Fwd: Event on community gardens

[Nicholas Leete]

Hello all, passing on this invitation about an event at UW on community gardens, see below.  While I'm at it, we're holding a few different workdays on invasive species control around some of our community gardens, as well as other work on Rooted projects next week, see here for more info and to sign up if you're interested:  https://www.voltagevolunteering.com/organization/222/opportunities

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Emily Callaci <ejca...@wisc.edu>
Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 10:07 AM
Subject: Event on community gardens
To: gar...@rootedwi.org <gar...@rootedwi.org>

Dear Garden Network,

Happy spring! I’m a history professor at UW Madison, and am writing to let you know about an event on campus next week that may be of interest to your community of gardeners and food growers. I was hoping you could help me spread the word by sharing with your members. The event is a talk by historian and gardener Kate Brown, and it is called Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City. The talk will be Monday April 20^th at 5pm on the UW campus at Conrad Elvejhem Hall, room L140.

Here is a link to the event:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tiny-gardens-everywhere-with-kate-brown-registration-1984983231279

People do not have to register, but the first 20 people who DO register will be eligible for a free copy of her book.

Here is a description:

Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community.

This manifesto for the next food revolution by acclaimed environmental historian Kate Brown speaks to nature lovers, food activists, social–justice warriors, urban planners, WOOFers, and the climate–concerned.

Ever since wage labor in cities replaced self–provisioning in the countryside, gardeners have reclaimed lost commons on urban lots. They composted garbage into topsoil, creating the most productive agriculture in recorded human history, without use of fossil fuels. The ecological diversity they fostered made room for human difference and built prosperity, too: in Nazi Berlin, working–class gardeners harbored dissidents and Jews; in Washington, DC, Black southern migrants built communities around gardens and orchards, the produce funding homeownership.

Grafting contemporary experience and concerns onto every historical chapter, Kate Brown creates a mesmerizing hybrid past and present, archive and experience, showing how down–to–earth gardeners can reap abundant harvests while fostering mutual aid and political engagement.

Hope to see some community gardeners there!

Take good care,

Emily

Emily Callaci
Professor
Department of History
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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