[Community_garden] Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard

[Moonshae]

Water Saving Backyards
Redefining American Beauty, by the Yard
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
New York Times, Published: July 13, 2006
Straight to the Source
WHEN Cecilia Foti, a seventh grader at the Bancroft Middle School  
here, was asked to write a persuasive essay for her English class in  
the spring semester, she did not choose a topic deeply in tune with  
her peers the pros and cons of school uniforms, say, or the districts  
retro policy on chewing gum and cellphones.

Instead, she addressed the neighborhood’s latest controversy: her  
family’s front yard. The American lawn needs to be eradicated from  
our society and fast! she wrote, explaining that her family had  
replaced its own with a fruit and vegetable garden. She argued for  
the importance of water conservation, the dangers of pesticides and  
the dietary benefits and visual appeal of an edible yard. Was the  
Garden of Eden grass? she reasoned. No.

In this quintessential 1950s tract community about 25 miles southeast  
of downtown Los Angeles, the transformation of the Foti family’s  
front yard from one of grass to one dense with pattypan squash  
plants, cornstalks, millionaire eggplants, crimson sweet watermelons,  
dwarf curry trees and about 195 other edible varieties has been  
startling.

The empty front lawn requiring mowing, watering and weeding  
previously on this location has been removed, reads a placard set  
amid veggies in oval planting beds fronting the street.

The sign is a not-so-subtle bit of propaganda proclaiming the second  
and most recent installment of Edible Estates, an experimental  
project by Fritz Haeg, a 37-year-old Los Angeles architect and ersatz  
Frederick Law Olmsted. The project, which he inaugurated on the  
Fourth of July weekend in 2005 in a front yard in Salina, Kan., is  
part of a nascent delawning movement concerned with replacing lawns  
around the country with native plants, from prairie grasses in  
suburban Chicago to cactus gardens in Tucson.

It is a kind of high-minded version of Extreme Makeover: Home  
Edition. As Mr. Haeg put it, It’s about shifting ideas of what’s  
beautiful.

It’s about what happens on that square of land between the public  
street and the private house. It’s about social engagement. I wanted  
to get away from the idea of home as an obsessive isolating cocoon.

The Fotis volunteered for the project after reading about it in early  
2006 at treehugger.com, an environmental Web site. Cecilias father,  
Michael Foti, a 36-year-old computer programmer and avid gardener who  
raises chickens in the backyard, was eager to put his environmental  
politics into practice.

I am looking to think differently about this space, Mr. Foti said of  
the family’s once-placid front yard. I want to look outward rather  
than inward.

The delawning was accomplished over Memorial Day weekend by a SWAT  
team of some 15 recruits who read about the project on Mr. Haeg’s Web  
site. Mr. Haeg arrived armed with three rented sod cutters, a roto- 
tiller and a dozen rakes and shovels, and within three days the yard  
was transformed.

The new garden has caused much rumbling in the neighborhood, a pin- 
neat community originally built after World War II for returning  
G.I.s where colorful windsocks and plastic yard butterflies prevail.  
Some neighbors fret about a potential decline in property values,  
while others worry that all those succulent fruits and vegetables  
will attract drive-by thieves as well as opossums and other vermin in  
pursuit of Maui onions and Brandywine tomatoes.

But the biggest concern seems to be the breaching of an unspoken  
perimeter. What happens in the backyard is their business, said a 40- 
year-old high-voltage lineman who lives down the street and would  
give only his initials, Z.V. But this doesn’t seem to me to be a  
front yard kind of a deal.

In spite of its contemporary media-savvy title, Edible Estates is a  
throwback to the early 20th century, when yards were widely regarded  
as utilitarian spaces, particularly in working-class neighborhoods.  
As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, decorative lawns  which in this  
country date back at least to George Washington’s Mount Vernon and  
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello  were still largely the province of the  
elite, according to Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western  
Reserve and the author of the new book American Green: The Obsessive  
Quest for the Perfect Lawn (W. W. Norton). The yard was for putting  
food on the table, Dr. Steinberg said, in the form of vegetables,  
goats, rabbits and small livestock.

It was not until the postwar period that the notion of the lawn as  
the national landscape developed as a vehicle for upward mobility,  
with zoning setbacks designed to encourage clover- and dandelion-free  
perfection the living version of broadloom carpeting, Dr. Steinberg  
said.

While backyards remained private, the front yard evolved into a  
ceremonial space that appears effortlessly and without labor, said  
Margaret Crawford, a professor of urban design and planning theory at  
the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In middle-class neighborhoods,  
she said, the idea of actually using the front yard is extremely  
unusual.

Mr. Haeg, who was raised in suburban Minneapolis, now lives in a  
geodesic dome in East Los Angeles with a subterranean sprayed- 
concrete cave worthy of Dr. No. Covered in mouse-brown asphalt  
shingles, it dates to 1984; he found it on the Internet in 2000. Soon  
after he moved in, he began cultivating edible plants like kale and  
pineapple guava in his terraced garden, and he surrounded the dome  
with trellises for grapevines.

Mr. Haeg is perhaps best known in Los Angeles for his Sundown Salons,  
which transform his three-level, shag-carpeted home into an  
alternative cultural space that attracts artists, other architects,  
recent M.F.A. graduates and assorted gadflies. The theme and tenor of  
the once-a-month gatherings, which began shortly after he moved in,  
have varied; they’ve included traditional literary gatherings as well  
as gay and lesbian performance art and all-night knitting and make  
your own pasta animal sessions.

Mr. Haeg has taught at several colleges, including the Art Center  
College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he oversaw his students  
design and construction of Gardenlab, a campus community garden,  
beginning in 2001. He is now designing a house for a film executive  
in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles and a rooftop garden for an  
apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles.

Mr. Haeg selected Salina as his first Edible Estates site for its  
heartland symbolism  it is close to the geographic center of the  
country  and found his first subjects, Stan and Priti Cox, through  
the Land Institute, a Salina-based organization dedicated to  
ecologically sustainable agriculture, where Mr. Cox worked as a plant  
geneticist.

I didn’t feel any emotion, Ms. Cox, 38, said of her defunct sod  
expanse. It was monotonous. Now my senses are stimulated.

Mr. Haeg is planning seven more Edible Estates sites. (Coming soon:  
Baltimore and Minneapolis.) Though he lacks training in landscape  
architecture or horticulture, he has been shrewd in his recruitment  
of plant-literate people with sunny, treeless front yards.

So far each estate has been planted to reflect its region: the Cox  
garden in Kansas is heavy with okra and corn, with a smattering of  
bitter gourd, pimento and curry trees in deference to Ms. Coxs Indian  
roots. The Foti’s yard in California is resplendent with pomelos,  
oranges, mandarins and other citrus fruit.

Mr. Haeg regards the Edible Estates project as something of a  
manifesto. He fantasizes about setting off a chain reaction among  
gardeners that would challenge Americans to rethink their lawns which  
he insists on calling pre-edible landscapes though he knows the  
chances are slim. Still, he wants to make a point.

Diversity is healthy, he said. The pioneers were ecologically-minded  
out of sheer necessity, because they had to eat what they grew. But  
we’ve lost touch with the garden as a food source.

What is theoretical for Mr. Haeg, of course, has become everyday  
reality for Michael Foti, who must live with his edible estate and  
arrive home from a long day at the office to prune and weed and smite  
caterpillars into the wee hours without pesticide, he is quick to note.

Mr. Foti is taking the garden one day at a time, A.A. style, a bit  
uneasy at the thought of waning daylight. The biggest pest, he noted,  
is inertia.

We sometimes joke that its the garden that ate our marriage, he said,  
then added wearily: I do feel a certain pressure not to fail. The  
whole neighborhood is watching.
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