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Street Corners, Dandelions, and Blackberry Hill

© Leda Meredith

My allies are easy to find: the dandelion growing between squares of pavement, the bramble berry ignored in a city park, the mugwort taking over a parking lot.

When I was twelve years old and growing up in San Francisco, there was a street corner that I named Blackberry Hill. A sign said it was going to be "developed", but for years nothing happened there except the quiet growth of wild oats, miner's lettuce, red clover, dandelions and blackberries. On the way home from school (and sometimes instead of school!), I would go to Blackberry Hill to sit in a hidden spot among the brambles and dream of living in the wilderness.

One day I went to Blackberry Hill and there was nothing, just bare dirt. Soon after that an ugly condominium complex appeared. I stood on the sidewalk cursing the unmet strangers who'd wiped out a hundred summer afternoons, the squirrel who ate out of my hand, the dandelion seedheads that had carried my wishes on the wind.

I've lived in big cities for most of my thirty-seven years. The first garden I was ever tended was just a few pots out on a fire escape. The next was twenty-five planter boxes on the roof of an apartment building. I began to dream of having a garden with a tree and some actual ground to plant in. Everyone was quick to tell me I couldn't afford such a luxury, but I was thinking crops and medicine, and the word "luxury" just didn't make sense to me. Eventually my husband and I moved into our current home in Brooklyn, where we are blessed with a small garden and a direct path from our kitchen door into the neighborhood community gardens. And for less rent than we'd been paying for a studio apartment in Manhattan!

This small apartment garden plus two plots in the community garden are what I can do right now to make a difference in a city that desperately needs green spaces. I live in the city, but I can still collect dandelion greens just like I used to with my great-grandmother in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I can turn what was for years a trash heap into a lush, green haven. I can revel in the colorful flowers and delight in the fact that we grow much of our own food and medicine. I can help a friend choose herbs for her windowsill garden and give her a jar of the jam I made from the wild fruit growing in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. And if someday I do move to the country, I am going to name my new home Blackberry Hill.

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