Twelve-year-old Amanda Clement raced to the ballpark across the street from her house in Hudson, South Dakota. She couldn't wait to join her brother, Hank, and the boys for a game of baseball.

Would they let her play? She could throw, run and bat as well as any of them, but they let her play only when they needed her. She would have to umpire again. At least she could be part of the game.   Amanda knew all the rules, and the boys could count on her.

Over the next few years, local teams began asking her to judge their games，too. One summer day in 2018，Amanda and her mother traveled to Hawarden, Iowa, to watch Hank play in the championship semiprofessional game. Two local teams decided to play a game be- fore the semiprofessional teams.   Amanda agreed to be the judge. As Amanda finished the morning game, she saw two men walking toward her. To her surprise, they were the manag- ers of the semiprofessional teams and were impressed with her judge and wanted her to judge the afternoon championship game. They would even pay her.   The 16-year-old girl was about to become the first female paid to be a judge of a baseball game. Amanda was calm and confident and judged fairly.   She was right on the spot, watching closely.

Newspaper reporters said that she was absolutely fair.   Managers began to ask for her first when they needed a judge. Amanda was popular with the fans, too.   In one game, the audience weren't happy with the judge and insisted on replacing him with Amanda. Being a judge was hard work. Amanda judged for the whole game, and she worked in all kinds of weather. She said, "It isn't as easy as it looks, but for all that, there is a good deal of enjoyment in the work. You have got to have confidence in your ability or you won't do well in anything.”

As a garden designer and consultant, I see the amazing progress that can be made when gardeners get together and get things done. Here are some small stories about how something has been achieved through cooperation.

I was involved with one project earlier driven by two twelve-year-olds living in a small northern England town. To do something good for the environment, the two girls desired to grow their own food in some deserted land. So the pair spoke to their teacher about using a small abandoned space next to their school’s parking lot. The teacher reached out to me for advice and together we determined who owned the space. The owner agreed to rent the space and the kids were able to raise money to pay the rent and start growing food on the site.

Another inspiring story was about one enterprising gardener in Illinois who decided to speak with his neighbors about using their grass-filleld front yards to grow food. This gardener did have his own garden but he wanted to do more. So he offered to tend his neighbors’ front yards in return for the use of these underutilized spaces to grow food everyone would share. To his surprise, all of his neighbors adopted this front-yard farming idea, and even one neighbor joined him and helped grow the food to learn more about the process. Everyone gained a lot at last.

The final story was that of three women in a neighborhood in Vermont. Struggling to find the time to look after their kids and grow their own food, they found a solution. The mothers together raised children and plants, selling produce and young plants to other gardeners in the area to cover basic costs. They took turns on daycare duty for a handful of children and tended the garden around their part-time jobs.

These stories show just what can be achieved when people work together to make their own lives and the lives of those around them just a little bit better.