There is a politics to gardening.
Burned in my memory is an encounter I once had with a baby-boomer white guy who saw me working in a garden on Buffum Street. He wore a Grateful Dead tee shirt and a pair of jeans and he introduced himself as the owner of the dilapidated duplex across the street. In what seemed to be a friendly overture, he offered me this advice: “You don’t want to spend a lot of time on these places, lady, because they’re just cages, you know. That’s all they really are.”
Cages. The word curdled my blood when I heard it coming out of that man’s mouth and it sickens me to this day. The implication was that the people who lived on that street, who lived in that neighborhood, were animals. The racism was so blatant.
So this month I want to focus on three gorgeous gardens in the neighborhood west of Holton. I want to honor the work and imagination and love that have gone into these three luscious gardens. In spite of violence, joblessness and drug traffic, there are flowers blooming in the Harambee neighborhood. These gardens brim with delight and a sense of beauty. They bloom out of the human spirit that has not been blighted and so, to my way of thinking, each of them is a profound political statement.
They are gardens of hope.