I live in a three-bedroom house next to an old cemetery. Beyond the cemetery are some very small condominuims which used to be low-income housing, until affordable housing started to disappear and gentrification set in. Beyond the condominiums, further down the street, is a big apartment complex. I used to live there. The apartments are generic. White walls and brown carpeting. The management takes good care of the grounds, which are landscaped with highly-fertilized sod and identical, low-maintenance, non-flowering plants at the entrance to each building. When I lived there, there was no sense of community, except for the one time the power was out for four days and one of the older neighbors invited everyone to a barbeque at which he served all the meat that had thawed in his freezer.
There are no balconies or patios attached to these apartments, and no private green space where a person could set a chair or a potted plant. It is clear from the layout of the buildings and the parking lots which they overlook that one is expected to go from one's car to one's apartment and to do all of one's living inside the apartment or Somewhere Else.
So you can imagine that the garden that appeared there last night seemed quite miraculous. We were walking past the apartment complex on the way home from the river when we spied it-- an oasis of vegetables and flowers and herbs growing like crazy in dozens of lovingly-tended pots amidst a desert of asphalt and beige brick. There should not have been space for a garden there, but somehow there was. It was so audacious and so wonderful. We laughed out loud and moved in to get a closer look. We found the gardener, trimmers in hand, hidden by tall fronds of happy greenery. He told us how he had started all the plants from seeds in the middle of winter, tending them under grow lights and giving over most of his small apartment to the project. He described how people would stop by on their way into their apartments to help themselves to a tomato or two. We left with a baseball-sized kohlrabi and the feeling that something good was happening around us.
Maybe every garden is an act of hope, and these days, an act of resistance. More gardens. More growing things.
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i can still remember how astonished i felt, many years ago, when a friend showed me all the daffodils her sister had planted on an urban hillside that belonged to no one (and everyone). i had been so indoctrinated with the notion of private gardens.
your essay reminds me that i want to do some guerilla gardening this spring. there is a particularly ugly parking lot area where i work. i've been thinking of painting a mural. and now i am thinking of gardening. lots of people use the parking lot and driveway as a short-cut. if we think of "trespassers" as "guests," wouldn't we want to welcome them with flowers?
with appreciation,
c'dog
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