Growing Upwards
In the Peter Brown picture book The Curious Garden, a child waters some forgotten, scraggly plants, and from that one tiny spark, a once-gray city blooms, bit by bit, into color.
This past Saturday, Nathacha filled a Santa Monica condo building’s window box with aloe and cacti. A few weeks ago, she had done the same for the one outside her friend’s place. There isn’t anyone tasked with maintaining the building’s planter boxes, and once her neighbors saw the first one, they asked if theirs could get the same makeover.
An older couple emerged from their unit and handed out cookies, delighted the entryway had more life and cheer. “These boxes were empty a long time.”
Everything Nathacha re-homed in the window boxes was free—“people will leave cuttings of their succulents out”—the alleys often yield entire plants next to the garbage.
The City of Santa Monica’s Resource & Recovery department (garbage, recycling & food waste) holds events where residents can pick up free compost—the richest, most nutrient-dense soil. Its manure-like smell is part of the process. In his April 2, 2020 profile in The Guardian, the self-titled “gangsta gardener” and LA native resident Ron Finley exhorts us to “plant some shit.”
The act of growing plants in neglected public/private spaces is sometimes called “guerilla gardening.” At its core, it’s practical: using abandoned spaces to create nourishment otherwise inaccessible in food deserts, such as in Detroit.
Of course, there’s also the inherent symbolism. Gardening, like any kind of art-making, is caretaking as protest. “We are gardens,” Finley insists. The main goal is “growing people…vegetables are simply a nourishing byproduct.”
Why not simply plant in Santa Monica’s community gardens? For one, the demand far exceeds the allotted space. My sister is on the cusp, she hopes, of getting her plot after ten years on the waiting list. Nathacha’s number hasn’t come up yet. More shared gardens would be better, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t pockets of potential surrounding us.
One way to form connections through gardening is to participate in beautification days at Santa Monica local schools. On Saturday, November 2, my eighth grader and I weeded, picked up trash, and planted succulents and feather grass at Lincoln Middle School.
Nathacha’s gardening journey began in the McKinley Elementary’s garden plot: “At first it was for the kids.” Covid interrupted. She tried to garden at their place in Big Bear but was no match for the squirrels, so she turned her green gaze to her Santa Monica yard.
First, she cleared a tree that flowered only one week per year. In the space it left, her kids planted seeds: tomatoes, sweet potatoes, flowers. Passion fruit vines joined the grapes. Her sixth grader inherited her green thumb, though he insists “I don’t have magic.” He’s right to ground gardening in the everyday, prune its mythical aura of requiring loads of time and resources. After all, gardening is simply dropping seeds in dirt, watering, and reaping the rewards.
Like the many gardeners that “pop up” in Brown’s picture book, guerilla gardening engenders opportunities for in-person interaction disguised as transactional.
Connections tend to sprout in the raised beds of unforced proximity and yield unexpected riches, a kind of casual causality that echoes Bahala’s mission to open ourselves up to serendipity.
Not all her neighbors like Nathacha’s project. One admitted, “I don’t really like plants,” but soon after returned with succulents, saying, “These are just going to die in my house.”
Nathacha’s new blueberry bush, carrot, beet and kale seeds are calling to her. She plans meals by what's ripe in her garden, though she still has to supplement with store-bought produce. “The trick is not to harvest everything at once,” she says. Leaving a few sweet potatoes on the vine ensures they’ll have more next year.
Before she heads home, Nathacha and I case my apartment building for areas we could plant (lots). What better way to belong here than to dig into the idea of home through the soil (soul) it stands on?