The Gazette: Fertile garden offers oasis in urban jungle

The garlic is already up, its green shoots poking out of the mulch in garden beds next to a concrete tower on McGill University’s downtown campus. What used to be a rock bed is now a fertile garden, transformed, thanks to energetic volunteers from two Montreal non-profit organizations tackling the problem of food insecurity. Soon the walls of the Burnside Hall math and science building will be home again to bean plants, with tomatoes and eggplants soaking up the sun throughout the summer. It’s an urban garden that provides people, mainly seniors, with locally-grown herbs and vegetables, run by Santropol Roulant, Alternatives and McGill. Tuesday their efforts were recognized with a prize for sustainable development, one of 10 handed out at a lunchtime gala in Old Montreal by the city of Montreal and the Conseil régional de l’environnement-Montréal. The garden started out as a rooftop container garden at another institution, but when Santropol Roulant and Alternatives approached McGill about setting it up on their campus, architecture professor Vikram Bhatt had the idea to move it off the roof and down to ground level...

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