Carol and I were talking tonight about urban agriculture. She has a friend who teaches landscape design, and this friend is trying to promote fanciful urban agriculture like hydroponically grown plants on the sides of sky scrapers. This seemed a waste of time to both of us; why not farm the many empty lots that exist in some cities? Carol went further than that, saying that we don’t need urban agriculture so much as we need suburban agriculture: farms, not in the city, but close to the city; farms which fill in the spaces left by suburban sprawl. She was trying to explain this to her friend, the landscape designer. She knows he likes catchy phrases, so she told him, “We need growscapes instead of sprawlscapes.” We both laughed at her catchphrase. Yet funny as it is, I’d like it if we replaced suburban lawns front yards with suburban farming.

And if you ever see “Growscapes, Not Sprawlscapes!” on a bumper sticker in the future, remember that Carol was the one who coined the phrase.