“Hey, nice crack!,” the girl heard a voice call out from a distance. Embarrassed, the girl quickly stood up and turned around. Only then did she realize he wasn't talking about that, he was talking about her garden.

The Crack Garden. No, it has nothing to do with your bottom, nor does it involve drugs. And frankly both of those thoughts came to my mind first because living in suburbia, I often forget about my fellow city dwellers and their lack of space for growing gardens. So what do you do when you have a lot of concrete, a lack of money and a desire to turn white and bland into a colorful and lively garden? Well, when the landscape architecture firm, Conger Moss Guillard (CMG), was presented with the riddle, they turned a concrete yard into a masterpiece. First they jack-hammered the concrete into even strips. Next they dug through the rubble revealing untouched earth. And then they planted flowers, herbs and more into the cracks, filling every nook and cranny. As CMG wrote on its site, “Inspired by the tenacious plants that pioneer the tiny cracks of the urban landscape, the formal rows of this garden create order in the random and mixed planting of herbs, vegetables, strange flowers and rogue weeds.”

The unexpected Crack Garden won an Honor Award in the Residential Design Category for the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects Professional Awards. The jury commented, "What a wonderful idea that can be used everywhere. A grassroots project on how to take something and make it sustainable without any means. Very deliberate; good rhythm. A profound project for the future we are about to embark upon." So what does it take to create this boring-turned-beauty sustainable landscape?

-Your basic ordinary concrete already in place

- A jackhammer

- Soil amendment

- Plants

- $500

I love that instead of removing the concrete altogether, or bringing in potted plants, the designers were able to add life, but still hold on to the garden’s “original” identity. This is the first time I’ve come across anything like this. I wonder if the crack garden is a one-of-a-kind endeavor or if other homeowners and landscape architects have implemented similar style gardens.

By Gawky Green of Two Girls Go Green

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