Suburban gardening with an urban flair in Wellesley

Everyone knows that of the leafy green suburbs outside of Boston, Wellesley is the leafiest and greenest of them all. It’s a place where lawns are tended, gardens are tidy and, after the landscapers still their leaf blowers and lawn mowers and rumble out of town until the next day, a feeling of peacefulness and order prevails.

As always, there are exceptions to such rules, and my favorite example of this is the garden at Auto Lab on Spring St. in Wellesley Square. Tucked away behind the soon-to-be closed Turnabout Shoppe, this tiniest of gardens produces but one crop, but what a crop. The gardener at Auto Lab takes a gritty, urban-looking wall and turns it into a productive vertical garden that produces masses of cherry tomatoes all summer long. It’s a wild-looking, untamed tangle of greenery and food, never clipped into any sort of submission, never coaxed into something perhaps a bit more presentable. I present you with these pictures of an urban garden here in suburban Wellesley.