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There are more than a few urban dwellers who, despite the lack of a green patch attached to their properties, have their very own three-by-six-metre slice of land to plant anything under the sun. All it costs is $10 a year. That's the fee to join one of the many community gardens in Montreal's neighbourhoods.

Montreal has one of the most vibrant and organized community garden programs in North America. A total of 96 gardens are available across the city, and some 14,000 Montrealers have a patch of land to grow vegetables and plant flowers.

While the community garden program in Montreal is currently healthy and thriving, this wasn't always the case. Before the city adopted an organized program in 1975, many urban dwellers were forced into "ghetto gardening." In order to grow their own fruits and vegetables, Italian and Portuguese immigrants began working the land in empty lots near railway tracks and hydroelectric lines. A group of about 200 seniors in Snowdon also took up the cause, converting an abandoned, litter-infested lot into a blooming garden comprising 176 adjoining patches.

This burgeoning movement continued to gather momentum and was subsequently endorsed by former mayor Pierre Bourque, then a horticulturalist with the city parks department.

Today, the boroughs continue to support the community garden program by providing supplies to people who use the gardens and maintaining the land, including some in surprising locations.

"There are little gardens that you just wouldn't expect to see in certain places," says André Pedneault, a horticultural animator with the City of Montreal for over 18 years. "Sometimes they're located right in the middle of the city, squeezed in between two busy streets."

The gardens themselves are also packed. Nowadays, with suburban backyards slowly receding and more people opting for life in the city, the need for a patch of green to call one's own is even stronger. The number of lots per garden ranges from about 11 to 300. Yet many areas in Montreal, particularly highly concentrated ones like the Plateau, have long waiting lists of people wanting to secure a spot.

We've put together a short list of some of the most interesting gardens around town.

A group of seniors in Snowdon turned an abandoned, litter-infested lot into a blooming garden.

Côte-St-Luc and Rosedale Rencontres
Rencontres defies traffic from its location on an overpass by the Décarie expressway in the Côte-des-Neiges/NDG borough. Vegetables and flowers compete for attention in this relatively small patch of land that has 38 individual plots.

Société d'horticulture de LaSalle
This green space has the distinction of being the oldest in the city. It was first cultivated by a group of locals in 1936, long before the launch of the city's community garden initiative.

Victoria
Climbing plants cling to fences around the edges of this ethnically diverse garden in Snowdon. This is one of about eight spots in Montreal where the majority of gardeners are immigrants from around the world, making for wonderful variety of foreign vegetables.

For more information on the community gardens in your neighbourhood, visit the City of Montreal's website at www.ville.montreal.qc.ca.