Where Food Grows, So Does Hope

Nineteen Al Quaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes, deliberately flew them into buildings, and people died.  My mom moved to Atlanta from New York.  I started a garden.  Ten years passed.  My daughters grew up.

I woke up and heard the news.  The head of Al Quaeda, who had organized the attacks, was killed by the U.S. military.  Like ten years earlier, I had no words.  I couldn't work.  Farmer D's truck arrived moments later.  I spread new compost all morning.  I nurtured land.  I planted seeds.  I gathered fruit.

 
I saw footage of Ground Zero, the place where the Twin Towers used to stand in downtown Manhattan.  A hole.  A gaping hole.  And then I remembered what was happening just blocks away in Battery Park, something Carolyn Zezima of NYC Foodscape, one of the people I interviewed for my article about what we can learn from urban farms in the July/August issue of Urban Farm magazine (the preview copy of which I just received yesterday), told me: there is now an urban farm.  It is a one-acre farm shaped like a turkey (I found the aerial photo of the farm here), believe it or not, and lined with a fence made from bamboo repurposed from the Big Bambu installation that I actually saw last July when I was in NYC, which was created from bamboo harvested from the state of Georgia, where I live. 

I wondered how this came to be, food growing instead of fear, on precious real estate literally overlooking Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the first view of the United States so many people who came to this country (including all my grandparents as I'm a second-generation American) had.  Warrie Price, the founder and president of the Battery Conservancy (a non-profit organization committed to restoring the Battery's 25 waterfront ares and revitalizing its landmark castle), explained to me:  

photo from Inhabitat

"We knew we had space for more than a vegetable garden in the park where for six years subway construction had occurred and we wanted to do some added soil enrichment in preparation for the new Battery Garden Bikeway. Our Battery Conservancy's Vice Chairman had created a mini roof top urban farm and we were impressed with how much produce came from his efforts. We also wanted to do outreach to the surrounding neighboring schools to let them know the Battery was their outdoor classroom.  We now have 8 schools and 680 students participating in the Urban Farm at the Battery."

Warrie Price was a founding director in 1983 of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, created to champion the use of native plants along public access ways and in urban landscapes.  I wrote about Lady Bird Johnson's national wildflower project once, in a post titled Where Flowers Bloom, So Does Hope.  And now, of course, all these years later, it's clear. Where food grows, so does hope.  Where children innocently plant on a piece of land that hadn't been cultivated since the early Dutch settlers, the future takes shape.  And just as Ben Franklin suggested the turkey should be our national bird, perhaps, in this turkey-shaped urban farm (the shape of which was chosen because there is a wild turkey named Zelda who apparently lives in downtown NYC), it finally is.

And so, for me, the words have come again, and as always these past ten years, they come in stories of food.

Where Food Grows, So Does Hope