A year ago I woke up and went to work. My walk took me past a garden in a "bad" neighborhood.
In fact, the Woodside neighborhood of Greenville, SC was rated the 8th most dangerous neighborhood in the country. Every day when I would walk past there, I would see a garden. Rather, I would see what was left of a garden. It had overgrown quite a bit and the more resilient plants were continuing to grow. Okra, tomatoes, and cucumbers were climbing and rising through the weeds and reaching towards the sun. There were a few strawberries that clung to life as well, but nothing really of note.
This garden, it turns out, was meant to support a learning plan for kids in the neighborhood as well as provide some vegetables for the senior citizens home across the street. There was the remnant of a sign that touted the companies who had donated money to see it come to life, but it was now leaning against a wall, its posts tangled with weeds. The raised beds that they had fronted the money for were rotting and straining to contain the weed infested beds. I knelt down and dug my hands in. I could feel the earth give easily and could tell that this garden was not far from having been maintained. It had merely gotten out of control and only recently.
I began to leave work an hour earlier. When I left the house, I would grab my gloves and on my way to work, I would stop and pull some weeds. I would clear some of the brush. I would water things. This was the south and it was the summer and once, while bent over pulling weeds, I saw a shadow moving slowly out of the corner of my eye. Even though it was early in the morning and the sun was just coming up, it was hot and I was already sweating.
The shadow came to me slowly and I saw that it was a woman from the home across the street. She asked what I was doing and I told her that I was just pulling weeds. She was pushing a walker, the kind with wheels and a basket on the front. She asked if I was going to pick anything that was growing there. I had never planned on it so I told her to help herself and even offered to help her pick some of the Roma tomatoes that were stretching across the lawn.
She began to tell me about the garden, about how she could see it out of the window of her room in the home across the street. Then she told me that she didn't have the energy to come out the way she used to but there was a guy who would come and pick the vegetables and then he would walk across the street and sell them to people in the home. He would sell them the vegetables that were supposed to be free to them.
From that day on, I began to look more closely at the neighborhood. I am the type of person who notices more the surroundings rather than the people in an area, so it was really no wonder that I noticed the weeds that were growing before I looked around and saw all of the other things. I saw that there were beer and liquor cans all around. This was the summer and when I took the earbuds out of my ears I could hear the bouncing of a basketball...at six in the morning. It was often kids coming or going from the row houses one block over. Where were they going that early? Where were they coming from that early?
I began to look at some of the houses in the area. There were some for sale and I was in the market for a cheap house. I felt I could handle living in a "bad" neighborhood. I began to look at auction houses. These were houses that had been repossessed and the previous owners had been booted out; victims of the housing crash. There were bullet holes in the windows of some of the homes, but they would likely be bought by a developer all in one go and then leveled. They would be turned into homes that the people who had previously lived there could not afford to live in.
The woman would come back every so often and chat with me while I worked. I liked the company. Soon, she was joined by others; men and women who had been born and raised in the area and who told me stories about what had once been where. Schools they had gone to when they were 8 and the significance of things that were in the area; what had once sat on a particular foundation that was now leveled and gone.
One of the next things that I had noticed what was not there. There were no more cans. I could see out of the corner of my eye while I was working people who would look and keep walking. I suspected these were the people who had once taken tomatoes to sell to the seniors across the street and now, that they saw it was being maintained, thought better and went elsewhere.
I am a big proponent of the
"broken windows theory". This is simply the idea that people do not respect something that they come across that is already a mess. If a building already has broken windows vandalism increases and other crimes follow. Unkempt areas cause a downward spiral. Can we admit that there may be an overgrown gardens corollary?
The recent divides in this country over what is going on is based a great deal on location, location, location. Liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican, Black or White, a lot of what we are encountering is who is where and when. That was an interesting summer because I talked to old and young. Old people who told me that they used to be able to play late into the evening in this neighborhood when they were kids. I talked to young people who said that they were afraid to walk in any neighborhood because of what had happened to Trayvon Martin. We had these discussions though, while gathered around a garden. At the core of these discussions was "ownership" and how many of the old people felt that the neighborhoods had gotten away from them and how many of the young people felt that it was hard to feel a part of any neighborhood where you are made to feel that you do not belong or where you are always about to move. Those who were in the middle? The people my age? They were at work because that is where they had to be.
Someone on some Facebook thread called me silly for wanting to create gardens. They say, not to my face, mind you, but behind the comfort of a keyboard, that gardens don't do anything. I tend to laugh at them. This year we are going to start a lot more gardens and we are going to maintain them. We are goingn fact, the Woodside neighborhood of Greenville, SC was rated the 8th most dangerous neighborhood in the country.
No matter what position you take about what is going on in Ferguson, what happened in NY, or Cleveland or any of the other cases that have been all over the news, whether you believe that it is race or whatever else, I have my theories and I stick by them, there is an ideal place for healing and for change. That place is in the garden.
The interesting thing is that gardens that 99knives supports, produce exactly what everyone wants; better looking neighborhoods, food, occupation for idle hands.
There are ways to help. Donate so that we can buy seeds and more.
If you would like to help us, Join a CSA in your area.
in South Carolina Greenville, Columbia, Charleston...
in Atlanta
contact us at
epochpeople@gmail.com
Help us keep the gardens from overgrowing.
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