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SUMMARYGrowing concerns about rapid urbanization and food insecurity in cities worldwide have renewed interest of academic community in urban gardening and urban agriculture. Urban gardens, including community and allotment gardens, are places of local food production that bring many other benefits to local communities, such as improved health, social networking and cohesion, community development and citizen activation. The paper attempts to comprehensively review the extensive body of literature on urban gardens by looking into geographic locations, disciplines and methods applied in each of the examined papers. The aim of the review is to identify gaps in existing knowledge and to suggest research directions for the future. A total of 27 academic articles in English published between 2000 and 2017 have been reviewed. The results of the data analysis point to uneven geographic distribution of research papers on urban gardening, having large body of literature coping with the North American and Western European context. Fields of research are diverse and fall into categories of planning and social studies (37%), health and community development (26%), politics and citizen participation (26%), and food production (11%). The findings recommend future more rigorous research on quantities of food production, effects of urban gardening on health and nutrition, and social aspects of community and allotment gardens. There is also a need to expand geographic scope of the research beyond the cities in developed countries in order to enrich our understanding of urban gardening in various contexts.