Gardeners for Gardeners

Tonight, while perusing my Twitter feed, I came across a story on TreeHugger about a woman in Tulsa, Oklahoma who is suing the city’s code enforcement officers for cutting down and destroying her edible/medicinal garden.

The story as reported by KOTV in a nutshell: Last August, Denise Morrison received a letter from the city citing a complaint about her yard. She took pictures of the garden when she went to meet with the inspectors and invited them to her home to point out the problem areas. She states their response was that everything had to go. She then went to the police who issued her a citation and a court date. At the court appearance the judge told them to come back in October but City workers showed up at her home the next day and cut down all of her plants and some of her fruit and nut trees.

I came back three days later, sat in my driveway, cried and left,” Morrison said.

Sound familiar? That’s because we’ve heard versions of this story several times over the past few years. And every time I hear about another garden destroyed based on the complaint of one backwards-thinking neighbour or another gardener sued by the city for deigning to grow food in their front yard I am horrified, saddened, angered, and incensed. But worst of all I am paralyzed. I feel helpless, useless, powerless, hopeless about the state of the world, and consequently I do nothing. I self protect. I put it out of my mind and move on.

This time, rather than doing nothing or assuming there is nothing that can be done, I thought I’d at least get a discussion going about what can be done. Employ the power of many rather than remaining passive and powerless as one.

Firstly, I’d like to know how we can help this woman and others like her. Could we organize a drive for plants, seeds, and materials to replace what was lost, locals to show up at the site of the destroyed garden to help replant?

Do we need a public body of support? Citizens against the destruction of edible gardens? Gardeners for Gardeners?

And as Gina of My Skinny Garden asked on Twitter, I also wonder what we can do to circumvent this kind of thing from happening rather than reacting with shock and horror when it does happen.

On the one hand I feel like some of the work is already being done: writing about edible gardening as a positive, showing gardens that are not like the chemically dependant lawns and gardens popularized over the last 50 years, and gardening ourselves. Showing our neighbours what is possible, talking to them about what we are doing and shifting attitudes one person at a time. But it’s not enough. Clearly it is not enough.

What else can be done? I’d like to know what you think.

UPDATE: There is a petition at Change.org

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Alive in the Garden

One of the garden projects I’ve had on tap to post about is the woven willow bean tripod I built last week, shortly after our return from a road trip that took us through my “hometown” and the place where I grew up. This sort of garden work is creative, but it is also physical, and I find that while my hands and body take over, my mind is freed to wander and meander over thoughts and emotions that have been stuck in my subconscious.

Meditation in motion.

All-in-all the bean support probably took about 2 hours to construct from start to finish and I spent the entire time mulling over the stark contrast between the lifelessness of that place and where I live now. I thought about the reasons why people can end up in a place like that without the resources or agency to turn it around. When I think about my childhood in that townhouse complex, class inevitably sticks out and I do not want to undermine that. Class Matters. To be clear, I am not speaking of or for the people who live there now, I am only speaking of the experiences I had while living there. What struck me when I stood at the edge of that walkway to the front door of #62 was that the impoverishment I experienced there wasn’t simply about a lack of money. It was not about a lack of things, which is what my mother often jumps to in her defence. Which is what people think of first when they think of impoverishment. We had shoes on our feet, cable television, and toys. We did not die. This is what she says. That my childhood was a success because I lived through it. No, it was so much more than that. The physical deadness of the place where even the few hardscrabble plants I remembered as a child were now completely wiped away served as a visual reminder of other kinds of deadness. The kinds that are sometimes hard to define and certainly less tangible than a lack of greenery or our very mortality.

This inevitably lead me to thoughts about making something out of nothing, which is what I was doing at the time. Here was a pile of branches clipped from a friend’s garden; yard waste that I was turning into an artful supportive structure. And here was a handful of bean seeds gifted from another gardening friend that in a few months time will grow into a beautiful, edible plant that we will be nourished by, which will also provide seeds for next year’s garden. And so on.

As I finished the structure and planted the seeds I felt proud and satisfied. I imagined the way it will look once the green leaves have formed and wrapped themselves around the brown branches. And the bright scarlet flowers that will follow them. Alive and colorful. A simple idea, come by simply. And yet to have this simple beauty in my life is not simple at all.

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Give Me Your Rusty Metal and Your Beautiful Decay

Last night, I gleefully laid out the collection of items I had purchased from the flea market onto the floor and imagined how I will use them in the future. Most of the items were purchased for the garden and some will make an appearance in the photos I take for future book and assignments.

Most of the items that show up in my work projects are also used by me in my home. Few are purchased for one-time usage and then shuffled out the door. Perhaps it would be better that way, but I am a collector, always have been. Still, I can’t recycle the same plates, bowls, and fabrics book after book, photo after photo, so to keep things fresh, I collect an affordable hodgepodge of items that I like, primarily from thrift shops. I’ve never really been into sets anyway. It’s one part of my job that gives me an excuse to indulge in a whim that I would be otherwise forced to curb. It is why I go to the effort of dragging home dirty curbside “treasures” on my bike and why I fill up my luggage with special canning jars when I go away on business trips. In truth, I was doing these things before it became a part of my job — this just gives me the justification I need to continue.


Part of a burgeoning collection of rusty witches’ cauldrons. Some are used as pots. Some just sit there. What can I say? I like them.

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Want / Don’t Want

The first pieces of flair I added to the garden early last year was a collection of bird and bee houses that I affixed to the left front side of our ramshackle shed. Recently, high winds have been knocking them off and when putting them back up I happened to notice a few stray baby yellow garden spiders (Argiope aurantia) and a big egg case affixed to the back of one of the houses.

Since then I’ve been watching eagerly to see if there was any movement. And look what I discovered today…

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A Year of Progress in the Garden

The other day I posted the above image, a photo of the garden as it was at that very moment. I’ve been swinging back and forth lately between satisfaction with the garden’s progress, and frustration with the weather and the feeling of being behind. Or if it’s not that it’s a nagging dissatisfaction that it hasn’t come far enough and is not enough… yet. And then I find joy in a new flowering bulb that emerges, that fresh look that the soil has after it rains, and the relief in finally having laid down a new layer of mulch and I come back full circle to satisfied again.

It was that seesaw of ambivalence that held me back from pressing the post button for a minute before I got over it and let the image go live. Despite my own uncertainty and/or insecurities I am not Better Homes & Gardens and I have never aspired to be. We’ll leave that to those who are better suited to it. I have intentionally rejected that path as a gardener, and thwarted that role as a garden writer for all sorts of reasons, the most basic being that it’s not me. As a result, I feel a commitment to showing my gardens as they are, as never-ending projects that are always in progress. I don’t stage them for photos or wait for that final moment of “doneness” because in truth that moment will never come.

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