MY GARDENING YEAR STARTS in December. While the roots of my chives and tarragon are frozen beneath a blanket of snow, I get an invitation to a pre-Christmas potluck dinner with the folks who share my community garden, a patchwork of 87 squares of topsoil tucked behind a high school near downtown Montreal. Over lasagna and Filipino banana egg rolls, we catch up on what's happened in our lives since we yanked out the last pumpkins and reminisce about the past growing season: a good year for beans, a bad year for basil, and what were those white dots all over the Swiss chard? Trading seeds and recipes, we discuss composting and techniques for keeping mosquito numbers down. When it's finally time to head home, it's a shock to step outside into mid-winter; in my mind it feels as though I've spent the evening in spring.

By February, I'm usually rummaging through my basement, digging out pots and bags of soil. The bay window in my living room becomes a greenhouse for tomatoes, Japanese eggplants and poblano peppers, which need a jump-start on Quebec's short summers. For the next few weeks, I visit my seedlings more often than is necessary; the frail shoots and smell of earth allow me to dream about my garden while blizzards rage outside.

By nature, gardeners are passionate about their land, and none more so than those living in cities, where green space is rare. I grew up in Vancouver with German parents who turned part of our suburban back lawn into a vegetable garden. Moving into an apartment in Montreal in 1988, I missed the fresh herbs, the peacefulness of working the soil and the excitement of watching baby peppers ripen to adulthood. When I heard of the city's community gardening program, I applied and became one of 14,000 Montrealers – more than 1.5 percent of the adult population – who have their own three-by-six-metre slice of heaven.

I'm lucky. Quebec has more community gardening plots across 22 cities than the remaining provinces combined – more than 10,000 in all. Montreal's community gardening program has 97 gardens and 8,200 individual allotments. The program reaches more people per capita than any other similar gardening project in North America. It also is the most organized and receives the most government support. And that doesn't include dozens of locally run gardens in boroughs outside the city of Montreal, a growing network of collective gardens. Seniors homes, recreation centres and even hospitals are developing community gardens.

Urban gardening in Canada has enjoyed waves of popularity since the CPR sponsored the Railway Gardens of the late 1800s. During the First World War there were Liberty Gardens, and during the Second World War, Victory Gardens. These were developed to enable Canadians to support the war effort by growing their own produce. The current boom began in the 1970s as a response to Canadians' growing concern about levels of pesticides in food.

The movement's main obstacle – one that has plagued it since the 1970s – is lack of available land. In the United States in decades past, an exodus from inner cities to the suburbs left downtown lots vacant, enabling New York City, San Francisco and many other centres to create extensive urban gardening programs. In Canada, however, people continued to reside in city centres, so plots were harder to come by, and today urban gardeners struggle to keep hard-won plots from vanishing beneath new buildings.

Montreal was the exception. The economic stagnation of the 1980s and '90s kept property values low, and once the gardens were established, the city protected them from development through zoning. Two-thirds of Montreal community gardens are now zoned as parks, a solution unique in North America.

Montreal's community garden movement began in the early 1970s with groups of "gardening guerrillas" who worked empty lots and fallow land beside railway tracks and along hydroelectric lines. They were mostly Italian and Portuguese immigrants, but also included were a group of 200 seniors in the district of Snowdon who wrestled a rubble-strewn lot into 176 gardening plots (a grassroots endeavour chronicled by a 1977 National Film Board documentary called The Vacant Lot). After a series of fires during a three-day strike by firefighters in 1974, former Montreal mayor Pierre Bourque, who at the time was a horticulturist with the city's parks department (and later chief horticulturist), became involved in the community gardening movement. Looking for a way to revitalize some of the charred lots, he met with the city's renegade tillers. With their help, the first informal community gardens were set up on lots in low-income, highly urbanized areas. "Residents were often only a generation away from having lived in the countryside," says Bourque. "There was an immediate and strong connection for them and the concept took off. There was no precedent in Canada for this, and we learned as we went along."

By 1975, an organized and official community gardening program was underway, and during that hot summer, local firemen lent gardeners their hoses to water plots. In 1979, Bourque headed a group of concerned citizens and successfully lobbied the minister of municipal affairs to protect the gardens permanently by deeming them city parks. By 1987, 75 community gardens had been established across the city. The movement had become so popular that Bourque's office could not keep up with all the requests for growing spaces. "We were very surprised by the response," Bourque says now, "and very proud."

The gardens, which generally include between 10 and 300 plots each, are found almost everywhere – wedged between apartment buildings, alongside parks and in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium and downtown high-rises. There's even an overpass garden straddling the traffic of the Decarie Expressway. A youth garden with 440 plots is used to teach gardening to nine- to 14-year-olds, and elevated soil beds in many gardens make it possible for those who are wheelchair-bound to participate. Community gardeners each pay an annual $10 fee to the city, which provides a variety of equipment and services, ranging from manure and water to soil testing and storage facilities.

TODAY, CANADA is one of the most highly urbanized countries in the world, with almost 80 percent of its population living in urban areas. Backyards are shrinking, and a yearning for a patch of green among city dwellers has helped to fuel a community gardening boom across the country in recent years. In 2002, an Ipsos-Reid poll found that 40 percent of people in Greater Toronto and 44 percent in Greater Vancouver produce at least some of their own food. "Interest in community gardens has never been greater," says Michael Levenston of City Farmer, a Vancouver-based information and communication organization that bills itself Canada's office of urban agriculture. "And they're not just for food production, but a place to relieve stress and to escape the isolation of city life."

In Victoria, a non-profit group called Lifecycles has set up gardens in 12 elementary schools, where workshops teach young people how to take a seed through to harvest. In Vancouver, which currently has about 30 community gardens, Strathcona Community Garden in the low-income east end is an organic showpiece. Built on a former garbage dump in 1985, the 1.3-hectare garden is the city's biggest and features a solar-powered club house.

Winnipeg is the birthplace of Grow-a-Row, a program that encourages city gardeners to donate surplus vegetables to food banks. Since its inception in 1986, more than half a million kilograms of fruit and vegetables have been contributed to the Harvest Food Bank through Grow-a-Row, which has spread to Halifax, Edmonton, London, Ont., and many other cities.

In October, Toronto hosted the 25th annual conference of the American Community Gardening Association (ACGA), which brings together community gardening organizations from Bosnia to Cuba. Toronto is a city where urban gardening is on the rise. The Toronto Community Garden Network has set up 110 garden sites, and city high-rises are sprouting rooftop gardens. Sixty metres above ground level, the Fairmont Royal York's organic herb garden supplies the hotel's fine dining rooms with the likes of lemon balm, edible pansies and red basil. There are even cultural gardens. In a Caribbean community greenhouse, residents grow the produce of their home islands: black-eyed peas, callaloo (the leaves of the taro plant), and "red peas" (kidney beans) for the staple "peas and rice."

Community gardening is in its infancy across Atlantic Canada, but interest is spreading. Whitehorse has a community garden, as does Inuvik, N.W.T., 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Here, a hockey rink has been converted into a greenhouse, which holds 89 raised beds. Residents can garden above the permafrost and beneath the midnight sun, which shines from mid-May to mid-August. Gardeners say the extra light makes vegetables ripen a week to 10 days faster than in the South. "Ironically, our biggest problem is that the long hours of sunlight can mean that too much heat builds up," says garden coordinator Carri Young. "Some things bolt – they go to seed too quickly."

FROM THE FOOTPRINTS in the patches of melting snow, I knew I wasn't the first person to unlock the gate into my allotment garden last spring. Carrying a hefty bag with the winter crop of moist black compost harvested from my balcony composter, I headed toward plot number 37. When I spotted the first garlic shoots spearing through the soggy soil, my heart soared. Working the garden beside mine was 78-year-old Maria Iacovone, who grew up on a farm in Italy. Her plot is a sweet reminder of her youth, and she lingers on the garden bench every summer morning after she waters her robust tomatoes, basil, peppers and onions. Maria is our garden's sage and the grandmother figure we all turn to with our gardening questions.

While we are lucky to have Maria, the rest of Montreal is fortunate to have Daniel Reid. One of six horticultural counsellors in Montreal, he makes the rounds of gardens from April to October to advise on everything from pruning to planting. A unique concept in North American community gardens, the counsellors also give brief talks on gardening issues like organic methods and genetically engineered seeds. Generally, each garden receives a visit every two weeks. Part of Reid's job is to make certain garden rules are followed. "You must plant at least five different vegetables," he says, "because the diversity forces gardeners to visit their allotment frequently."

Reid is also one of the judges in the city's Best Garden Contest. Every garden chooses a winner from each block of 25 plots. Certificates and prizes of houseplants are presented at an autumn ceremony. "We're not just looking for someone who grows the best tomatoes," he says, "but for the person who best fosters community spirit and goodwill within the vegetable patch."

The sense of community and camaraderie that begins to bloom in my garden with the first pea blossoms is in full swing by mid-summer. We admire one another's produce and arrange to water one another's gardens while we're on summer vacation. For many, the human contact the garden provides is just as important as the harvest. My Jamaican-born friend David Bailey has a plot in the Des Seigneurs garden near the Lachine Canal, and every afternoon he can be found unpacking his domino set on a table beneath a shady tree in a corner of the garden. "A few of us finish up our gardening with a game," he says. "It's time we like to pass chatting in a green place."

Some gardens have barbecues set up for garden parties, others have croquet mallets, horseshoes and checkerboards stashed in their clubhouses alongside the hoes and shovels. In one garden, a barber sometimes sets up shop, clipping hair in the shade of the Chinese long-squash trellises.

Especially in early morning and at dusk, stepping through the garden gate is like entering a sanctuary. I feel the stress slip away as I pluck weeds from between dew-drenched flowers or listen to the birds while I pull up beets for the evening's borscht; many days, the garden for me is more about nurturing calmness than carrots.

Lydia Lockett, a spoken-word artist, took up gardening after being injured in a fall. "I brought a bucket and sat on it, gardening under a beach umbrella," she says. "I was in terrible pain but felt like a happy three-year-old with my bucket and shovel." The garden helped her heal and continues to be a place that clears her head. Lockett's job and passion is to make people smile, so she donates flowers to a seniors home and vegetables to the poor.

While 38 percent of Montreal's community gardeners are over 55, increasing numbers of young people are taking up gardening in response to concerns about food additives, "food security" and "food miles" – how far their food must travel from farm to table. Since pesticide and insecticide use was banned in Montreal gardens in the 1980s, 75 percent of community gardens are largely organic. "We encourage people to use manure and blood and bone meal," says Daniel Reid, "and composting takes place in more than one-third of our gardens."

Montreal's plots of green are the birthplaces of salsas, curries and pestos – a multicultural feast on the vines. In the garden abutting mine, Mercedes Nuñez grows vegetables I've never seen before, like upo, a round white squash that dangles from her trellis and will wind up in stir-frys like the ones she ate as a child in the Philippines. She shows me unusual string beans that she mixes with pumpkin or seafood and coconut milk in a traditional Filipino soup. "They are so hard to find in stores," she says, "so I have this garden to grow my own."

In at least eight Montreal gardens, the majority of gardeners are people whose first language is neither French nor English. At Victoria Garden in the city's Snowdon neighbourhood, 18 nationalities are represented among the gardeners. Since Asian, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish gardeners cultivate climbing and trailing plants that require longer trellises than usually allowed, designated multicultural gardens permit those gardeners on the perimeter of the sites to use the fences as support for climbing plants.

By late summer, fruits and vegetables fill the plots and the gardeners gather to celebrate the harvest with an outdoor potluck dinner. In the days ahead, many will be busy making jams and salsa, canning vegetables and fruit, and preparing produce for the freezer to see them through the long winter months.

AS WINTER TAKES HOLD of Montreal, the results of my summer labour are evident in my freezer. If I'm careful, they'll last me until spring, nourishing my spirit with memories of the smell of newly turned earth and my community of urban gardeners.