Laura Lawson
2009 Fellow

Laura Lawson is an acclaimed author, landscape architect and avid gardener. Currently she is the Chair for the Landscape Architecture Department at Rutgers University.  She has been documenting and writing about community gardens for over fifteen years and has produced several articles and two books –  City Bountiful: A History of Community Gardening in America (University of California Press, 2005) and Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens (co-authored with Jeff Hou and Julie Johnson, University of Washington Press, 2009).Lawson continues her documentation of urban gardens, focusing on the cities of Chicago, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco. Her intense background research on the historic evolution of each city developed into a comparative framework to identify key themes/issues to compare across the different cities.