COURTESY OF FRIENDS OF BRADNER GARDENS PARK Mount Baker neighbors, as well as people from around the city, are drawn to Bradner Gardens' sunny, plant-filled site with a view to downtown Seattle. For more information about the P-Patch program, check out the Seattle Parks & Recreation Department Web site at www.cityofseattle.net/parks/ or call 206-684-4075.

GARDENING TENDS to be a solitary communion with nature in your own back yard. But while many of us have been planting our personal Edens, others have had the vision to seek a wider circle of fellow gardeners. From subsistence farming to butterfly borders, Seattle's community gardens are part of a nationwide trend toward urban havens where the sowing of vegetables and flowers reaps a harvest of shared purpose as satisfying as the lettuces and chard.

It has been said that urban community gardens are the last remnants of the commons in contemporary life. Perhaps that explains the grass-roots phenomenon of people gardening together, most often prompted by the urge to grow food or clean up a derelict property.

Public art, including the insect-themed tiled restrooms in the new building, is just one of Bradner Gardens' many attractions.

For all of us in the city, it's so easy to forget where food comes from, and this disconnect is a kind of poverty amidst our abundance. U.S. Department of Agriculture research shows that the average distance a vegetable travels from the fields to the dinner table is 1,500 miles, losing nutrients and flavor with every hour of transport.

The desire to grow your own, as well as the shortage of flat, sunny gardening spots in steep, well-treed Seattle, is why we have 70 communal gardens within the city limits, up from 30 a decade ago. Most are P-Patches, others are youth and market gardens at Seattle Housing Authority sites, where gardening is used as a tool for social change. There's a two- to three-year waiting list for the most popular P-Patches on Capitol and Queen Anne hills.

It's hard to typify who is working these plots, for both renters and home owners participate for a variety of reasons. "Many, especially in the South End, are subsistence gardeners, where the food grown goes directly to the table," says Rich McDonald, Seattle P-Patch program manager. These plots are a social outlet, a safe place for kids to play, as well as a chance to work the earth in familiar rhythms.

Seattle P-Patches are all organic, and that's not the only trend-setting going on here. McDonald's department is developing terraced sites on slopes and considering creative farming options for food-bank production. "We're dipping our toes into communal gardens, not divided into individual plots, in the most densely populated parts of the city," he says. What used to be a guerrilla garden in a right-of-way on Capitol Hill is now the Pelican Tea Garden where neighbors cultivate vegetables and fruit trees.

Because P-Patches have turned so many people into dedicated park stewards, there's been a real shift in how community gardens are viewed within the city administration. Originally, these plots were seen merely as an interim use of park land, but now the Seattle Parks & Recreation Department has a policy statement recognizing P-Patches as a valid park use. The Seattle Parks Foundation is supportive; executive director Karen Daubert thinks there's something magical about how community gardens bring neighbors together. She points out Bradner Gardens in the Mount Baker neighborhood as "a model of models" for the country.

The garden's 1.6-acre site, with a terrific view out over Seattle, used to house abandoned school portables and a P-Patch for Laotian immigrants. Its tenacious and talented volunteers fought City Hall to block the sale of the site to a developer and have since developed a rich, multiuse garden that's become a magnet for people in the neighborhood and around the city.

Seattle Tilth created seven theme gardens, Master Gardeners holds clinics, the entire site is pesticide free. A hundred gardeners of diverse ethnicities, including some of the original Laotians, till their own plots; there's a functioning windmill, children's gardens and a new community center built with sustainable materials.

"The wonderful thing about volunteers in parks," Daubert concludes, "is that people working together in public spaces is so very satisfying at the end of the day."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle free-lance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.