“Offensive Gardening”: A Primer for Bushwick
Today as I sat here working, I heard a metallic “tink!” coming from the front of the house. I looked out the window, and watched as one pre-pubescent boy handed the other an aluminum baseball bat. The other kid got into a stance as though he was ready for a pitch, brought the bat back, and just then, despite my previous vows to be sweet as candy to the kids in the neighborhood, I barked out “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?” They ran off, and I went to check the tree. Luckily it’s young and bendy, so it just has a small mark. I’m still in shock at how two kids can just stand in front of someone’s house and take whacks at their tree with a metal bat.
So, adrenaline still pumping, I came inside, made myself some coffee and sat down to my latest obsession — The City Gardener’s Handbook by Linda Yang. I happened to open to the page that mentioned common problems city gardeners have with gardens that the public can access — namely, theft and vandalism. The book’s answer to vandalism, unsatisfyingly, is to use cheap plants you wouldn’t care too much about losing. But the part about warding off thieves is great: “use plants with natural barbs whose removal is too painful for the vandal to bear.”
Yang goes on to describe something about which I have fantasized…”This approach to ‘offensive gardening’ was honed to a fine point by one desperate gardener who twined barbed wire unobtrusively through her ground cover and around her roses.” The book then has a good list of plants that have their own naturally built-in barbs, including blackberries, roses, thistles, and some that sound downright threatning: stinging nettle and firethorn. A friend of mine started telling me to bury razor blades a few weeks ago; now it’s her answer for any problem I complain about to her. I say it’s her “azúcar!”
Anyway, off I go to collect trash from around my sad, beseiged little tree.
May 29th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Blackberries! Everybody likes blackberries.
May 29th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
They don’t like to be stuck with blackberry thorns…I guess.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
wow, that’s a little tree man.. most new trees I see in “tree pits” around the city are twice that big. hmmm.. well, you could consider putting two support poles, one on each side, and tying them to the tree. that’s something else I see on most new tree transplants. good luck. I hate it when people act like assholes that way. I mean, if you think about it in terms of the environment, trees are worth a lot more than some people in this world. god, that sounds harsh..
May 29th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Wow, you said it man.
Yeah, I didn’t realize how little the tree really was until I got it home…it’s supposed to grow up to 2 feet a year, so hopefully it will toughen up and get taller quickly.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
My hardcover copy of Yang’s book is yellowed with age. There are more resources and references today, but when it first came out, it was a godsend.
Armstrong’s suggestion of support poles is a good one. Not that your tree needs it to grow up properly. There’s some evidence the presence of support poles reduces vandalism.
I note this post is “filed under Crime.” Not that the penalties are that much, but it is a crime to damage a street tree. You can call the Parks department, 311, or your local precinct to let them know what’s going on. I’m sure your tree isn’t the only one being attacked by these two. Nor are they likely to limit themselves to vandalising trees.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:30 am
Well, I think they focused on mine because it’s so small — a couple more well-placed hits and I think they could have snapped it. I’m sure they were just on their way to the baseball field down the street, and saw something small enough to destroy in only a few smacks. Calling the cops wouldn’t have gotten any cops there in time anyhow.
My neighbor has those poles, and I never understood why…now I guess I should get some.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:00 am
Just the other day I told my husband that once we know for sure we’re going back to NYC, I’m buying another copy of The City Gardener’s Handbook.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:52 am
One time in front of my old apartment I saw three children (the oldest one was maybe 10) hurling water-filled 16 oz. bottles at cats. Like you, I ran down and screamed at them.
Yeah, they aren’t foliage but it makes you wonder what (if anything) their parents are teaching them. It makes me thankful my ‘new’ neighbors actually watch their kids. One wrong move and momma is on the scene.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:39 am
UGH - that sucks. get the poles for the tree. that will probably help. i have thought about putting razor wire in my front flower baskets but the theft has been only intermittent so far (once or twice a year). also i wonder if i would get in trouble if a kid put their hand in there and hurt themselves badly… so i’ll probably skip it.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:49 am
actually i prefer the method you employed already: scream at the top of your lungs.
i wish i had been there to see that! those kids musta jumped ten feet. maybe you can rig up a motion detector to signal a recording of yelling if they get too close. it’s the only way they’ll learn.
i’m trying to work in some bit about aluminum vs. wooden bats, but i can’t quite bridge the gap.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Dana, try barbed wire instead of razor. It just pokes unless they really get their hands in there deep. By the time their hands are in the dirt, it’s gonna be some jerkoff adult trying to steal your plant, not a juvenile vandal.
JL, actually, the kids stopped and looked first, and when I yelled again (that would be “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?”), then they took off running. I find the Mexican kids are scared shitless of anything, but the baby Boricuas look at you like, yeah, AND?
May 30th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Hey. My sister and I garden outside a cop station in strips of dirt that probably had been intended at some point for bushes but the city ran out of money. The garden’s beautiful — pretty mature at this point — and I saw some kids come hurtling around the corner and jumping in the beds. I ran over and yelled at them. They were obviously a class from a school — they were wearing identical maroon polo shirts — and the teachers came around the corner eventually, but a confrontation had already ensued. One largish girl — they were 6th graders — got in my face and I got right back in hers, which perhaps surprised her, but I went to and have taught in public urban schools and I wasn’t havin’ it.
The teachers apologized, blah blah blah, and some of the kids were sweet, but the whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth, given the racial and class ramifications and that I was effectively participating in an oft-played and very frequent gentrification dynamic. My sister’s lived in Bushwick for 10 years, btw, so we didn’t just get here last month. So I got on the horn, called around, tracked down the school, and said I wanted to go talk to the class. Not for blame, not because I wanted an apology, but because I wanted each side to talk about what happened. This is where I was coming from, and then they could say where they were coming from. Also, this was a strategic move on my part, because I didn’t want the kids coming back and ripping out the flowers in retaliation.
Long story short: I went in, talked to the principal, and then was walked to the class. I think it went fine. If nothing else, perhaps the kids will know that we all have to live together, and if you’re out running around on the street, you’re not anonymous and actions have consequences, some perhaps intended, others not. I don’t have any big moral to this story, but I just didn’t want things to play out as they had.
May 30th, 2007 at 9:56 am
You garden at the cop station on Forrest and Central? I see you all the time! Once spring sprung I knew there was no way some city gardener was doing all that, and that some private citizen had taken it over, since you knwo the cops couldn’t give a shit, I mean look at all the trash in front of that dump.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
That’s the one! I should say that it’s the brainchild of my sister, and she was the one who put a hell of a lot of initial work into it. Go look at the Forrest Street strip — the roses have all popped and it’s lookin’ great. I’m going to try to hit the Central side tomorrow — I’m just the unhired help, though, rather than the organizing genius (which is another way of saying my sis won’t let me plant what *I* want, hem-hem). A lot of the cops are appreciative, though, and say so, and ply us with hamburgers and hotdogs when they grill outside. My sis and I look a lot alike, so I think many of the cops are under the impression that they’ve been chitchatting with just one person the whole time.
Hope you’ve enjoyed it. That was one of its points — a little beauty in the midst of a hell of a lot of concrete.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
It’s definitely appreciated — Central from my block to Flushing is a gauntlet of vacant lots, razor wire, depressing dusty parks, and street-snubbing housing projects.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
KG - i have appreciated your plantings too!! thought to myself what a nice job they(the police dept) did… now i know the real story. thanks!
June 5th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Don’t the police have leisure time to plant?