Week 4: ELEMENTS

A Patch of Dirt

I live in an apartment complex surrounded by apartment complexes. The space around here stretches out from expansive lawn to lawn with patches of hedge and other typical landscaping plants filling in the borders near the buildings. In many ways all the public space is convenient. My two year old has a much larger yard for running in that he would if we had a fenced in yard. And yet the private space—where one might grow a garden—is technically non-existent. But lately I’ve noticed this technicality has not hampered many of my neighbors. Two apartment buildings down from me in a patch of bare dirt—where most buildings have a yew hedge—my neighbor has only bare dirt where she grows beans. She’s built a kind of tee-pee trellis and the beans rise up over five feet. I’m almost certain she did not ask permission to plant directly in the ground, but there are her beans just the same. She also has a dirt patch on the opposite side of her porch where tomato plants climb a similar trellis-structure.

All around this neighborhood people have claimed a few feet of dirt for themselves in this fashion. Some have built garden boxes full of soil that sprout flowers, and some vegetables, but many have planted right in the ground. On a walk today I saw a large squash runner intertwined with a landscaped hedge, the big leaves and yellow flowers flaunting their usefulness overtop the merely decorative hedge.

In a world of urbanization, overcrowding, corporate landscape, and political division it can easily feel that there is no space to breath—and certainly no small spaces to make personal and beautiful and productive. And yet everywhere I look, I find incidents that prove this idea wrong. I’d like to learn better to do this myself. To embrace the small spaces that do exist—a crack in the landscaping, a hidden corner of sun. A space where a little care and a bit of rule bending from me might produce something beautiful and life-giving. I have two potted tomato plants on my shared porch this summer. It’s a very small start.