The Anywhere Garden – A Guide to Container Gardening
the short version
The Anywhere Garden: A Guide to Container Gardening is a practical guide to growing food and plants in movable pots — a garden you can carry with you across homes, cities, and seasons. Built on lived experience, it shows you simple, low-cost setups that work in real-world conditions..
What does it mean to grow something of your own – when you don’t own the land beneath it?
For many people today, gardening exists within constraints: rented homes, temporary spaces, uncertain futures, and changing climates.
The Anywhere Garden: A Guide to Container Gardening, is a short guide that emerges from this reality. Rooted in lived experience, it offers both practical tips and a deeper reflection on what it means to grow, adapt, and continue cultivating life in spaces that are not permanently yours.
Living with a Moving Garden
For K. Alexis West, author of The Anywhere Garden, this question became something she lived rather than simply considered. She writes:
“Five years ago I seriously resolved to seek whatever level of sustainability I could achieve as a renter, as it was unlikely I would be purchasing land anytime soon. So I plunged into the deep end of gardening in my ‘serf’s plot’ of rented land, as long as it might last. That location lasted a good five years and by then I had a wealth of dwarf trees and specialty herbs – and it all moved with me.
I suggest renters everywhere consider their “Anywhere Garden”.
My how-to and why-to book, The Anywhere Garden, shares my experiences and will save other gardeners time and investment.
I moved my extensive garden last fall in a cheery yellow Penske truck. The photograph documents the layering of plants over household boxes. It is invaluable that I was able to retain that very important part of my life embedded in my favorite herbal plants, dwarf fruit trees, decor favorites like my Frost Resistant Gardenia, Smoke Tree, Japanese Forest Grasses, my Milkweeds, the Passionflower that lives in my window now.
Many of my plants are not found in garden centers easily and even if I owned property, I would container garden because the weather has become inconsistent and strange and quite possibly is unlikely to improve. The new rental has a better yard and the greenhouse is 17’ long to shelter the fruit trees when the season turns cold.
The Anywhere Garden is a way to integrate solastalgia with direct positive action. I chose this title because it promotes a positive feeling in a time when opportunity is increasingly limited by social status.
Container gardening, even on a patio, is a little piece of something that is part of your personal circle, your personal agriculture – and it all stands true: anywhere.”
Begin Where You Are
There is something so powerful in the idea that a garden is not defined by ownership, but by care, continuity, and attention over time.
Container gardening offers a way to stay in relationship with plants even when life itself is in motion. It allows people to carry living systems with them – small ecosystems of memory, nourishment, and practice – across homes, cities, and seasons.
Whether it’s a balcony, a rented yard, a shared terrace, or a windowsill, the invitation remains simple: begin where you are, with what you have.
Why Container Gardening Matters Now
Container gardening is often seen as a limited or scaled-down version of gardening. In reality, it reflects a growing ecological and social reality.
It offers:
- flexibility in uncertain housing conditions
- resilience in changing and unpredictable climates
- accessibility for those without land ownership
- continuity through life transitions and mobility
More than anything, it reframes gardening itself – from something fixed in place to something carried, adapted, and continually re-formed.
The Anywhere Garden: A Guide to Container Gardening is now available as a downloadable resource on our website.
A practical guide to growing food and plants in small, flexible spaces, it shows you how to build productive container gardens using simple setups, low-cost materials, and adaptable systems that work in real-world conditions.
K. Alexis West is a Permaculture Designer, Painter and Photographer
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