| If you’ve ever been to the edge of a German city, you’ve probably seen the precise rows of cottages on postage-stamp lots filled with fruit trees and vegetable patches, sometimes squeezed between apartment buildings or warehouses. No, these aren’t some sort of unusually tidy slum housing. They’re what the English would call allotments, and they’re virtually unknown in the US. Rented to individuals at a below-market rate for the non-commercial cultivation of fruit and vegetables, these gardens are a cultural institution throughout northern and eastern Europe, though the Germans are particularly fond of them. There are nearly 900,000 such “Schreber gardens” scattered through the Federal Republic, with more than 60,000 in Berlin alone. (There’s also a law to govern them, with strict rules about keeping one-third of the garden in fruit and veg and even whether you’re allowed to have a toilet on the property.) Theories about how to keep big-city residents healthy were behind the gardens from the beginning. Not all have aged well: Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, the 19th century Leipzig doctor for whom the gardens are named, pushed for outdoor play space for inner-city children but also thought they should be strapped into harnesses in order to straighten their spines. Modern medicine has abandoned Schreber’s orthopedic contraptions but built on his era’s ideas of the garden as a cure for the under-exercised urban resident. The UK’s National Health Service categorizes heavy gardening together with weightlifting as a muscle-building activity, and mowing the lawn alongside doubles tennis as moderate aerobic exercise. A raft of clinical studies have tried to nail down just how much gardening helps the body and brain. It’s a tough thing to investigate without the placebo effect, but some researchers have tried to pair gardeners with non-gardeners in order to get a comparison. In one Dutch survey, allotment gardeners over the age of 62 scored better than their neighbors on health and wellbeing. (Interestingly, younger gardeners showed no difference.) A single session of gardening in an allotment improved self-esteem and mood in a UK trial. A randomized study in Alabama found that, while vegetable gardening didn’t improve a range of health and wellbeing measures in older cancer survivors, participants still ate more vegetables, could walk more quickly and perceived their own health as better. After my family’s first adventures in Schreber gardening this spring, I can report that the physical benefits seem real: an afternoon shifting topsoil hurts more (in a good way) than an hour in the gym. But for people like us — not yet old or ill, just overscheduled and under-slept — the psychological benefit of the dirt on our fingers might be the most important factor of all. — Naomi Kresge | 
