VOA标准英语2011--Community Gardens Thrive in Urban Jungle

Community Gardens Thrive in Urban Jungle

Friday, April 22, is Earth Day, a time set aside to appreciate nature and to dedicate ourselves to protecting and sustaining it. New York City, a place many think of as an "urban jungle," is home to more than 500 community gardens where the crops are as diverse as New Yorkers themselves.
Creating and sustaining these green spaces offer pleasure, camaraderie¹ and much needed contact with the wonders of nature.
It's nearly nine a.m. on a workday but Noah Kaufman, volunteer manager of the 113th Street Play Garden, cannot help stopping at the 12-by-30-meter green space. Grabbing a hand trowel, he turns over the pebbly² loam³ looking for worms for his plot.
"New York City is, if anything, the built environment. We have plenty of concrete. We have plenty of bricks. We have plenty of steel," says Kaufman. "We have little, little places like this vest pocket park, which are a small oasis⁴, a piece of green, a place where there are trees, where there are weed trees, fruits trees which have been planted by humans or planted by nature provide a little refuge from the city. So for the neighbors here on 113th street, this is our front yard and we share it."
The community garden has been a refuge for Alexandra Patz and her 7-year-old son ever since her family moved to New York from the suburbs where they had their own yard.
"When we moved to the city, I was glad to find on this block that there was this little garden where we could become involved, and where my son could experience digging and growing things," says Patz.
New York's community garden movement began during the 1970s. It was a difficult era, when the city's population was declining and many city-owned lots were trash-filled, rat-infested eyesores. Erica Packard is with the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, which raise money to buy urban green space and transfer ownership into community hands. The city offered to give the lots to organized groups in exchange for improving and maintaining them.
"Those neighborhoods were, and still are, least served by the existing parks system," says Packard. "So they provide some of the only open accessible green space, particularly for seniors and children in low income neighborhoods."
A milestone⁵ in the movement was the creation of Operation GreenThumb. It's a program within the city's Department of Parks that offers free gardening classes and light equipment like shovels⁶ and rakes. Still, in leaner times, many communities have had to fight to keep control of their gardens when the city wanted to auction⁷ the plots to tax-paying real estate developers. Some green spaces have been lost this way because people couldn't maintain them properly.
Community garden organizer Catherine Wint, of the Manhattan and Bronx Land trusts, says that because gardens are governed by grassroots volunteers with diverse interests, keeping them going is an exercise in democracy.
"It's different than a park because individuals in a community garden have to have a relationship and they have to work democratically," says Wint. "And they have to come up with procedures to enable them to share this very small space in a way that's going to benefit everyone."
The diversity of plants in the city's community gardens reflects the variety of New Yorkers themselves. For example, there's a bed of special red peppers planted by a Mexican immigrant family growing next to a stand of flowering peonies tended by a homesick Chinese gardener.
Mint says gardens in African-American neighborhoods often feature the collard greens and black-eyed peas favored on many Southern family farms.
"And they hold up that tradition of farming because it's still within the memory of the family. They still go back down South and their relatives still come up to New York. So it's always a source of pride for them to bring their relatives to the community garden to see that they are continuing this tradition that's gone on in their family for so long. And people walk by it and say ‘That's a farm. That's a farm.'"
There is pride on the face of Lori Harris as she surveys the half square block of green her farm-raised father, now 90, helped create from a rubble-strewn Harlem lot in 1979.
"You have to give back to the Earth. You can't just take everything from it. You gotta learn how to recycle and clean up. People think groceries come from the grocery store, but they come from a farm," says Harris. "They start from somewhere. So you really have to treat Mother Earth right and she treats you just the same."

1 camaraderie   

n.同志之爱，友情

参考例句：

• The camaraderie among fellow employees made the tedious work just bearable.同事之间的情谊使枯燥乏味的工作变得还能忍受。
• Some bosses are formal and have occasional interactions,while others prefer continual camaraderie.有些老板很刻板，偶尔才和下属互动一下；有些则喜欢和下属打成一片。

2 pebbly   

多卵石的，有卵石花纹的

参考例句：

• Sometimes the water spread like a sheen over the pebbly bed. 有时河水泛流在圆石子的河床上，晶莹发光。
• The beach is pebbly. 这个海滩上有许多卵石。

3 loam   

n.沃土

参考例句：

• Plant the seeds in good loam.把种子种在好的壤土里。
• One occupies relatively dry sandy loam soils.一个则占据较干旱的沙壤土。

4 oasis   

n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方

参考例句：

• They stopped for the night at an oasis.他们在沙漠中的绿洲停下来过夜。
• The town was an oasis of prosperity in a desert of poverty.该镇是贫穷荒漠中的一块繁荣的“绿洲”。

5 milestone   

n.里程碑；划时代的事件

参考例句：

• The film proved to be a milestone in the history of cinema.事实证明这部影片是电影史上的一个里程碑。
• I think this is a very important milestone in the relations between our two countries.我认为这是我们两国关系中一个十分重要的里程碑。

6 shovels   

n.铲子( shovel的名词复数 )；锹；推土机、挖土机等的)铲；铲形部份v.铲子( shovel的第三人称单数 )；锹；推土机、挖土机等的)铲；铲形部份

参考例句：

• workmen with picks and shovels 手拿镐铲的工人
• In the spring, we plunge shovels into the garden plot, turn under the dark compost. 春天，我们用铁锨翻开园子里黑油油的沃土。 来自辞典例句

7 auction   

n.拍卖；拍卖会；vt.拍卖

参考例句：

• They've put the contents of their house up for auction.他们把房子里的东西全都拿去拍卖了。
• They bought a new minibus with the proceeds from the auction.他们用拍卖得来的钱买了一辆新面包车。