“Might I,” said Mary, “have a bit of earth?”
It’s one of the most quietly revolutionary questions in children’s literature. When Mary Lennox asks for a bit of earth in The Secret Garden, she’s not demanding wealth, or freedom, or even love. She asks for something older and humbler: a patch of ground to call her own, to tend and watch, to know by the shape of its weeds and the smell of its soil. She asks to belong.
Once, we all had—or at least expected to have—a bit of earth. Not acres. Not abstracted wealth. Just a plot. A bounded space where attention could take root. Where tomatoes and children grew slowly. Where something of our own labor might bloom or go to seed, and where we’d come to know the difference.
The plot was physical, yes: the backyard garden, the borrowed churchyard, the weedy margin behind the garage. But it was more than that. It was a way of living within limits, a pattern of provision and patience, a quiet confidence that not everything had to scale.
That plot was something owned, clung to even, in the understanding that he who has a piece of ground to call his own is not truly bereft, no matter what else is lost. There is, at the very least, a place to begin again.
Even as towns grew and population density increased, the need for space to meet one’s own needs persisted. A Victory Garden in every yard, and a chicken in every pot! Or at least a backyard garden behind the row house, or an allotted parcel just outside of town, suitable for vegetables, rabbits, or a few hens.
As recently as the early twentieth century, it was common for small-town residents to own a house near the center and also a bit of farmland on the edge of town. You can trace the pattern on old plat maps, where farmsteads pressed up against town limits before those same parcels sprouted subdivisions instead of oats, potatoes, or hay. Back when the average farm in a county was eighty acres—not eight thousand.
We’ve largely traded the idea of a plot for the modern concept of a lot. One letter, but a world of difference. A plot is that piece of creation over which we exercise a tiny modicum of our mandated dominion, to practice stewardship. A lot is a registered subdivision of geography, whose value is managed by assessors and determined by market forces. It transforms land from a place to a commodity.
And many of us have given up even that, in favor of what urbanists call “the built environment.” We rent, or claim to own, apartments in structures that sit on land we do not touch and do not tend. We exercise no care for the ground beneath our feet, and derive no nourishment from it.
We’ve lost the plot. Not only in the literal sense—the parcels of land that once tethered families to soil, seasons, and each other—but also in the deeper narrative sense. We no longer know what the story is, or where it’s going. What once rooted us—land, family, faith, the rhythms of work and rest—has been traded for convenience, mobility, and placelessness. In trying to build lives of freedom, we’ve unmoored ourselves from the very things that made freedom meaningful.
And instead, we’ve turned those plots into a moth-eaten quilt of subdivisions and two-acre “mini estates” that pock the landscape of nearly every rural region. This kind of “development” doesn’t just stretch outward—it stretches inward. It eats into the fabric of rural communities from the edges and the center, unraveling what was once cohesive. It leaves in its wake a pattern of isolated parcels no longer devoted to the growth of food or families, but to the performance of lifestyle, the pursuit of status.
My morning commute carries me past a whole panoply of these places. But one catches my attention more than the others. Each morning, I pass a trim blonde woman power-walking laps around her own driveway, which arcs in a tidy horseshoe. At its apex sits a suburban-style snout house, centered on the roughly two-acre parcel that’s been carved out of the surrounding farmland for it.
The road itself is busy enough, especially in the morning, and lacks anything resembling a shoulder. It’s not a safe place for a walk. So she loops her own drive—again and again—under the gaze of her neighbor’s horses, who watch with liquid-eyed curiosity from the adjoining field.
I wonder, often, whether she understood what her life would be like when she bought that home. Was the isolation intentional? Or did she imagine that “living in the country” would bring with it some rural analog to suburbia—a network of like-minded neighbors, porch-sitters and potluck sharers, all just a stroll away?
If they’re there, they’re too far down the road to walk to. Too far to share a cup of coffee on the porch. Too far for a child to ride a bike unaccompanied.
The house itself has no garden. No chickens. No workshop. Just a large garage housing an RV—perhaps for escaping the place she tried to escape to. What story did she tell herself about how life would feel here? What plot did she imagine she was entering?
This is not—I’m acutely aware—a novel insight. The debate over sprawl has raged for decades, and some still argue it’s not a problem at all. A recent piece in The New York Times, for example, contends that suburban expansion is the answer to the housing crisis.
But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the suburban experiment has failed. The physical form may be functional for cars, but it’s alienating for people. It hollows out rural communities and replaces them with a landscape of isolation.
Chuck Marohn and the Strong Towns movement have made a forceful case against sprawl, arguing instead for a “thickening” of existing towns and a return to local life supported by walkability, density, and civic resilience. It’s important work—but it speaks mostly to cities and large towns. Rural communities don’t need bike lanes or revised parking minimums. They need something that fits their own grid: square-mile roads, a few stop signs, and a church, a diner, and a gas station at the crossroads.
Wendell Berry, for his part, calls us back to the family farm and the homestead—to rootedness, memory, and place. His vision is both luminous and sobering. The problem is, most of us can’t go home again. As Grace Olmstead describes in her book, Uprooted, we are a generation largely uprooted from ancestral land, from the very rhythms Berry holds dear. Few of us had the good fortune to learn to plow with horses, or to grow up knowing the soil of a single field. Even those who long for that life would not know how to begin.
Others, like Brian Donahue in The Essential Agrarian Reader, promote the re-establishment of the commons: shared ownership of land and shared responsibility for its care. There’s an idealism to this that I appreciate, and the historical precedent is real. But commons only work in high-trust societies—where conformity is enforced not just by law but by a deeply embedded culture of mutual accountability. That’s hard to come by in a fragmented world where neighbors are strangers, and where individual freedom is prized above shared obligation.
Some local governments and nonprofits have tried to slow the advance of sprawl through agricultural or conservation easements. But these are typically designed with agribusiness in mind. The assumptions built into the rules favor large parcels and large machinery. They preserve acreage, not culture. And they do almost nothing to restore the relationship between people and the land—not at the human scale, not at the family scale.
But what if we could take the best parts of all these models and recombine them? What if we borrowed Strong Towns’ idea of “thickening”—focusing growth where people already live—and married it to a genuine preservation of farmland? Not just as landscape, or yield per acre, but as a living part of the community: stewarded, productive, and accessible. What if, instead of isolating people on ornamental plots, we offered them a real oikos—a household economy in the truest, oldest sense of the word?
We used to know how to do this—not only in colonial New England villages with their shared commons, or in Puritan towns founded on theological and agrarian unity. Sometimes the pattern was formal. Consider James Oglethorpe’s plan for Savannah, Georgia: each household received a small residential lot within the city grid, a five-acre garden plot outside the walls, and a forty-five-acre farm further out. It was a nested system of care and responsibility—intended to ensure provision, community, and rootedness all at once.
Other times, the pattern emerged more organically. On early plat maps of small towns across the Midwest, you’ll often see the same surname attached to both a clustered town lot and a larger parcel just beyond the edge. People lived near each other, but worked the land beyond together. The community was neither fully agrarian nor fully urban. It was woven.
Even in denser urban environments, garden plots have long played a role. From World War II Victory Gardens to community gardens in modern condominium complexes, the instinct to cultivate something—no matter how small—has persisted wherever people are given the opportunity and encouragement to do so.
Once, we understood that density and land access were not opposites. We knew that proximity didn’t have to mean disconnection from provision. It was a system not without flaws—but it was frugal, participatory, and distributist. It assumed that households had a role to play in the local economy. It gave them a place to exercise that role. And it trusted that most people, given a chance to be stewards, would try.
And what if I told you that the basic elements of a better system already exist?
Most rural regions are still dotted with little towns—or at least clusters of homes, gathered loosely around a church or two, maybe a diner, a bakery, or a garage that still does repairs. Many of these settlements aren’t even incorporated as villages or cities. They don’t appear in bold on a map. But they’re there.
The challenge is to keep those clusters alive—to maintain their cohesion—while also protecting the farmland that surrounds them from being nibbled away by subdivisions and mini-estates. At the same time, we must prevent the local economy from being swallowed up by distant interests: agribusiness conglomerates, or wind and solar installations that neither employ locals nor feed local households or shops.
We can’t recreate 18th-century Savannah, but we can borrow its pattern. We can tie some of the homes in these rural clusters to parcels of land just outside of town—parcels that are legally deeded to the house, but cannot be sold separately. Land that must remain in active, productive use, either by the homeowner or a local lessee. Keeping these parcels modest—between five and forty acres—makes them far less attractive to industrial-scale farming, and far more useful to people who want to build a life on a human scale.
These aren’t commons. They’re not held in collective ownership, nor are they governed by a board. But neither are they mere “lots,” bought and sold as speculative assets. They are plots in the older sense: purposeful pieces of ground meant to nourish a household and a community.
And within those boundaries, there is room for a thousand kinds of fruitfulness. A U-pick berry patch. A cut-flower farm. A CSA. A small orchard. Hay and grazing for wool sheep. A backyard dairy or a heritage poultry flock. A renting a field for a young neighbor trying out his first market garden. The point isn’t to build capital—it’s to build something else: resilience, knowledge, rootedness, skill, and memory. A local food culture. A household economy strong enough to stand against the winds of global fragility.
You ought to hear echoes of Proverbs 31 here: She considers a field and buys it… she girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong… she looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Of course, there are practicalities to address. This isn’t a project that any one household can undertake in isolation and expect to succeed. It requires coordination, commitment, and a degree of civic imagination.
The most logical way to begin is with a Land Trust—organized at the community level—to acquire likely parcels around a rural cluster or small town. These parcels could then be offered at below-market rates to nearby homeowners, with permanent deed restrictions tying the allotment to the home and setting clear guidelines for its use. The Trust would be responsible for codifying those rules and might also include a kind of “release valve,” allowing owners to return the land to the Trust if personal circumstances prevent continued stewardship.
Some zoning reform would also be necessary. The Trust would need to work with local authorities to ensure that infrastructure like wells, fencing, outbuildings, hoop houses, and small barns is permitted by right. And each Trust would need to decide whether to allow accessory or seasonal dwellings on the allotments. Why consider it? Because these parcels could provide an ideal entry point for a grown child, a beginning farmer, or a young family to test a land-based enterprise—without the capital required to purchase a full home and acreage outright. A small cottage could enable leaseholders to build experience, capital, and community before taking a larger step.
In communities within reach of an urban center, the Trust might also consider infrastructure that strengthens the viability of small agricultural businesses. A shared, state-inspected incubator kitchen would allow members to produce cottage goods—bread, jam, bone broth—for sale. Likewise, the Trust could lease a regular booth at a nearby farmers market and offer it as a cooperative space. This lowers the barrier for small producers.
The Trust itself would also need to take on a role of light but real leadership. Trustees might help facilitate lease agreements for parcels that go unused, or pair experienced mentors with newcomers who are still learning how to manage land well. It’s easy to romanticize the “fish out of water” story—urbanites who leap into rural life without a clue and chronicle their misadventures in blogs or books. But long-term success, and real community integration, comes more often when someone takes the time to show the newcomer where to start, what to plant, and what (or who!) to watch out for.
Land stewardship is not only a civic good—it is a spiritual one. That’s why it’s wise to include small, local churches in the vision from the very beginning.
A church might choose to steward an allotment as a congregation, cultivating vegetables or fruit for those in the community who struggle to afford fresh food. It’s a natural extension of the “leave some, take some” produce stands you still find in front of many rural churches. But this would take that impulse a step further—transforming informal generosity into a reliable ministry of provision and presence.
Alternatively, the church could use its parcel to host an apprenticeship program for young or aspiring farmers—passing on knowledge, offering a place to practice, and building ties across generations. It could even serve as a meaningful supplement for a bivocational pastor: a way to support a family that’s giving itself to ministry in a time when many rural congregations can no longer afford a full salary.
This is becoming more common. Many denominations now face a landscape dotted with small, faithful churches—too geographically isolated for consolidation, but too small to sustain full-time clergy. An allotment could offer not just food, but dignity. Not just income, but an invitation into deeper local life. The church would once again become what it has so often been in rural history: a center of provision, teaching, and care—not just for souls, but for soil.
None of this should be viewed as a panacea, or the solution to everything that is wrong with society. In fact, it’s workable only in a very narrowly defined type of place. This kind of cooperation can only take root in a community that is already knitted together by shared history, interest, and vision. It won’t work where people are strangers to each other, or have deeply divided ideas of what their place should be.
It needs to be a reasonable distance from a larger urban center, in order to have a ready market for the products being produced. Your neighbors can only eat so many jars of strawberry jam, however delicious it might be. At the same time, if that small town has a large proportion of its population already committed to becoming a suburban bedroom community for that urban center, the battle is already lost. People who feel enthusiastic about the encroachment of all the amenities that many associate with sprawl, or plan to profit from it by the sale of land to developers, are likely to oppose any effort to keep out the Taco Johns by changing the zoning laws.
And even if the effort succeeds, no legal change, however cleverly crafted, can create the culture necessary to develop a deeply rooted, agrarian community if the seeds of it aren’t already present. Legal structures can help get things set up, but only culture can maintain it over the years. Otherwise, it won’t be long before those new civic institutions are put to use by others for their own benefit.
It’s not a system that can “scale.” It’s meant to be small and it will only work if it stays small, small enough that the Land Trust board is comprised of locals whose interest lies in using its structure to preserve the founding vision. It must be constantly guarded against bloat, repurposing, or takeover by “green washed” corporations.
To reclaim the plot is not just to claim a bit of ground. It is to reclaim the story we have forgotten: that human life flourishes best when lived in community, with responsibility, within limits, and in love. To wait, with Mary Lennox, for the Magic to come into the garden.
A plot of land—rightly tended—is not just a place to live, but a place to become.
