RAGHAVA KK
New York Times Article on Ron Finley
Urban Gardening: An Appleseed With
Attitude
By DAVID HOCHMAN
Ron Finley was home by the pool recently when
his thoughts once again turned to dirt. “People need to realize how powerful
the transformation of soil can be,” he said, with a hint of evangelism. “We’ve
gotten so far away from our food source. It’s been hijacked from us. But if you
get soil, plant something in it and water it, you can feed yourself. It’s that
simple.”
Mr. Finley’s two-story house in South Los
Angeles used to be headquarters for a swimming school but the pool was drained
long ago to make way for greener dreams. Potted cactuses, bags of organic
fertilizer and gardening equipment cluttered the shallow end. Graffiti
emblazoned its once-white walls. Old shopping carts planted with succulents
lined the pool’s edge.
“We’re going to do a parade with a hundred of
these to show you can repurpose the carts instead of just junking them,” he
said.
It was early afternoon and Mr. Finley, who is
tall, extroverted and disinclined to give his age (he has two sons in their
20s), had been up since dawn dealing with e-mails, invitations and other
byproducts of what he called “the TED effect.” Last winter at TED, the annual ideas confab in Long Beach, his rousing 10-minute talk about guerrilla
gardening in low-income neighborhoods was the hug-your-neighbor presentation of
the week, and Mr. Finley was suddenly the man to meet.
“I should have brought a stripper pole and had
people throw money at me,” said Mr. Finley, who juggles jobs as a fitness
trainer and fashion designer to support his passion for gardening. He does not
receive a salary for his work at L.A. Green Grounds, the volunteer organization he
helped found three years ago to install vegetable gardens in vacant lots and
sidewalk medians in blighted areas.
TED was a world apart. “Sergey Brin from Google
was standing there clapping,” he said, “Benedikt Taschen was inviting me to his
Hollywood parties and Goldie Hawn wanted to say hi and kiss me. I kept
thinking, what am I doing here?”
Since then, Mr. Finley has been thrust into the
unlikely role of pavement-pounding Johnny Appleseed. His talk has
received almost 900,000 views on TED’s Web site and his message that edible
gardens are the antidote to inner-city health issues, poverty and gang violence
(“if you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangsta,” he told the crowd) has gone
supernova.
The talk show host Carson Daly, the actress
Rashida Jones and the celebrated Danish chef René Redzepi were among hundreds
of new admirers issuing shout-outs on Twitter.
Alice Waters stopped by Mr. Finley’s house,
Russell Brand put him on his late-night talk show, and corporations like
Reebok, Disney, Stihl and Toms Shoes had collaboration ideas. A graduate
student asked to write a dissertation about Mr. Finley, who, to his credit, has
kept an eyebrow arched over his newfound fame.
“All the attention in the world won’t do my
dishes,” he said.
“Ron is compelling, funny and completely
authentic in his quest to redefine what’s possible in areas where there’s no
nature to be seen,” said Chris Anderson, the TED curator who helped select Mr.
Finley as one of 34 speakers discovered during a worldwide talent search that
drew thousands of applicants last year. “He takes on the depressing narrative
that our inner cities are irretrievably decaying. Watching him fight back
rewires your worldview.”
Mr. Finley, who grew up with seven siblings near
the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues, where the 1992 Los Angeles
riots began, aligns more with graffiti artists like Risk and Retna, both
friends of Mr. Finley’s, than with English horticulturalists of yore. Neat rows
of zucchini are for grandmas. His gardens have spirals, color, fragrance and
curves, and, to him, soil is sensuous. “How much more sexy can it get than you
eating food that you grew?” Mr. Finley asked.
In a city where an elite few fuss over $13
plates of escarole wedges, too many others eat at 98-cent stores and
drive-throughs or go hungry altogether. Mr. Finley estimates that the City of
Los Angeles owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20
Central Parks, with enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants.
His radical fix is to take back that land and
plant it, even if it’s the skinny strip between concrete and curb.
It was the barren 150-by-10-foot median outside
Mr. Finley’s house that inspired his first act of crab grass defiance. In 2010,
he planted a sidewalk garden to reduce grocery expenses and to avoid the
45-minute round-trip to Whole Foods.
“I wanted a carrot without toxic ingredients I
didn’t know how to spell,” he said.
A few months later, neighbors were gawking in
delight at the sight of pumpkins, peppers, sunflowers, kale and corn in an area
better known for hubcap shops. Late one night, Mr. Finley, who is a single
father, noticed a mother and daughter sneaking food from his garden. He
conceived L.A. Green Grounds as a way to share the abundance with people like
them.
The city was less magnanimous. As do other
metropolitan areas, Los Angeles owns the “parkways” that run alongside the
curb, and the Bureau of Street Services cited Mr. Finley for gardening on his
median without the required $400 permit.
Outraged, he and a band of green-thumbed
activists petitioned a member of the City Council, who convinced the city to
back off.
“People in my neighborhood are so disconnected
from the fresh food supply that kids don’t know an eggplant from a sweet
potato,” Mr. Finley said. “We have to show them how to get grounded in the
truest sense of the word.”
That missionary zeal got Mr. Finley noticed by
Jesse Dylan, a filmmaker whose company made a short video about the gardener’s
City Hall battle. It helped that Mr. Finley is a magnetic character. He motors
around town in a three-wheeled Can-Am Spyder roadster, often dressed in the
couture garments he designs for his clothing company, the Dropdead Collexion. His storehouse of
African-American entertainment memorabilia is considered one of the country’s
most impressive, at least by Mr. Finley.
“Ron’s got a deep and feisty spirit,” Mr. Dylan
said. “He’s a modern Walt Whitman with attitude.”
On a sparkling Saturday morning in March, Mr.
Finley was overseeing a “dig-in” in Baldwin Hills with around 20 volunteers
from L.A. Green Grounds. “We’re usually begging people, but this time we had
300 requests,” he said.
After a few hours of working with donated
shovels, mulch and seedlings, the team transformed a backyard tangle of weeds
and pale grass into an outdoor salad bar offering Japanese eggplant, black
tomatoes, Swiss chard, red kale, dragon kale and plum trees. It was organic
proof of Mr. Finley’s second most indelible line from TED, that “growing your
own food is like printing your own money.” (His most memorable line is not
suitable for printing here.)
Mr. Finley now faces the challenge of living up
to the hype. “The world is behind Ron, and it’s wonderful that his efforts and
instincts intersect with latent support,” said Ben Goldhirsh, a co-founder and
chief executive of GOOD, a publishing and marketing business that promotes
social causes, and whose Goldhirsh Foundation plans to give Mr. Finley a grant.
“The question is how to convert that energy into outcomes. Ron’s got a lot of
energy and ability. It’s up to him whether he can harness that for the long
slog.”
With a shovel in one hand and a cellphone full
of new messages in the other, Mr. Finley appeared to have as many plans as
there are seeds in the new garden.
“I want to plant entire blocks of vegetable
beds,” he said, back in preacher mode. “I want to turn shipping containers into
healthy cafes where customers can pick their salad and juice off the trees. I
want our inner-city churches to become ministries of health instead of places
that serve up fried, fattening foods. I want to clean up my yard, my street and
my ’hood.”
The neighbors are certainly responding. In
April, a local dialysis clinic pictured in his PowerPoint slide show at TED
wrote to say it had more than 200 volunteers ready to serve Mr. Finley’s cause.
“It’s definitely a start,” he said. “Although the kind of support this
community needs might eventually put them out of business.”
If nothing else, Mr. Finley hopes to use his
moment in the spotlight to give the next generation an alternative. “I wish,”
he said, “somebody had told me, ‘don’t go down that street,’ or ‘find yourself
a mentor,’ so that’s a role I’m trying to play.”
The future he envisions is full of shovels, not
guns, and mint and marjoram instead of drugs.
“I saw a kid walking down the street listening
to music when he came face to face with one of my giant Russian Mammoth
sunflowers,” Mr. Finley said. “He said, ‘Yo, is that real?’ ”
“He thought it was a prop or something. That’s
what I want on my streets. Flowers so big and magnificent, they’ll blow a kid’s
mind.”
