TWO gardens completed in the last month by the New York Restoration Project  one in Queens, by Walter Hood, a California landscape architect; the other in Harlem, by Sean Conway, a Rhode Island garden designer  demonstrate how sustainable technologies like rainwater collection and solar and wind power can be incorporated into landscapes that are varied enough to fill many needs.

The actress and singer Bette Midler, who founded the Restoration Project, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995, said that she has been courting imaginative designers to enlarge the scope of community gardens so that “everyone who has a stake in the garden is able to use it the way they want to: some want to grow fruits and vegetables, others want a quiet place, some want to play ball. So all these things have to be taken into consideration.”

Mr. Hood’s design, for the Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson Community Garden in Jamaica, Queens, has six 10-foot-tall blue rainwater collectors shaped like martini glasses that funnel water into two 1,500-gallon below-ground cisterns. It was named after the rapper, a Queens native whose foundation, G-Unity, provided $350,000, which paid not only for the water collection system, but also for a complete redesign of the old community garden.

Gone are the random assortment of raised beds and the scattered fruit trees. Mr. Hood, who is known for sculptural landscapes like the grounds of the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Center for the Arts in Jackson, Wyo., created a powerful, linear space.