E-Mail This Article to a Friend Coming up roses Tips and tricks for urban gardening BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

The rose gardeners only came out at night. A few years back, as Boston legend has it, the city needed to cut costs. Lists of expendable expenses were drawn up, and the roses — and their maintenance — in the Boston Public Garden were pruned from the budget. The city decided that roses and the effort to maintain them were something Boston could do without. Better than slashing teachers or art programs, you might think. Who needs a few flower bushes?

But a gaggle of gardeners felt otherwise. This group of rose-loving Boston beautifiers banded together and agreed to maintain the roses themselves — secretly, silently, as volunteers — in order to keep the pride of the Public Garden on display. Once a week during the summer, a little after dusk, when most of the commuters had already passed by and most of the tourists were out to dinner, the gardeners tended to the roses. Picture men and women in pink and rose-red camouflage, armed with pruning shears and trowels, ducking and dashing from bush to bush. This group of guerrilla gardeners understood, it seems, the power of plants.

Because when tourists from Japan and Germany visit Boston, when they amble around with their digital cameras and their guidebooks, they ooh and ahh as they walk through the Public Garden. They take pictures. "What a beautiful city," they say to their friends at home. And maybe they’re not thinking of the roses in particular, but the flowers certainly add to the overall effect. More tourists come. They go out to dinner and stay in hotels and go to museums and on Duck Tours, and Boston wins.

Closer to home, when we walk through the gardens with frazzled post-work brains or on hazy summer afternoons, and we see the care and color, it makes us feel better, too. We take pride in Boston, and we want to keep it blooming. The volunteer rose brigade knew this, and their stealth tending is testament to the power and pleasure flowers can bring to a city.

Urban gardening — planting, growing, and harvesting something in a limited space in the city — is an art form, but you don’t have to be a rogue rose warrior to have access to a plot. Across Boston, there are more than 250 community gardens, areas open to the public for individuals to claim a plot of land to grow beets or begonias, peonies, pansies, or potatoes. And whether you live in Brighton or Beacon Hill, Allston or Roxbury, chances are there’s a community garden nearby where you can start growing.

The positive results from these gardens range from the personal to the public. "I could go on and on about the benefits of these community programs," says Betsy Johnson, treasurer of the American Community Gardening Association and executive director of Chefs Collaborative, a national network of people in the food community who promote sustainable cuisine and responsible food-industry practices. "You can put gardening in the mental-health category," she says. "It’s a way to enjoy nature, have a place that’s yours, a reason to get out and be away from things." Not to mention the way it beautifies a neighborhood, she adds.

For a list of community gardens, look to the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN) Web site, http://www.bostonnatural.org/, which breaks them down by neighborhood. "Each community garden is managed on an individual basis, and each garden has a main contact," Johnson explains. BNAN maintains a list of contacts for each garden. To obtain a plot, call BNAN, get the information for the contact person at the garden you want to be a part of, and get in touch with that person. He or she will tell you whether there’s a waiting list or not, and whether the garden can provide a plot.

Each garden has its own set of rules and regulations. In cities like Chicago and Seattle, community gardens are run by a single state agency. Not here. The way the gardens are run "reflects the unique history of each community garden," says Jo Ann Whitehead, a garden educator at BNAN. "Every one has its own story. That there’s no one way of doing things reflects that." Here, management depends on volunteer gardeners. They collect dues, maintain waiting lists, run spring and fall meetings. Price per plot depends on water. "Each garden has to figure out how much it needs to charge in order to pay for the water," says Johnson. Renting a plot for the summer costs anywhere from about $10 to $50.

Like the rules of the gardens, what grows in each varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. "There’s a large preponderance of vegetable-growing," says Johnson, but some community gardens, like the Fenway Victory Gardens — one of the most visible and well-known — have more flowers than vegetables, due to vandalism and a large rat population. The garden at the Boston Nature Center, on the other hand, one of the biggest in the city with about 300 plots, has nothing but vegetables. "They just evolve this way," says Johnson.

"It’s not like gardening in your own back yard," says Whitehead. "Some people think in terms of ‘it’s my plot now,’ but it really is a public space, and it won’t survive without the community." And it’s precisely that idea that makes community gardens so special, says Johnson. "That’s part of the beauty of community gardens. Everyone’s right there."

But plenty of people prefer the privacy of their own back deck, front porch, or fire escape, and it’s possible to do a lot of planting in a little space. "Gardening is more of a challenge for a person in the city," says Mark Cutler, an operations manager at Mahoney’s Garden Center, in Cambridge, who moved from a Maine home with apple trees in his yard to a North End apartment with a tiny fire escape. But Cutler made his space work by cultivating some dwarfed evergreens and "beautiful, albeit small" pots. "Not to overuse the phrase," he says, "but it’s Zen-like. It’s one of the most calming things to go out there at the end of the day and have a drink and enjoy the sunset."

To create your own city garden, there are a few basic factors to consider, says Cutler. "Know your light conditions," because light determines what kinds of plants will thrive. "Is there direct sun or is the space in the shade?" Then you have to decide if you want your mini-garden to be a one-season affair, or if you want something that’s year-round. "If you just want some summer color," Cutler says, you have a wide variety of flower and container options: "You can use a boot as long as it holds soil," he says.

For the amateur gardener, someone who might not have 20 minutes every evening to trim and tend and weed and water, Cutler suggests some nearly fail-proof plants. "It’s New England, and let’s face it, you can’t go wrong with geraniums." And, surprisingly, roses aren’t something you need to fuss over: "There are varieties that will take care of themselves." When it comes to vegetables, almost all of which need bright light, tomatoes and basil are the most popular options. Mahoney’s carries more than 80 varieties of tomatoes alone. "You can get a compact ‘patio’ tomato" that’s meant to be small, Cutler says. Veggies to watch out for if you’re dealing with cramped conditions are zucchini and squash, which tend to run.

Ornamental grasses, which can grow up to eight feet, prove a popular choice. More exotic and unusual options include Bismark palms, "with big, dramatic, silver-blue, hand-shaped" leaves, or jasmine, which flowers all summer. Cutler recommends hibiscus, morning glories, and mandevilla vines. What you choose also depends on whether you’re into instant gratification ("Start with a six-foot tree") or willing to test your patience ("Start real small").

And now’s the time to start planning for the summer. Cutler recommends coming into the Garden Center or other nursery not only with an idea of what your light conditions are, but also with thoughts about how you want to fill the space you have. Like any other trend, flowers go in and out of style. "What was hot a few years ago, people don’t want to look at now," Cutler says. Look around. See what you like. And read through gardening books. "Now, when everything’s put to bed, is the time to be the imaginative gardener," says Cutler.

If your thumb needs some help getting green, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education offers several gardening classes. "Container Gardening for the Horticulturally Challenged," for example, takes place on May 16 and costs $63.

On the other hand, if you’ve got no interest in growing your own anything, Boston’s got acres of gardens to explore, like the Arnold Arboretum, the Mount Auburn Cemetery — America’s first garden cemetery — and, of course, the Boston Public Garden, roses and all.

Nina MacLaughlin can be reached at nmaclaughlin[a]phx.com .