City Gardener With a Passion

Los Angeles Ron Finley Gardens

Where No Man Has Gone Before!

 

 

If you want to humanize a city, take inhabitants back to their roots--vegetable roots, that is--where do you start?

 

 

If you are Roy Finley living in a downtrodden Los Angeles neighborhood, you begin planting in your yard and on the city's 150-by-10-foot median strip outside your house.  No square foot of hard-packed sod or patch of crabgrass dare be ignored.

 

 

An inspiring article in The New York Times (Sunday, May 5, 2013) by David Hochman describes the whirlwind that Ron Finley stirred up beginning in 2010 when he planted a sidewalk garden "to reduce grocery expenses and to avoid the 45-minute roundtrip to Whole Foods."

 

 

That got the city's Bureau of Street Services to cite and fine him $400.00 for gardening without a permit on city property.  Fortunately, activists got the city to relent.

 

 

Latent City Land Just Waiting for Transformation!

 

To dramatize the city's potential, Finley estimates that Los Angeles owns "26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20 Central Parks [in New York City], with enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants"!

 

Pavement-Pounding Johnny Appleseed 

 

Article author David Hochman calls Finley a "pavement-pounding Johnny Appleseed," implying that his attitudes and actions can transform cities.  Finley's activities have already landed him on TED's website with the message that edible gardens are the antidote to inner-city health issues.

 

 

Shovels Not Guns!

 

Finley pictures a future full of shovels, not guns, and mint and marjoram instead of drugs.  He says,

 

 

I want our inner-city churches to become ministries of health instead of places that serve up fried, fattening foods.  I want to clean up my yard, my street and my 'hood.

 

I saw a kid walking down the street listening to music when he came face to face with one of my giant Russian Mammoth sunflowers. . . 'Yo, he said, 'is that real?

 

He thought it was a prop or something.  That's what I want on my streets.  Flowers so big and magnificent, they'll blow a kid's mind.

 

 

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