My last garden was pirated.
A neglected property with an abandoned house set deep on the lot. It was secured from the street with an 8’ chain link barbed fence installed years ago by the owners when people were dumping garbage on the property. They hung a sign on it. No Trespassing.
The lot was typical in size for the neighborhood at twenty-by-one-hundred feet. It is unusual in that there is a shell of a house at the rear of the property leaving a large front yard. It was home to a small magnolia, huge, blue spruce tree, rose bush, lilac, lily-of-the-valley, spiderwort, boxwood, and arbor vitae. A concrete sidewalk divides the space into two long areas which are overgrown with wildflower weeds, viola, lily of the valley, asiatic lily, chrysanthemums, dandy lions, poison ivy. milkweed,...
The first years I watched this yard grow to a height of seven feet before landscapers suddenly appeared to noisily reduce it back to bare earth and minor stumps each autumn. On one such occasion the property owner was attending the operation and by chance I was as home at the time and was able to introduce myself.
She explained the condition of the building's foundation was making the renovation difficult hence the appearance of abandonment. The interior has been gutted to the frame. A mere shell.
She then offered me to use as a garden, with the caveat that construction would commence in the spring and may start without much warning. She gave me a set of bolt cutters.
I was glad at the offer but it being late in the season I felt it made little sense to spend any amount of effort that year. The next spring brought a similar defeat, armed with the knowledge that construction would begin before summer, it would be folly to invest in the plants only to have insufficient time to bring the crops to maturity.
But then something happened. The construction didn’t begin. and late in the Autumn when the day laborers appeared to clearcut the land I was devastated. A whole growing season wasted. I vowed to plant in the spring.
That winter I squirreled away every seed that passed through my kitchen not destined for the cook pot. planning and scheming nightly for the coming bounty, I investigated and observed the plot to determine the prime location for each planting.
When the snow melted I tended to the strawberries and herbs I grow on my patio. Once these were firmly established I turned my eye to the neighbors yard. Storms and litterbugs had filled the yard over the winter with tree limbs and trash.
I gathered and the garbage and debris was cleared the land. I turned over the area closest to the side of my house and sifted through the soil to remove glass and debris. I used some pavers and bricks I found there to make a path.
Patrick Keefe, Oil Painting, In Preparation of Spring (Diptych), 26 x 24, 2022
Sold from the studio to a collector while curing.
I walked the mile to the local garden center and bought all the plants I could afford. Four beefsteak tomatoes, four early girl tomatoes, four eggplant and four basil.
I planted the tomatoes deep so that only the top of the plant was uncovered by earth. The Basil and eggplants get buried to the soil line.
The next area I turned over the next weekend, and planted it with butternut, watermelon, cucumber, and cantaloupe and kobocha seeds that I had saved.
Every morning my routine included spending time watering each plot, and walking between the gardens picking out glass and weeds and training the plants. Large areas of the yard I left fallow. I thinned the existing plants to those that were of a more manageable height and those which provided benefit to and attracted bees and butterflies.
By June the peach tree I had planted four years prior was beginning to yield fruit. I reckoned forty Peaches, each stolen just prior to ripening by neighborhood vagabonds.
The kabocha seeds I planted grew vigorously, until a powdery mildew killed them all in a week.
I wasn’t ready to start harvesting the food. I honestly didn’t really trust it. I took soil samples and sent it to the Environmental Laboratory at Brooklyn College. Since I was sampling I decided to grab a few from around the neighborhood as well. I also sent the lab “Tissue samples” which was just fruit in this case from the tomato, peach, and a nearby mulberry tree. The Mulberry tree’s root section I suspected intersected with the chemical plume under the roadway at the corner of Franklin Ave and Dupont St and I had seen people eating the fruit.
I took 3 locations’ sample sets in total each where a fruit was growing. Sending the laboratory peaches, tomatoes, and mulberry fruit and soil samples. The mulberry tree was the worst of all of them with high levels of lead and other heavy metals in the fruit and the highest of over 1000 ppm lead in the soil. The tomato also contained toxic levels of lead. Only the peach tested clean. Despite the soil being heavily contaminated around 600 ppm lead.
We never ate anything from the ground here except for a few peaches, but even those we ate sparingly.
The next season I planted wildflowers and used the space for garden parties. I hosted my friends and family out there for five years.
My son and I turn over the pavers on the pathway to look for bugs together. We would always find snails and slugs and their eggs; centipedes and millipedes; worms, grubs, ants, and roaches.
Detail from “In Preparation of Spring Series”
Years go by. Season after season I care for the garden. Pruning the lilac; training the rose bush; discovering underground rhizomes and roots of neglected perennials. I take cuttings for my small plot and planters from some of these.
The chain link fence is replaced with a wooden construction fence painted green. It has a sign on it advertising the new condominium that will be erected on the site.
Early in the spring only lichens and moss are green; along with the very tips of buds and eyes of rhizomes peeking through winter’s detritus.
The insects are still asleep in the soil. Grubs, and other larvae, unhitched eggs.
Snails slowly patrol the landscape hiding from the starlings and sparrows.
It was the beginning of 2020 when they clear cut the lot. They crushed the rose bush under the wheels of a dump truck. I went into the yard and gathered the roots of the roses, the bulbs from the spiderwort, and the hydrangea, I potted them.
Construction began abruptly. There was indication that all unnecessary construction would be halted by the Department of Buildings so they were planning to do the excavation as quickly as they could. An open pit is a safety concern so would set the project into necessary territory by making it dangerous to leave unattended.
There is a snail crawling on the stonework on the base of my home. It’s eating the lichens growing there. It’s moving slowly. Like you would expect a snail to move. Its body stretches from its translucent green-yellow and black spiral shell as it glides over the rough dirty surface it’s eyestalks and antenna probe and explore.
