As the urban-rural gap in America grows wider, some urbanites are stepping across the line by planting gardens. Today New York City boasts over 600 community gardens. Among their life-enhancing qualities is the fact that crime decreases in the surrounding areas. PNS essayist Paul Bennett profiles two gardens in the heart of Manhattan.

NEW YORK - Watching the new Coen Brothers movie "Fargo" in a crowded Manhattan theater, a Midwestern friend was dismayed by how the urban audience laughed derisively at every Midwestern accent or figure of speech. "It was disconcerting," he remarked. "Their reactions were so terribly myopic."

Urban and rural America have long harbored easy disdain and distrust for each other. The scorn of New Yorkers for all things west of Philadelphia is echoed by country folk who fear the tentacled, ubiquitous crime of the city. Meanwhile political candidates troll for white suburban votes by disparaging the concrete landscapes of the Bronx or Compton.

Now some urbanites are stepping across this imaginary line between urban and rural, fusing the rural experience to the city. They are planting gardens. Stretched across all five boroughs, New York City today boasts over 600 community gardens.

"A community garden is an organic process, if you don't mind the pun," says Phil Tietz, Associate Director of the Green Guerrillas, a nonprofit volunteer urban gardening group. According to Tietz, an urban garden is usually the brain child of one person who takes over an abandoned lot and transforms it. But within a short time, people from the neighborhood start to inquire about the garden and before you know it one small plot of land is providing an entire residential area with shade, food, relaxation, a meeting place -- all the things a garden does. Tietz says some people view gardening within the forbidden landscape of Manhattan as incongruous. He prefers to see it as enhancing.

On Houston Street between Bowery and Second Avenue lies the Liz Christy garden, a patch of green amid the decaying remnants of Manhattan's Lower East Side. The park is the oldest community garden in the city and its beginnings are suitably mythopoeic. According to legend Ms. Christy and a friend were walking by this empty lot that hangs precariously close to traffic-clogged Houston Street when the friend's baby carriage hit a piece of debris, pitching the child headlong into the garbage strewn around the area. In response Christy mobilized residents from the neighborhood and they began clearing the vacant lot of potential hazards and planting the beginnings of a stupendous urban garden.

On 105th Street in Harlem, fitting neatly between two dirty brick apartment buildings, is La Perla garden, literally "the pearl" in Spanish. Within its limited confines rows of vegetables and flowers wind like curled snakes. In late summer, planters filled with peppers and tomatoes give way to a meandering esplanade of begonias and daisies. La Perla is the quintessential community garden. It was begun by a group of Puerto Rican immigrants who named it after La Perla ghetto in San Juan, where gardening played an intricate role in city life by providing a gathering place and a source of locally grown food.

Inside La Perla there is a pleasant buzz of conversation. From the gazebo in the far corner you can hear an older man's deep guffaw and the ring of a wooden spoon mixing lemonade. Two boys and a girl are helping mix the compost bin near the back wall; and in a flower bed nearby two women speak in hurried Spanish about the potentials of their beefsteak tomato plants this year. The gardeners are happy to welcome strangers, provided you can dig a hole or water shrubs.

Phil Tietz gets excited about the garden's success. "It's a known fact among urban gardeners that crime decreases in the area around a community garden," he says. "No one has actually gone out and done a study. But it's true."

In his recent book, "Cosmos and Hearth," geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes how Americans are rapidly abandoning the worldly Enlightenment ideals of "democracy" and "science" for the more rural notions of the hearth, such as "family" and "community." In the inner city, this idea of hearth is taking root in the most basic expression of rural culture: community gardening. It is a fusion of two extremes, and it is helping to bind communities together around a very real hearth. Urban gardens, such as the Liz Christy garden, may begin as the dream of a single person, but in the concrete jungle of America's cities they thrive as focal points in the neighborhood, a place where people gather and nourish each other by communing with the land -- which is quite a rural notion indeed.