Community Gardening

Admiring A Horticultural Refuge

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Stella Kalinina

Community gardens have been a regular topic in our pages over the last decade. We never tire of the subject. I personally have a soft spot for roses, especially those found in unexpected places. So, Raúl Laly Fernández, you are my hero. I hope that the next time I am in Los Angeles I will find you in this garden and bear witness to the rose wonders I see in these photographs. Kudos to the writer/photographer Stella Kalinina for capturing this intersection between immigrant culture, working class refuge, and horticultural knowhow:

Mr. Fernández decorates a sitting area in his plot with roses that he grows.

In Los Angeles, Glimpses of an Oasis With Deep Immigrant Roots

The San Pedro Community Gardens have provided physical and spiritual nourishment for the past half a century to multiple generations of immigrant Angelenos.

Kimberly Mentlow received a plot in San Pedro after three years on a waiting list. “Being able to plant something or see something grow — it’s extremely therapeutic,” she said.

Ten minutes from my home, next to a decommissioned landfill, a freeway and the largest port in the country, sits an unlikely hillside oasis of vegetables and fruit trees.

Emerging like a mirage from its surroundings, the San Pedro Community Gardens occupy a six-acre parcel of city-owned land in the otherwise highly industrialized area of the blue-collar harbor community of San Pedro, in Los Angeles. Continue reading →

Foraging for Plenty

/ Amie Inman / 7 Comments

When I lived in either tropical or Mediterranean environments it was never surprising (but always exciting) to see trees and bushes laden with fruit in their season; mangoes, citrus, and papaya in Costa Rica, or figs, pomegranates and lemons on a Croatian island.  But when we temporarily relocated to Atlanta I was happy to discover similar levels of abundance in both urban and suburban environments.  In some cases there were trees that looked like they had outlived what some in the neighborhood are wont to call “the war of northern aggression”, such as the pear trees owned by the Dunwoody Preservation Trust, while in others it was a fresh commitment to collective action like the Dunwoody Community Garden where food pantry harvesters pick, wash and bag lbs of produce from donation plots to distribute to a local food bank. (Current estimates for these initiatives are over 1,500 lbs of produce plus 567 lbs of pears to be exact!)

In a time of disparity between the amounts of fresh food produced in the world and the number of people who go without it, I am happy to participate in and proselytize about programs that help alleviate this  imbalance. In the United States Community gardens are springing up around the country on both public and private land, in likely places such as empty lots, school yards and church yards, as well as surprise locations like urban rooftops.  And while those gardens are used by individuals to allow food security for their families, a large portion of them also plant with surplus in mind in order to donate to local food banks.  Continue reading →