Red Tail Hawk's Eye View

This beautiful photo was taken by UCONN landscape arcitecture student Sabrina Buttitta from the roof of the Underswood Senior Apartments. It is a great perspective on how urban agriculture fits into our cityscape. You can see I-84 winding in the background just as the banks of the Park River used to hug the land against the garden. Urban mini-farms such as GROW are an oasis of new opportunity for our cities; from outdoor education, to micro-enterprise potentials, for wildlife, and transformative beauty. For me it is a reminder that the city still connects to the earth, where natural features and topography are released to express themselves and interact with the human elements fo the modern city. This is an easy thing to forget as sit in traffic on Park St. watching layers of asphalt and stone laid down, but important to remember when you create the opportunity to harvest red sweet tomatoes on a lot that used to be filled with debris and scare the squirrels away from a neat and row of rasberries.-Shannon