Blood and Carrots
By Eric Verkerke
4:39 | audio slideshow | listen to mp3
More on urban agriculture:
- Fishing and Gardening:
- J. Glenn Eugster:
- Jody Tick:
- Vinnie Bevivino:
LINK:
There’s a garden just outside the Fort Totten metro stop in Washington, D.C. You could easily pass it by without a second look or second thought. Hundreds of people do every day.
But in this forgotten corner of our sprawling capital they’re growing more than just cabbages and collard greens.
Benny Harris, Jr. is lean and weathered, wearing a black felt cowboy hat and a coarse grey beard. He’s been gardening at the Mamie D. Lee Community Garden since the early ’80s and has watched it change over the years.
“When I first came here we had a really good group of people,” Benny says. “But over the years they died out; they all was an older group. Probably there’s only…” He pauses to count in his mind. “There’s only two people still gardening from when I started.”
He leads me over to a tree stump at the top of the garden and nudges it with a boot. “We had a big old tree right there man,” he says. “This is where we used to have our meetings and things a lot of the times.”
When Benny looks down at the stump you can see how it stands for the garden’s past.
The cool shade used to make a good meeting spot for all the gardeners in the heat of a D.C. summer. They kept the ivy cut back and the tree thrived. But a few years ago, the park service made them stop. The ivy spread and the tree died.
This seems to be the story not just of the tree, but of the garden itself. A combination of neglect, regulation, and old age has taken a toll. As Benny’s generation begins to fade away, more and more plots lie empty.
A Garden Spanning Generations
Harold Stone is the new manager at Mamie Lee. As we walk through the garden together, he tastes the collard greens and carrots from different plots, the crunch and snap of fresh vegetables breaking up our conversation.
Harold stands between the generation of gardeners who grew up in the rural South around World War II and the young urban professionals who are rediscovering gardening.
Harold is passionate about revitalizing this place, but he’s also humbled and almost reverent about the work ethic and philosophy of the older generation.
“I get so much from these people, from the people in the garden,” he says. “It’s humbling… There is a grace about them. There’s just a lot of grace in the way they look at things, respond to things. I’ve got a lot to learn.”
Meanwhile, gardeners like Benny are quietly teaching by example.
On one plot, a new gardener is growing sunflowers, right in the middle of his garden.
“The first thing new gardeners wanna do is put down sunflowers,” Benny says. When I ask him why, he just shakes his head and says, “I have no idea, I have no idea.”
As he cracks open one of the dried sunflowers, he points out the mistake: “See, with a garden, I would never put nothin’ tall in the middle ’cause it shades everything from the sun,” he says.
Lessons Beyond Gardening
The divide between Benny’s generation of urban farmers and the young professionals who may replace them is clear in their gardens: the traditional clean, straight rows of okra, tomatoes, and collards contrast with the more youthful, experimental mounds and spirals of herbs and sunflowers.
And, Harold says, the differences run deeper than garden design. “The older gardeners in my mind, it’s almost like must — they must do this. It’s in their bones to produce vegetables, to produce a crop. And it’s an outlet for them to connect with a longstanding tradition in their lives.”
But he says that for young folks, it’s more of a hobby than a way of life. He can’t see one of the new gardeners coming out if they were sick or if it was raining. But, he says, “some of our older gardeners will come out with two canes to be in their garden.”
Harold says this new generation can learn more than just gardening from Benny.
“Took me a while to really understand that what they were giving was advice,” Harold says. “A lot of times it just seemed like, oh, just conversation, but there was a whole lot more there.”
Our world is full of choices. We pick out colleges and careers and hobbies and clothes to define who we are. Benny’s generation began gardening out of necessity. They keep gardening because it’s in their blood, it’s who they are. It’s a kind of hard-headed pragmatism that comes out of a very different era — an era that only survives in guys like Benny, and in anyone who’s willing to listen.
As we walk past fallow plots, Harold mulls over his experience at Mamie Lee. “It took me slowing down to really listen to them,” he reflects. Now, he says, “I do a lot less talking, a lot more listening. The listening has got a lot of space in between, ’cause there’s not a whole lot said.”
Tags: DC, eric verkerke, science desk
All stories