Now that the gardening season is off to a start and the gardens are buzzing, the real fun begins.  And if by that you think I mean actually gardening, well, that too, I guess. 

This morning, for example, I've been working on letters to two elderly gardeners who have become too frail to work their multiple plots (they both have what are referred to around here as "estate gardens" — three or more contiguous plots), but can't seem to give them up.  In both cases it's been a couple of years since any gardening to speak of has been done.


Every community has to deal with the issue of aging, and community gardens are no different, but because we have so many senior gardeners it's somewhat surprising that the only mechanisms we have in place for a situation like this are warnings and revocation. 

Another issue is theft — gardener-on-gardener theft.  A couple days ago I encountered a crest-fallen gardener in his lovely perennial garden.  Two brand new plantings had been neatly extracted leaving two perfect little holes in the bed in their place. I commiserated. It's happened to me. 

When you have seven acres of gardens to scour, there's almost no chance of finding the culprit.

I gotta tell ya, sometimes I feel like I'm in the Peace Corps.  There are so many little tribes, each with their own chieftain, on our seven acre reservation.  There are regional differences.  I used to liken it to the five boroughs, but I'm starting to see it's more like, I dunno, Afghanistan.

When a new board comes in the chieftains start making their appearances, offering to lend a hand, dishing.  You don't realize until you've met with several of them that you are just the latest in a long line of well-meaning missionaries whose mission is doomed.

The chieftains' urgent task is to pull the new officers into ancient tribal skirmishes before the latter can get the lay of the land.  If one can get your ear before the other, then he at least has a shot and ousting his rival (and hopefully pillaging his plot).

It turns out there's politics everywhere.

So you have to be very wary.  You have to be mindful: there are local customs to observe, longstanding blood-feuds, networks with deep, subterranean roots. 

There is, for example, I have come to my chagrin to find, a very well-established trade in plunder from gardens in transition.  The goods are divvied up and travel along a series of well-worn routes, mostly to "estate gardens" that are behind impenetrable hedges, but sometimes to new gardeners to curry favor.

Trying to "nation-build" on top of this with a mere three years to do it in (and frankly, I could not see myself in this volunteer post for more than that), well, even if we had the means to conduct a few much-needed extreme renditions, I don't think we could eradicate the black market or eliminate the tribal leaders that rule the urban garden underground.

It's all about territory.

"Men have been fighting over land since the dawn of time," one old-timer who had been booted by a previous board was telling me.  "Even a thirty foot by twelve foot plot will bring out that ancient lust for land in a man."

And I understand that when you've been tending the same plot for twenty years, you might set some roots down.  All you have to do is take a stroll around our "victory gardens".  You'll see right away that although it points to our origins "victory gardens" is really a misnomer, since nowadays we have more perennial gardens than herb and vegetable gardens.

A mature perennial garden is an altogether different kind of garden than a vegetable garden.  It requires a different set of skills and it evokes a different set of emotions and attachments.  Most perennial gardens are a long-term relationship, a slowly- and ever-evolving labor of love. 

Each year the perennial gardener notes the minute changes that take place in each of his perennials.  Last year my beloved tree peony was in full glory on the tenth of May. The year before, it was the sixteenth.  The year before that?  The 21st!  (It was starting to seem like a disturbing trend, but this year it didn't do its thing until around the 25th.)

Point being, perennial gardening inspires a degree and kind of attachment to place that a box garden just doesn't.  There are many wonderful things about vegetable gardening, but it is, on the whole, more pragmatic and prosaic. Gardens can be easily disassembled and relocated.  Place is a means, not an end.

It's a question, then, if our perennial gardeners are, on the whole, more territorial than our vegetable gardeners. To the casual observer they certainly seem to be.

Interestingly, the "incoming class" are almost all twenty-somethings, and almost exclusively into old-school victory gardening.  They all want —- or think they want — vegetable gardens.  I think this is a very positive trend. 

And so do these guys:


It's always something.