, near Belfast, began letting out squares of his land as allotments a few years ago. He started the venture with just a handful of plots, but numbers have grown steadily and there are now 30 allotments on his land. "It has gone very well indeed," says Patton, who offers his own sociological survey of those tilling his ground. "It's actually fascinating, because it has largely moved on from the flat-cap, pipe-smoking 60-year-olds. We're getting city-slicker professional types, as well as grannies getting their grandchildren down to plant a little seed. I get a great adrenalin rush out of this myself, watching people going back to the grassroots ways of doing things."

What's behind the allotment drive? Well, Northern Ireland now has far more apartments than it used to, while many of today's gardens are smaller. Some people are also concerned about chemical additives in their food. Others, according to Patton, "are maybe tired and they just want to sit down and chill out for half an hour, enjoying the view here".

One such is Helen Hume, a mother of four who has rented one of Patton's plots since February last year. She has experimented with growing potatoes, leeks, raspberries and strawberries, and many other plants. "I'm a nurse working in quite a stressful environment," she says. "It's a great way to get away and relax."

Hong Kong by Clifford Coonan

With everyone living on top of each other in a high-rise environment, it's no surprise that urban gardeners have learnt to use space efficiently. Look up to the windows of the tall buildings, especially the older ones, and you'll see herbs and vegetables sprouting on the window sills. The government has introduced a programme aimed at greening the rooftops, but the city's notorious pollution can prevent photosynthesis from taking place for weeks on end.

In the less urban environments on Hong Kong's islands and in the New Territories area adjoining China, there are many community gardening projects where people grow food to eat, focusing on the organic herbs and vegetables that are hard to get from the markets.

"Here on Lamma island, there's been quite a movement towards allotments without the council getting involved, though they run into problems about watering and disputes over who has the right to work the land – a very Hong Kong/New Territories type of problem," says one amateur gardener, Jane Ram.

Ram and other members of the Hong Kong Gardening Society like to cultivate vegetables that are "not grown using nasty things". She grows moringa, curry leaf and herbs on her roof. Another member of the group is a chilli expert whose repertoire includes the hottest chillies in the world, Scotch bonnet. Allotments here also have a social purpose: "In the New Territories, there's a place where children who can't fit into Hong Kong's middle schools are growing vegetables, as well as retired people from the city who find time weighing heavily on their hands," Ram says.

The colossus of the Hong Kong allotment scene is a surgeon called Arthur van Langenberg, who has written several books on urban gardening, and who has avocado, papaya and lemon trees growing in the concrete yard of his apartment near the city centre. He even grows sweet potatoes in the space between two layers of bricks and railings. Van Langenberg cultivates his produce for pleasure rather than trade, but such is his reputation that, when an order of Italian nuns heard that he was growing Italian chicory, they immediately started ordering supplies from him.

France by Emily Murphy

The Square Boutroux in Paris is wedged between several tower blocks and the city's congested ring road. A small, green haven, this is a "jardin familial" – literally, a family garden. It is the French equivalent to English allotments.

Sited on what used to be a no man's land in the 13th arrondissement in south-eastern Paris, the garden is made up of 21 neat plots, each of about 20sqm. "You get a mix of people here," says Olivier Louis-Jean, who's in charge of subscriptions to the garden, and is also a representative of the National Federation for Family Gardens. "All the plots are leased to locals. Most of them belong to families, and the others are shared between several individuals."

Plenty of Parisians would like to get their green fingers on one of these plots: according to Louis-Jean, there is a three-year waiting list. "People grow whatever they want; lettuce, potatoes, carrots, flowers. They can order all the stuff they need through us."

Gardening in one of the most densely populated cities in the world naturally limits the scale of harvests, but Louis-Jean believes the physical and social benefits of this gentle pastime are more important. "It encourages people to join in and get to know each other. In the evenings or at the weekends, this place is like a village in the country," he says.

The allotment site is of one of about 60 in the Paris region, and there are more in cities and towns all over France. The tradition of communal cultivation dates back to 1896, when a priest founded a gardening league to provide workers with small plots where they could grow vegetables for the dinner table. The movement has thrived like French beans in manure, but the principle remains the same – giving city-dwellers the chance of direct contact with the earth beneath the concrete.

Allotment facts

* The average number of people on a waiting list for an allotment in the UK is 59. Half of local authorities in the country report lists of more than 200 names. About 4,300 people are waiting for an allotment in London alone.

* By tradition, the rent for British allotments is due on St Michaelmas Day, 29 September.

* Allotments in the UK date back to the 18th century. By 1873, there were 244,268 allotments in Britain; by 1918, 1.5 million. The number then declined, falling to 600,000 by the late 1960s. Today, there are an estimated 300,000 allotments, yielding about 215,000 tons of fresh produce every year.

* Famous fictional allotment holders include Arthur from EastEnders, who died among his spuds and caulis. The actor Charles Dance and, less surprisingly, Alan Titchmarsh are allotment gardeners.

* The National Society of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners is the UK's biggest allotment body. The latest issue of its quarterly magazine, Allotment and Leisure Gardener, includes news of the Third Dunblane Potato Day and an ad for "probably the greatest rotavators on earth" (the BCS and the Camon).

* In the UK, the size of allotment plots is measured in "rods". One rod equals 25.29 square metres.

* Allotments thrive on rules. For example, Greenwich council requires that pathways should be 47.27cm wide. Waltham Forest council bans bonfires on its allotments.

* The Luxembourg-based Office International du Coin de Terre et des Jardins Familiaux is Europe's largest body representing allotment gardeners (it claims to have three million members). Tickets for this year's International Allotment Gardeners' Congress in Krakow, Poland, are selling fast.

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