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Features
WAR ON TERRA
Nazis. Hippies. Rule-breakers. A police state. Weeds. Welcome to the war over the Long Beach Community Gardens.
PHOTO by JEFFREY R. GOULD
THROUGH THE FENCE
You can glimpse the Long Beach Community Gardens from the southbound lanes of the 605, after the Spring Street exit. Look to your right, beyond the row of power-line towers. See that collection of verdant green patches? Like a commune splashed with bright flowers, and punctuated by the purposeful movements of urban farmers tending the good earth?
But don’t get yourself killed looking. The view’s not that great, and it leads only to heartbreak. Or a good joke. Your call.
My first view of that piece of paradise launched my search for the Long Beach Community Gardens. And it’s how I ended up there, standing for hours on the outside of a chain-link fence, staring in awe and curiosity past the No Trespassing signs at the luxuriant compound inside.
A few cars pulled up to the fence. The drivers pushed the security button. The fence rolled to one side. They drove through. When the gate opened, I got a full and unobstructed view of the place—more beautiful than I had imagined from the freeway. There’s an orchard off to the left, a large gazebo halfway down the main road that cuts the garden in half. I could see a few gardeners—wide-brim hats like a uniform—bent to their labor. Birds fluttered and argued, bugs buzzed. All was green, lush, instinctually inviting.
My eyes settled on a garden gnome, forever gazing into the distance from under his pointy red cap. At 103 pounds, I’m really not much bigger, and my outfit was about as outlandish—a T-shirt adorned with a picture of a piñata, shorts, my hair in braids, and hot-pink flip-flops. I looked about 13, and suddenly felt kind of gnomish myself. I identified with the little guy in the garden—except for the fact that he was in the garden, while I was locked outside.
Reluctantly, I went home and set to work trying to arrange a tour of the Long Beach Community Gardens. I went to its website—there’s more than one, it turns out—and I contacted its officers, and I asked for a tour. And then I pleaded and, ultimately, argued. None of it got me anywhere.
So now, several days later, I’m back at the automatic chain-link gate, waiting hopefully while cars go in and out, until one driver notices me standing there. He rolls down his window.
“So, you interested in getting a plot?” he asks.
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You know, it takes a lot of work,” he warns. “And you really have to keep up on it. They’re real Nazi here.”
I ask him if I can come inside and check out the gardens. He hesitates a moment before agreeing. But he tells me he’d prefer to drive in alone, that it would be better if I walked in and then met him up ahead. He detects the uncertainty on my face.
“If anyone says anything, my name is Eric,” he offers. “Just tell them you’re with me.”
I take my first step across the boundary, inside the fence, while he drives his truck a few hundred feet down the main path, past the gazebo where a small woman with gray hair sits in the shade, chatting idly with a man. She stops talking as I walk past. I smile. She stares.
MOSTLY IT WAS WEEDS
The Long Beach Community Gardens runs across nine acres leased from the city for $1 a year and is operated by a private not-for-profit association. They’ve been part of the local fabric since the mid-1970s, when the Long Beach City Council approved the project, provided some initial funding and allowed organizers some resources from the Department of Parks and Recreation. In the mid-1990s, retail development of the original site at the intersection of Carson and Dovey streets threatened to kill the Community Gardens. But the city stepped in again, helping relocate the urban farming project to its current home—adjacent to El Dorado Park, across from the animal shelter—with money, staff time and that buck-a-year lease agreement.
Since then, the urban farmers have blissfully planted and harvested to the rhythms of nature.
Only not always blissfully.
“Most of the people there were pretty nice,” says Gabrielle Weeks, who used to tend a plot at the Community Gardens with her husband. “But there is this board of directors that we call the Garden Gestapo.”
Weeks is passionate and talkative—the fact that the diminutive of her name is Gabby may have its origin in intuitive parents rather than mere coincidence. And she has an axe to grind with the Long Beach Community Gardens board of directors. It revoked her membership and, when she and her husband didn’t exit fast enough, summoned an El Dorado Park ranger to escort them from the property.
The reason? There were several. But mostly it was weeds. The board of directors determined that Weeks violated the Community Gardens’ list of rules and regulations by failing to keep her plot free of weeds. A search of the Community Gardens website (lbcg.org/home_0.shtml) reveals that “weed” is a word that comes up frequently in those rules and regulations, and which is defined as “Bermuda grass, morning glory, spurge and nut grass; see complete list at the table under the gazebo.”
Weedlessness could reasonably be considered next to godliness in a shared gardening environment, but Weeks charges that the Community Gardens board goes to ridiculous extremes to identify plants as enemy combatants, and that its members sometimes use the rules about weeds as a cover for indulging their personal power and preferences. “For example, they say that Asian people—Cambodian and Vietnamese—plant weird vegetables,” says Weeks, “so the Garden Gestapo can’t tell what’s a weed and what belongs.”
Weeks may be the loudest, but she is not the only critic of the Community Gardens board. You’ll find, for example, that the Long Beach Community Gardens Association’s original website—lbcga.org—has now been renamed the Long Beach Community Gardens Advocate. It’s still maintained by Steve Passmore, the man who built the association’s website, but it’s now like Radio Free Europe, a kind of voice of opposition.
“Tired of being policed instead of governed?” asks the website, where the opening words are “Recall the Board. Take Back the Gardens.” “Bothered by unequal enforcement or bizarre interpretations of the rules? Click the following link to send an e-mail and find out how you can sign the recall petition.”
The site is full of complaints about the power-hungry inconsistency of Long Beach Community Gardens officials. But those complaints overlook the most crucial rule and/or regulation: “The Officers and Board of Directors are the determining bodies on the interpretation of the Rules and Regulation with all decisions being final.” That is, they decide what a rule means.
Oh, and they don’t truck no back talk, neither. That’s in the rules and regulations, too: “The officers and board members need not converse or otherwise meet with anyone unless the meetings are civil and respectful. Nor will anyone be expected to respond to persons who are harassing, intimidating and/or threatening.”
I MEET THE PRESIDENT
All fascinatingly wacko, but I just want to get a look at the Long Beach Community Gardens. I want to walk its wood-chipped paths, get high on its circle-of-nature vibes and maybe participate in a little photosynthesis—trading my carbon dioxide for some oxygen. Maybe I can get a plot of my own, despite the long waiting list. Meanwhile, and more likely, I can possibly write a story about the place.
I phone Nancy Bernstein, the Community Gardens second vice president. She advises me to call Lonnie Brundage, the first vice president, to get what she called “an unbiased tour of the garden.”
But Lonnie says no. She says she doesn’t want to assume the responsibility. “You don’t know the concept,” she tells me. “You might walk on someone else’s garden. Or walk on the wrong paths.” She asserts that only a member of the board can take me in the garden. I know that’s not true. The Rules and Regulations on the website say I can be the guest of any gardener. But of course, I’m already forgetting the rule that says the officers and board members get to determine what those rules mean.
I call President Joan Criswell. I ask the same question: Can I please just walk around the garden with someone? Please?
“Right now, we’re in the middle of renewals,” Joan responds—meaning the collection of members’ annual $50 fee. “So my board is really busy right now.”
I ask Joan if anyone else might be free for an hour or so while they’re at the garden.
“It has to be one of the officers of the board,” Joan says.
And they are all too busy? Couldn’t just a regular garden member show me around?
“No.”
And then I understand. I finally get a sense of why Gabrielle the firebrand let these people get under her skin. Why Steve the webmaster took something he built for free and turned it against its intended masters. How a garden can turn into a battleground. I’m pretty sure I can hear it in Joan’s voice in the way she says “no.”
I’ve spent one minute on the phone with Joan, and already I want to scream, “But this is just a garden! VEGETABLES!” Instead, I ask, “Why can’t any member bring me to their garden and show me around?”
Joan seems flustered. She stutters out a rule that she makes up on the spot. “Well because they . . . we . . . it’s . . . it’s the board’s thing, that’s, that’s what they would do, it’s not for our members to do.”
She says possibly we can do something next week, or the week after that. Possibly. I say okay. I say a polite thank you. I say goodbye.
FIVE MINUTES
So now, thanks to some guy named Eric, I’m inside the Long Beach Community Gardens, walking past the gazebo, and I’m smiling and saying good afternoon to a suspicious grey-haired lady who is doing neither—and I’m suddenly possessed with the certainty that this woman is Lonnie Brundage. I’m pretty sure she knows it’s me, too.
“Can I help you with something?” the woman asks.
“No, I’m just checking the place out,” I reply. “Eric can vouch for me.”
I walk toward Eric’s car. He leads me off the main drive, over to his plot. I tell him I’m a reporter trying to write a story about the garden, and confide that I never expected to encounter so many high-strung people. He laughs in nervous agreement.
My stay lasted five mellow minutes. Eric picked a fresh string bean for me to eat, and a sprig of rosemary to smell. He showed me his summer squash and Brussels sprouts and the biggest head of cabbage I’ve ever seen. Tomatoes climbing trestles. A few flowers to bring butterflies.
Then Eric remembers it’s the last day for renewals, and that he’s forgotten to bring any money. He says he has to go and hurry back before dark, when official gardening hours end and the gate is locked. I ask him if he thinks anybody would get mad if I stayed inside the gate and walked around the garden until he got back. He looks at me like I am crazy. “Actually, you should leave with me,” he says. “I’ll drive you back out. I don’t want to get in trouble.”
I AM STUPID. AND A LIAR
Back outside the gate, the sun drawing low and the dust hanging a golden haze around the flowers and plants, I acknowledge the Long Beach Community Garden is not the utopia I’d hoped for. Still, I’m not ready to give up on my other hope—of a story—and I know I can’t write about a garden I’ve experienced for only five minutes. I continue to wait, hoping another gardener won’t mind assuming the liability of showing me their lima beans.
Then the real story comes walking up. Lonnie Brundage has her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?” she asks, but it’s not a question as much as an accusation.
“Are you Lonnie?” I guess.
“Well, who are you?”
“Hi again,” I begin. “I’m Megan, and we talked— ”
“Yeah, I thought so.”
“—on the phone. Nice to meet you.”
“I knew it was you!” she screams, pointing at me as though she’s just unveiled a conspirator. She yells that I shouldn’t be here. That they told me not to come. That there’s no story for me.
“Where are your ID and your credentials?” she asks suddenly.
“My credentials?” I ask.
“You don’t have them!” she’s shrieking now, “You know why? Because you’re a fake! And a fraud! And an imposter!”
I laugh. I can’t help it because this whole scene just crossed the automated chain-link fence into total absurdity.
“If anything goes missing you will be blamed for it and you will pay a $300 fine!”
I consider the string bean I ate a minute ago. That’d be one pricey vegetable. At various points in the ensuing tirade she calls me a liar. And “stupid.” She raps on her head with her fist and says, “You’re obviously stupid if you can’t get it in your head. I told you we’re too busy. We don’t have any story for you. If you come in here I’m going to call the park ranger on you!”
She takes a cell phone out of her pocket, but she doesn’t call the ranger. She calls Joan Criswell. “Joan. Hi. I’m here at the fence and guess who snuck into the garden? Uh-huh, you know it. You need to come over here.”
Much to Lonnie’s chagrin, I wait for Joan to show up. It takes a while. For a half-hour Lonnie pouts and fumes in silence on the other side of that fence. She crosses and uncrosses her arms, stands in one place, then paces back and forth, glaring at me. Finally, a man who looks like Farmer John if you actually knew someone named Farmer John, brings over a patio chair so Lonnie she can sit and scowl.
I don’t know what Joan looks like, so when a woman passes closely by the fence I address her with a timid, “Excuse me?”
“What?”
“I was wondering if you were expecting Joan to come into the garden today. I was hoping to talk to her.”
“I’m Joan.”
“Hi, I’m Megan. We talked on the phone. Nice to meet you.”
I offer my hand through the fence. She backs away with her hand in the air as if I have leprosy.
“No! It’s not nice to meet you!” she informs me. “I told you on the phone, we’re too busy to talk to you. We don’t want to do a story. There is no story here.”
I plead. All I want to do is walk around the garden for a few minutes. That’s all. When she refuses, I try something else.
“I got an e-mail from a woman named Gabrielle Weeks. She told me some things about the garden and I want to give you a chance to clear them up, to show me what the real garden is like. It seems like such a nice place.”
Oops. I’ve pushed a big red, self-destruct button.
“I knew it!” Joan shrieks. “We don’t want anything to do with that woman! We don’t want to refute anything! We don’t want to be part of anything that’s taking sides! We’re not hostile!”
I hang out a while longer, Joan and Lonnie watching me and talking about me to every gardener who passes. At one point a young woman arrives at the gate on a bicycle with a little trailer hitched to the back. Joan and Lonnie rush toward her, and the girl becomes frantic to fish her gate opener out of her backpack. She holds it up to Joan’s face like an olive branch and pleads, “Don’t yell at me! I’m a member here!”
YES, WE HAVE NO POTATOES
A few days later, I’m back in front of the fence, hoping that the previous interaction was the result of weird atmospheric conditions, that cooler heads might prevail and I might yet still get my tour of the Long Beach Community Gardens. But it’s like that old quote—attributed to Henry Kissinger—about university politics, that they’re so savage because the stakes are so low. Here, the low stakes support vegetables.
I haven’t waited long when Farmer John approaches, asking me from beneath his straw hat what I’m doing here.
“Trying to write a story about the garden.”
“I know, they told me all about you,” he says, “but you can’t come in.”
“That’s why I’m just standing here.”
A while later, as Farmer John drives his SUV out of the garden, he stops next to me, looks out of the cool leather interior, and says, “Why don’t you just leave? No one wants to talk to you.”
I nod and smile, saying nothing because I know he will. And he does. “So, yes, there are a lot of rules. A lot of people complain about them,” Farmer John says. “But do I really want to grow potatoes anyway?”
He’s apparently referencing the Community Garden’s long list of banned plants, which includes potatoes. I say nothing.
“No!” he answers himself, then goes on talking to me for a few more minutes about how no one wants to talk to me. He starts to drive off, only to pull over a few feet away. I see him pick up his cell phone. He doesn’t leave until Joan Criswell shows up a few minutes later. Joan gives me more of the same, threatening to call the ranger.
I stay put.
MY NAME IN DIRT
It’s dusk, the garden will be closing soon, Farmer John and Lonnie have driven away, no one else was driving in, and I still haven’t been inside the garden. I’m out of ideas. I stare through the closed gate and into the garden. I can see a white board with phone numbers written on it. One of them is for the park ranger. I dial, but nobody answers.
I stop at an El Dorado Park gate and ask the attendant in the kiosk for directions to the ranger station.
“Everything okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine. I just have questions about the Community Garden.”
“The ranger is on his way to the Community Garden,” she says. “Someone else called him.”
Back at the garden entrance, I resume waiting. I wiggle my toes in their hot pink flip-flops.
The ranger’s vehicle finally slows at the gate. He rolls down the window. He looks confused. When I walk to the car and bend down to look in at him, my braid flops in my face.
“Hi!” I say.
“Uh, hi,” he replies, more confused. “Can I help you?”
“I wanted to ask you about the garden, and I was going to the station, but I was told you were already coming.”
He looks at me, stunned, then slowly raises his hand, and points a finger at me. He lets it hang there before asking, “You? They called me on you?” Then he laughs. He laughs so hard he doubles over the steering wheel.
All the pent-up hilarity from the past few days comes spewing out of me, too. “Yeah! I just wanted to look at the garden,” I laugh, “but they wouldn’t let me!”
The ranger is still chuckling when he pushes his own gate opener and drives over the threshold and into the garden. I hang back. When he gets out and realizes that I haven’t followed, he looks at me and laughs some more.
“Well, come on! I’ll let you in,” he shouts. “I’ll tell you all about the garden.”
As I walk in he’s still shaking his head and smirking. He tells me he was called to handle a case of verbal harassment. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but how can you harass anybody?”
For the next 20 minutes we trade stories about the Long Beach Community Gardens and the board members who run it. “They’re like a Nazi regime,” he says. “One time they called me in to kick out an 80-year-old lady.”
He gets a call over the radio and I meander a little, smelling flowers, marveling at an artichoke growing on a stalk nearly as tall as I am, reveling in the beauty of the flowers of a squash—and imagining steam shooting from Lonnie and Joan’s ears when they realize that calling the ranger on me was what finally got me into the garden.
Soon the ranger has to get back to work. He jokingly suggests that I brag to the board members about being here. “You should say to them, ‘By the way, I got in your garden. I walked around and I wrote my name in the dirt.’”
The gate opens again, this time from the inside, and I walk out. The ranger passes in his car and shouts from the window with mock anger. “Stop being so argumentative! Stop being so hateful!” I hear his laughter as he drives away.
Tags: gardening, gnomes, long beach community garden, string beans
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