A Garden Among Concrete
“So… you mean you don’t know this?” I pointed at a picture of a strawberry plant in our biology textbook, genuinely stunned. “Don’t you eat strawberries?”
“Yes, I do” my friend replied, puzzled. “But how could I recognize the plant it comes from? I’m an eater, not a grower.”
I laughed at first, but the moment lingered uncomfortably. She wasn’t the only one. I had asked five classmates the same question, and not one of them could recognize a strawberry plant. That was the first time I realized not everyone had the most precious gift that my family’s rooftop garden had given me: a connection with the natural world, right in the heart of a modern city.
I live in Shenzhen, a vibrant, industrialized coastal metropolis in southern China, with skyscrapers stretching into the sky and a subway system that hums like a heartbeat beneath the streets. But my home is in a part of the city known as an “urban village”, a patchwork of self-built homes that somehow escaped the well-organized urban planning. On one side of the road stand sleek, glass-walled towers; on the other, small, aging houses that hold stories, memories, and, in our house, a garden.
Ours sits on the rooftop, a tiny miracle hidden in the buzz of the city. My mother began it when I was born, wanting pesticide-free vegetables to feed her infant daughter. As I grew, so did the garden: cabbages, tomatoes, blueberries, grapes, loquats. Chickens wander around, ducks quack from corners, and two cats nap lazily beneath the grape trellis. On sunny days, I’d drag a chair into the middle and lose myself in the warmth of the sun. On rainy days, I’d place a ladder between two vines, climb up, and poke my head out from a sea of leaves, watching them tremble and roll like waves beneath the wind and rain. Summer, when the gourds grew wild and storms arrived without warning, was my favorite season.
I never thought of it as unusual, until that week in biology class. Until the strawberries.
I couldn’t shake it. How could an entire class at one of Shenzhen’s top high schools be unable to recognize the plants that produce the food we eat every day? I started showing pictures, potato plants, tomato vines, carrot greens, asking classmates to identify even one. Silence. Confusion. Shrugs.
That weekend, I returned home and climbed up to the garden again. The air was filled with the same floral sweetness, the moonlight was gentle, the cicadas sang without pause. Yet I felt strangely hollow. How had we grown so distant from something so essential?
We live on the land, eat from it, breathe the oxygen its plants produce. And yet we’ve built lives so far removed from the soil that we don’t recognize the shape of a plant whose fruit we eat weekly. Our buildings rise higher and higher, while our roots grow fainter. Even when people go hiking, biking, or picnicking, it often seems they treat the trees and grass like scenery in a painting, not as living beings they coexist with. Surrounded by millions of lives in a patch of city grass, most notice nothing. Starting from here, looking back, the lives of humankind where we prayed on the vast grassland and painted in the cave seemed so far away. Sometimes I wander, how long it will take us to completely forget our origin and become monsters in concrete.
That is the dust of forgetting.
But that’s not where the story ends. Even in the midst of this disconnection, a quieter truth has begun to emerge.
Recently, as strawberries ripen I hear from my mother that her colleagues have started growing strawberries and herbs on their balconies, swapping tips over lunch breaks. Online, the “urban gardening” and “balcony farming” tags are gaining popularity, short videos of people harvesting lettuce in laundry baskets, or turning rooftops into green havens. Even national media has begun to reflect this shift: a recent documentary-style reality show, Let’s Farm, follows a group of city-born young adults as they spend 190 days running a real farm from scratch. The show’s honest portrayal of labor and land has resonated with millions, drawing over 2 billion views online. It’s clear that people are not only craving nature, but starting to reach for it. There’s a quiet movement blooming, pixel by pixel, plant by plant.
I don’t believe everyone needs a garden to be whole. But I do believe everyone needs to know what it feels like to watch something grow. To care for a living thing with patience and attention. To remember the start of life.