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Here’s how it started: I recently moved from my home on a wooded, north-facing hillside to a neighborhood by the river. My new low-country residence has something that I have never been able to enjoy in my home gardening: a flat yard, plenty of sunlight, rich alluvial soil. Unfortunately it also has a well-established community of fat and happy groundhogs living beneath the shed in the backyard. So when my partner and I started planning for this year’s garden, I knew it would have to go streetside.

Inspired by the flat, sunny expanse, I began conjuring images of our edible front yard paradise. Vegetables, herbs and flowers of all colors and textures would replace the crabgrass lawn from one end to the other: okra, towering over us with its gorgeous papery hibiscus flowers, enough heirloom tomatoes to eat our fill and still jar up for the winter, beans and morning glories training along the porch railing and up the eaves, a thyme and mint pathway winding its way through the verdant, nourishing landscape. Ours would be a suburban garden of Eden, a garden of such bounty and deliciousness that it would inspire the entire neighborhood, maybe even the whole city of Knoxville, to pick up their hoes and join the fight for their food freedom!!