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| Nighttime preparations
for Wynwood assault. |
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| Wynwood mission
accomplished! |
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| A hole in the
sidewalk transformed into a Tree-0-5 mini park. |
By Tiffany Rainey
BT Staff
Writer
The parking lot behind a secondhand clothing
store just north of the Design District buzzes with a group
of twentysomethings, mostly clad in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers.
On this recent Friday evening, they are not drinking and carousing
but busily loading shovels, bags of fertilizer, jugs of water,
and an array of plants into the back of a few parked cars.
Some stand nearby chatting, waiting for the caravan to roll.
When the last of the stragglers arrives, the group sets off
for its clandestine destination in the Wynwood warehouse district.
The coast is clear when the cars pull
up just after dark to a vacant corner lot ripe with weeds
and garbage. After unloading their gear on the sidewalk,
the approximately 15 individuals linger for a few minutes,
strategizing about how they’re
going to transform this orphaned space into an urban garden
oasis. A few break away, heading to an overgrown corner with
shovels and a small live oak. Others fan out to collect trash
and debris scattered here and there in the tall grass. Someone
discovers a discarded bookshelf and table, then sets the wayward
furniture aside until a decision about exactly how to incorporate
it can be made.
The evening’s excursion is the team’s fifth. This
relatively new covert gardening collective, whimsically dubbed
Tree-0-5, is part of a worldwide movement of guerrilla gardeners
who practice what has been termed “subversive gardening.” Their
mission: to transform land left fallow by neglectful governments
and absentee landlords into green spaces the community can
enjoy.
“The urban blight in Miami has a negative impact on
people’s sense of community,” says Sara Yousuf,
a practicing attorney and occasional guerrilla gardener. “These
gardens create a better sense of community and make the city
a nicer place to live for all residents, not just the rich
ones.”
Stephanie Spiegel, who owns the secondhand
store where the planters gather, initiated the outings. The
idea came to the 23-year-old entrepreneur on one of her many
commutes through the derelict neighborhoods surrounding her
shop, Rag Trade Happy Clothing Company. “Just seeing all of the abandoned
lots makes you want to do something,” she explains. “I
get very frustrated sometimes.” That frustration inspired
her to look into how she could, literally, lend a hand. “I
thought I came up with this wonderful idea,” she says. “Then
I went online and started researching, only to find this whole
group.” Soon after, Spiegel joined a community message
board on the London-based Guerrilla Gardening Website, and
Miami’s insurgent troop was born.
Since July the loosely organized gatherings
have scattered their “green graffiti” across some of the city’s
most blighted canvases — Little Haiti and Wynwood in
particular. “I just wanted to bring that vibe here,” Spiegel
says. “Miami is like a teenager city in the way that
it’s very awkward but can also be very cool.”
Given that the grassroots group doesn’t have a lot of
money to spend, they rely primarily on donations of native,
noninvasive plants to carry out their greening campaign. Neighbors
often provide clippings or unwanted yard plants, and local
nurseries sometimes pitch in bags of fertilizer or mulch. Occasionally
they’ll be lucky enough to get a tree, like the live
oak recently planted in Wynwood. The rest of the expenses come
out of their own pockets.
“It doesn’t take a lot of money, just manpower,” says
guerrilla gardener Jonathan Wilson, a local photographer. Volunteers
from the group routinely check on the new plants and water
them during dry spells.
In addition to donning gloves and digging
in, Tree-0-5 explores more creative routes for sprucing up
the city. “We do
different techniques,” Spiegel says. One example she
cites: “seed bombs.” The guerrillas combine mud,
water, and flower seeds to make germinated balls. “We
went to an abandoned field in Wynwood and just threw them over
the fence,” she boasts. Another tactic: Tree-0-5 members
planted their own “installation” of bright pink
impatiens and mondo grass in the Design District during this
past Art Basel, the international art event held annually in
December. They even included a sign with their moniker and
the materials used “for that ‘real’ art feel,” Spiegel
says.
Despite the good intentions, what they’re doing isn’t
exactly legal. Although there are no laws that prohibit gardening
per se, there are laws against trespassing, which the group
does regularly. According to Spiegel, police cruisers often
drive by during their digs but rarely stop. “They have
bigger fish to fry,” she says. And that’s if they
even know the group is breaking the law. The young professionals
wielding gardening tools look more like horticulture students
than criminals, making them an unlikely target for officers
more concerned with drug dealers and prostitutes.
The risks they’re taking may be unnecessary. Delfin
Molins, the public information officer for Miami-Dade’s
Public Works Department (PWD), says residents unhappy with
public rights-of-way, medians, and swales maintained by the
county have a few options. “The public can report dead
and/or potentially hazardous trees by contacting the ‘311’ information
center,” he says. “From there the complaint is
routed to the appropriate staff, and remedial action is taken.” Molins
says groups like Tree-0-5 also can adopt small patches of land
to maintain: “Any party that is interested in enhancing
the landscaping of roadways within their communities can request
a permit from the PWD for the alteration of the [right-of-way].
Along with the permit, the applicant will be required to sign
a maintenance agreement whereby the applicant accepts responsibility
for and releases the county from any and all liability for
the maintenance of the affected [right-of-way].”
But Spiegel and her group place little
faith in the county’s
policies and promises. For her, the proof lies in all the derelict
public land she sees daily. “The county doesn’t
even come here!” she protests.
Though the environmental shenanigans
of Tree-0-5 are new to Miami, the act of subversive gardening
has a long and storied history. Supporters say guerrilla
gardening originally began in Surrey, England, around 1649
with Gerrard Winstanely, the leader of a Christian communal
group called the Diggers. Winstanely and his followers believed
collective land ownership was dictated in the Bible, and
they routinely seized public land to cultivate their own
crops. John Chapman, America’s fabled “Johnny
Appleseed,” was also said to have practiced a form of
guerrilla gardening when he spread his famous fruit tree seeds
across the unclaimed territory of the Midwest.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that the term was
first used by environmental activists in New York. Calling
themselves the Green Guerrillas, founder Liz Christy and a
small band of followers waged a green war against the city’s
fallow, weed-filled lots before finally creating their own
community garden in Manhattan. They are now a federally recognized
nonprofit organization that has propagated more than 600 gardens.
This is a trajectory Spiegel hopes her
Miami troop will be able to follow. “My end goal is to have a community garden
that the city would contribute some cash flow to,” she
says, “a place where people can come to garden and give
back to the earth a little bit.”
But for now, Tree-0-5, whose members
openly admit they know very little about gardening, is taking
it one step at a time. The most threatening issue at hand
seems to be how to keep their gardens in place for more than
a few weeks. On every dig so far, the flowers, shrubs, ferns,
and trees they’ve
planted have been uprooted. “People tend to steal the
plants,” says Lauren Reskin, who owns Little Haiti-based
Sweat Records. “It’s not crackheads. It’s
shady people that want them for their own property.”
The right-of-way in front of Reskin’s building was the
site of the group’s October dig, but within a few weeks
everything they planted had vanished. According to the Guerrilla
Gardening Website (www.guerrillagardening.org), this is a pretty
common occurrence. To Spiegel, it’s just further evidence
the city and its residents are plant-poor. Even so, she made
sure to include lots of spiky plants, like cacti, in their
last dig. “We have good efforts, but there are a lot
of factors when it comes to this type of gardening,” Spiegel
says.
* * *
As Miami winds itself up for another
Friday night, Tree-0-5 has successfully made the Wynwood
parcel its own in just under two hours. The bookshelf now
serves as a makeshift planter filled with cacti and ferns.
The table, placed along the wall of a neighboring warehouse,
has been dubbed the “altar” and
is surrounded by pink and white impatiens. Both pieces bear
the group’s logo, stenciled in green spray paint. The
remaining perennials form a delicately protective circle around
the live oak sapling. The guerrilla gardeners proclaim the
action a success. “The area was kind of dead, and it’s
nice to see something growing here now,” observes gardener
and student Leah Weston.
A light rain sprinkles the tired but
elated green thumbs and their newly planted earth as they
pose for a few pictures and load up the last of the equipment.
One gardener, a cartographer, wonders aloud whether the land
they just planted was public or private. None of the Tree-0-5
volunteers seems to know for sure. Although they try to plant
on public property, it’s
not always easy for them to find out who owns the many orphaned
properties in the area. BT called adjacent warehouse
owner Roberto Sosa to inquire. He says a couple from the island
nation of Grenada owns the lot and that those working in the
area use it for parking.
“Those plants won’t last a day,” Sosa says. “Sometimes
that lot has three or four rows of cars.”
When alerted that the Tree-0-5 garden
may be in peril, Spiegel doesn’t seem overly concerned: “These things happen.
At least they’ll see how nice it can look, and maybe
they’ll even decide to keep it,” she says. She
punctuates her optimism with the notion that the garden may
serve as a welcome respite for those attending monthly Wynwood
gallery walks if it still exists in the coming months.
At press time, the garden was still intact and thanks to abundant
rain of late, it is growing rapidly.
For more on the topic of community
gardening, see Marvin’s
Gardens also in this issue.
Feedback: letters@biscaynetimes.com
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