Cambridge Street pop-up and the social history of gardening in East Cambridge
By Beth Folsom, 2025
History Cambridge joins with the Cambridge Plant & Garden Club and East Cambridge Business Association on Saturday for a pop-up event celebrating Cambridge Street, the lifeline of the East Cambridge neighborhood. The event takes place in Cambridge Courtyard, the meeting spot tucked beside the train tracks on Cambridge Street, where History Cambridge will share information about the neighborhood and hope to hear some of your stories too. The Cambridge Plant & Garden Club plans to give away 100 geranium plants.
In preparation, History Cambridge explored the role of gardens and gardening in Cambridge during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the East Cambridge neighborhood. In November 1888, theCambridge Chronicle reported that the East Cambridge Women’s Christian Temperance Union had just finished its work for the year on its Flower Mission initiative. This program was designed to collect and distribute flowers and plants to the sick, elderly and homebound as a means of lifting their spirits and fostering community.
The act of growing flowers for use in the Flower Mission program was just as significant as the act of receiving them. The Chronicle noted “another person who is very fond of his garden kept bringing home plant after plant at the beginning of the season, and when the fact was noticed, said, ‘Well, I don’t drink any beer, my beer money goes for flowers, and I am going to have as many as I want.’ As a result, great handfuls of heliotrope and other fragrant flowers have carried delight into many a shadowed home, and perhaps lifted the thought from the flowers to the giver of all good.”
The simple act of growing flowers and sharing them with the needy held multiple layers of meaning; gardening was seen as a desirable hobby that fostered creativity, generosity and religious reflection. As the gardener quoted notes, because he did not engage in the “vice” of drinking alcohol, his time, money and attention could be directed toward an activity that enriched his own life and brightened the lives of others. This was an especially relevant goal for an organization such as the Temperance Union, which equated sobriety with Christianity and productivity.
The Progressive Era of the 1890s through the 1920s placed a large emphasis on gardening as a means of social uplift and community improvement, and this was as true in Cambridge as in the rest of the country. In 1902, a committee of middle- and upper-class Cambridge women embarked on an effort to distribute 4,000 seed packages to children in East Cambridge and Cambridgeport as a means to beautify these “poorer areas” of the city. Knowing that many East Cambridge families lived in tenement apartments with little or no yard space, the committee also distributed window boxes so children in these families could participate in the project. In reporting on this initiative, the Chronicle stated that “the women in these districts are very appreciative of this work, and the committee hopes to enlarge the field greatly another season.” An important part of the gardening initiative was to involve the community as much as possible; the reformers did not want to come in as outsiders and plant gardens for the people in poorer neighborhoods, but rather they wanted to engage residents in the work of cultivation, which they equated with moral uplift and community pride.
Cambridge had established a Home and School Gardening Committee by 1904 to extend these efforts to more of the city, and also to its elementary schools. According to the Chronicle, the women on the committee “try to cultivate a love of flowers in the boys and girls who live in such squalid homes that the appearance of one of these blossoms seems hardly in keeping with the surroundings where it has been nurtured to grow.” The article also cites the social good that had come from the home and school gardens as the children’s interest in gardening had spread to their families and fostered shared interests and cooperative spirit.
Although the reformers’ efforts were well-intentioned, they were also based on fundamental misconceptions about the residents of these neighborhoods. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Cambridge saw an influx of immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and China. Many of these newly arrived individuals and families did live in substandard housing, because their status as immigrants did not afford them access to well-paying jobs, and many shared tenement apartments with a number of friends and family as they got on their feet, leading to overcrowding and sanitation issues in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. But this was not, as many reformers supposed, due to cultural deficiencies or lower standards of cleanliness and space.
In fact, many immigrant families highly prized the ability to grow their own flowers and vegetables, and had been doing so on what small plots of land they had access to long before the creation of the Home and School Gardening Committee and like-minded groups. Immigrants with roots in Mediterranean countries, for instance, felt that their homes (modest as they may be) were not complete without a grape arbor and tomato plants. Many homes in East Cambridge, North Cambridge, and Cambridgeport contain the descendants of these vines planted more than a century ago.
During World War I and World War II, the emphasis on the beneficial effects of gardening was channeled into the Victory Garden movement, which sought to boost food production on the homefront and enable more produce to be sent to soldiers overseas. Victory gardens also allowed immigrants to assert their patriotism, even as they were growing fruits and vegetables from their own cultural traditions.
This article originally appeared in Cambridge Day.
