"The Garden"

The mailbox replacement project my neighborhood is conducting is scheduled for the first week of December (and yes, I have it worked out with the head of my home owners association to let Feliciomo recycle the mailboxes). I have been willing my mailbox garden crops to grow, grow, grow as quickly as possible so that I could harvest them before having to remove the garden, and they have been complying.

Yet our first below-freezing night knocked out the potato plants and I found myself out there yesterday with my large silver colander, gathering potatoes, black radishes, romaine lettuce, arugula, and peas, all from a 2' x 4' raised bed box.

And as I was pretty much destoying my garden, I felt tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. Not because of my little piece of earth, which I intend to replant. Because of theirs.

"They" are the Farmers of South Central L.A., and their piece of earth was the community garden at 41st and Alameda. This 14-acre urban paradise, with plots after plots of papaya and banana trees and every crop from avocado to walnut joining up from the grid structure of the city streets, formed an oasis where once were the remains of the Rodney King riots of 1992.

After 14 years, you truly won't believe what happens to this garden, and therein lay the reason for my tears. (You may recall that the actress Darryl Hannah, who had joined the farmers' movement to save the garden, had to be removed from a walnut tree by the police.) In a vividly-captured scene in Scott Hamilton Kennedy's award-winning documentary The Garden that will stay with me forever, something so raw with emotion happened that Scott told me last night when we talked that he has to leave the theater during screenings every time that scene comes on.

"The Farmers of South Central L.A." is a group made up of 347 families. Scott's crowning achievement in his movie, if you ask me, besides the masterful telling of a tension-filled story, is his elegant camerawork in capturing the unyielding pride on the faces of the farmers.

I asked Scott if he was a gardener before he started this project, and he told me he wasn't. He is a storyteller and this story had all the elements of a great one--heroes, villians, conflict, the works. Yet, as a result of being immersed in this community garden for several years, Scott is now planning to turn his backyard into a mixed-use environment that includes a vegetable garden. And the Farmers of South L.A. will help him. He has also become an activist, and I predict we'll have many more activists in this country as more and more people see this movie, and as rights of community gardens to survive get challenged in land ownership and land-use policies around the world.

If you are in the position to schedule a screening of The Garden for your city, contact Scott here.

Something tells me we'll be seeing more of Scott. Perhaps on Oscar night (the movie has been short-listed).

In the meantime, I'll replant my mailbox garden soon. Because that's what farmers do.