Content area
Full Text
SHE WIELDS A watering can with the hand of experience, and prefers to be called Miss Ella. Across the garden, Ella Heron's best man for 48 years of marriage, Percy, tinkers with a carpentry project beneath a pavilion he built as a shady refuge and centerpiece of the corner lot.
In South Jamaica, a primary (although apparently missed) target in the war on drugs, the Herons' happy, cottage-garden blend of vegetables and flowers - formerly an automobile dumping ground
is a bright spot on a somber canvas. In garden parlance, the "borrowed landscape" is what you see in the distance, what forms the backdrop of your garden picture, although it's not technically in your yard. The world's greatest gardens have unbeatable ones: mountain ranges, cliffs, coastlines. Community gardens do not.
The Herons' borrowed landscape is something you'd rather lose than borrow. Sure, they can keep voluntarily repainting the graffiti-covered storefront across the way and picking up the rubble, but those are endless tasks. "Some people just don't appreciate nice things," says Miss Ella, shaking her head.
Miss Ella and Percy's grown children wish they would leave the area, but no thank you, they say. Yes, they are senior citizens, but they are also proper southerners who have put down four decades of roots here. They plan to keep flying the American flag over the garden, as they have since 1984. "We're just trying to bring the neighborhood back to where it was when we moved here forty-two years ago," Miss Ella says.
The Herons are Green Guerillas. For better or worse, this is home.
The corner of Bowery and Houston is home, too, to a changing cluster of homeless men who work the windshield-washing gig on agitated motorists year in, year out. The wooden arbor that stretches above the garden's iron fence on the northeast corner of the busy intersection was built not for training vines or anything quite so horticultural. A trumpet vine twines mightily 'round a portion of it, but the arbor was added largely to make it harder for the men who live outside the garden to sleep inside. Although hardly what Robert Frost had in mind, good fences make good neighbors in the urban setting of the Liz Christy Bowery-Houston...