Helen Babbs is a self-proclaimed city girl who lives on the second floor of a flat in a chaotic corner of London. An urge to find more green in the city and a stronger connection to the natural world leads her to create her first garden, an organic edible garden on her rooftop. This year-long adventure is the story behind My Garden, the City and Me. The journey begins in the dark of winter, where Babbs finds herself at a seed swap on a February morning, seduced more by packaging than by any true understanding of the plants. As the year progresses, Babbs revels in failures, like waking up bleary eyed and stomping on her seed starts, and triumphs like her summer-ending dinner party made with homegrown produce. Along the way she discovers “that I like gardening in my pajamas and that growing something from seed, watching it develop and then eating its fruits is truly joyful. I’ve daydreamed out there and entertained out there. It’s the force behind new friendships that I’ve forged. The garden has opened my eyes to a whole new side of London and urban living.” My Garden, the City and Me is a lyrical narrative about a twenty-something in search for a bit of wild in her city. The journey is charming, honest, and steeped in the lore of London, a city equally known for its gardens and its grit. In the end Babbs has achieved a new perspective on what it means to live green in the city she loves.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ... AN EXPLORATION INTO "JACK KETCH'S WARREN" FEW days since it was my good fortune to receive a rather curious and interesting letter. The writer was a City missionary, and the communication was dated from the "Mission House, Turnmill Street, Clerkenwell." It was a remarkably blunt and plain-spoken communication. It set forth that in a story of mine recently written and published mention was made of Frying-pan Alley, and an attempt made to describe that place and its inhabitants, whereas nothing could be plainer to any one well acquainted with the locality than that I in reality knew next to nothing about it. "Not that it is in any degree wonderful or surprising that it should be so," was the text of my friend's epistle, "since it is almost impossible, except from one or two sources, to obtain anything like reliable information as to Frying-pan Alley, or the other disgraceful and disgusting alleys and courts adjacent. It is a waste of time to make inquiries of the police. A single policeman is rarely, if ever, seen in Frying-pan Alley, Bit Alley, Rose Alley, or the Broad Yard, in the course of his perambulations 'on beat: ' it would be scarcely safe in riotous seasons for him to show a face there, and secure harbour is thus afforded to thieves. The sanitary officers of the parish are even more timid than the police, so that year in and year out the alleys mentioned are the undisturbed breeding-places for fever and pestilence, and though sickness and disease in one form or another is never absent, a Scripture reader is almost as unknown to the wretched creatures who herd there as a breath of pure fresh air. There are but two persons--the parish doctor and myself--who have a perfect knowledge of the extent of vice and misery constantly to be...

Greenwood pioneered investigative journalism and adopted disguises to personally experience life in the rough streets of Victorian London. This work is one of a series in which he presents his observations of the poor disguised as one of them. Historian, E. A. Freeman (1823-1892) described him as "the most celebrated exponent of mid-Victorian complete participation" in the experience of the poor. Charles Dickens and others may have interviewed the poor, but Greenwood became "one of the crowd" and so provided a model for successors like Jack London, Mary Higgs, and George Orwell. --Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2014.