Land Matters
In a preview of the August Land Matters column, Landscape Architecture magazine editor Bill Thompson, FASLA, discusses the vulnerability and value of community gardens.

Would you risk jail to save a garden?

Movie star Darryl Hannah did. On June 13, police in riot gear arrested her for sitting in a walnut tree to protest the bulldozing of a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles. It was the largest community garden in the United States, supplying food to some 350 gardeners, mostly low-income Hispanics. Hannah sat in the tree off and on for 23 days along with activist John Quigley, who has staged the vigils on other endangered sites in California (“Land Matters,” March 2003). Singer Joan Baez and anti-logging activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill also took shifts in the tree, and Willie Nelson came by to lend his voice to the rescue attempt.

Darryl Hannah is arrested while protesting the destruction of a 14-acre community garden that was built on private property in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ric Francis)

The protests came to an abrupt halt when firefighters in a cherry picker cut away branches with a chainsaw and removed Hannah and Quigley along with 15 other protesters, some of whom had chained themselves to picnic tables and concrete barrels. Then the bulldozers showed up. The gardeners couldn’t stop them, because the land on which the garden sat is privately owned, and owner Ralph Horowitz had decided to build a warehouse there. By the time you read this, the garden will be a construction site.

Hannah garnered tremendous publicity for the garden—and herself—including an appearance on Larry King Live. Was her involvement, then, a Hollywood publicity stunt? I tend to think she was motivated at least partly by principle, because there are plenty of more comfortable ways of getting publicity than sitting in a tree for three weeks. But even if publicity was her only aim, her vigil still demonstrates one thing: Gardens—food-producing gardens, anyway—have a lot more public visibility and depth of support than some of us might have thought.

I’m a big advocate of community gardens. My wife and I tend a 10- by 25-foot plot in a totally organic community garden here in Washington, D.C. She sows the seeds and cares for the plants; I’m the soil builder and general beast of burden. It’s a good division of labor. In the warmer months we get most of our produce from our plot as well as neighborly chatting and sharing of plants with our fellow gardeners and, most important of all, spiritual nourishment from tending the good earth and watching plants grow. I think these benefits of community gardens are why my friend the late Karl Linn referred to them as “the sacred commons.” Yet these sacred spaces are terribly vulnerable, because most of them, like the one in Los Angeles, are sited on leftover bits of land that can be razed for development at will. That’s a shame if only because, for some community gardeners, they are the only means to fresh organic produce.

Do you ever think about where your food comes from? The way we get food today is something quite new and strange in the history of the world. Until recently, most people raised some or all of their own food—I know my grandparents did—in their own communities. Now, we blithely accept that food comes from industrial farms in other states or even other countries (an estimate I saw recently suggested that the ingredients of a typical meal come from an average of more than 2,000 miles away).

These fragile community gardens, by contrast, allow city folk to reestablish a connection with the land and their own food that past generations enjoyed. They are a link to the human past, to a timeless way of living on earth.

Landscape architects rarely get involved in community gardens because they are generally laid out by amateurs and aren’t a lucrative practice opportunity. Still, I wonder if landscape architects might be concerned about this basic venue for human/nature interaction in much the same way they are concerned about preserving historic landscapes. Shouldn’t the act of gardening for food and places where that happens against great odds have the same status as some of our designed landscapes?

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor.