Mobile gardens are here, there and everywhere! On Staten Island, artist activist Tattfoo Tan is hosting a mobile garden “expo” where people can bring their mobile gardens to “ooooh” and “ahhhh” at the ingenuity and beauty of each other’s work, and then wheel their creations a few blocks to the St. George Ferry Terminal where the gardens will be “parked” in the taxi pick-up area for commuters to enjoy for a month.

Mobile gardens are projects that redefine “green space” on the micro scale. You can roll your mobile garden—planted in an old office chair seat, grown on a skateboard or cultivated in a rusting shopping cart—to the nearest urban sign post. Then chain it and leave it to flourish in the sunshine for all to enjoy. Get a large group of mobile gardens together in one place and you’ve got a temporary island of atomized greenery on wheels. If you get really ambitious—like artist Joe Baldwin—you can turn a train car into a mobile garden for commuters to enjoy in the city of Chicago.

Mobile gardening is art and community action at the same time. It expands green resources for neighborhoods that are decidedly ungreen, and taps into creative impulses on the personal level. Another urban greening tactic is to lob “seed bombs” into vacant lots and other underutilized spaces. Seed bombs are small balls created from moistened organic compost, clay  and indigenous seeds.