garden apartment rental

I.

Years ago, when I studied abroad in college, I lived on a small island in the Venetian lagoon.  It was perhaps 6 acres and contained a handful of buildings that had once been a Benedictine order and then a mental institution, and later still, a university of sorts.  Most of the buildings, particularly on the island's southern end, were still being renovated by crews of workers who referred to me as "La Mozzarella," an indication both of my coloring and of my somewhat puffy college years.  Along the path which snaked along the brick seawall, a shaggy boxwood parterre divided patches of bare dirt and weeds, but for the most part, the unbuilt parts of the island were semi-wild parkland, planted naturalistically with trees and shrubs but not maintained since.  The whole place was haunted by feral cats.

I felt the need to make a home out of this place, so I bought a bright red cyclamen from an elderly man who, as I remember it, had a small stall on the far side of the Rialto Bridge, to place on my windowsill.  Eventually I decided that just one houseplant was not enough, and I bought bulbs.  I don't remember what kind - it was spring, so it seems improbable that I would have been able to find tulip bulbs.  But I got a trowel and spent an afternoon or two digging happily (and, no doubt, incomprehensibly, to my fellow students) in the dirt of the parterre.  It was another rainy, cold Italian winter, and spring weather only arrived the week that we left in May.  I worried that the cyclamen would wither away from neglect, so I placed it on the front steps of the building and hoped that someone else would adopt it.  I never did get to see what became of my exercise in bulb-planting.





II.
Brownstone Brooklyn may be full of backyard gardens, but if you don't have a brownstone, you'll never see them.  Those of us who are gardenless have only the front stoops and gardens and tree wells and borders that belong to others.  We must rely upon the goodwill of homeowners and co-ops and condominiums and corporations to beautify the street, or not.  Often, sadly, the answer is "not" - sidewalks extend grimly from street to building, or to the rim of the basement moat - but when, for example, an owner decides to plant that rim, it becomes a place to rest your eyes.



I took a walk late this afternoon, hoping to feast on the early stages of spring in the private gardens of neighborhoods new (to me) and old.

Grand Army Plaza has been completely remade in the past few years.  No longer is it a whirlwind of speeding traffic that leaves you, the pedestrian, cowering on the sidewalk.  Now there are intricate loops of bike paths and narrow traffic lanes and expanded pedestrian walkways; and new planted areas, too, have been added to the two long, narrow hills that rise like pincers from the park.

As you walk down the slope from its crest at Grand Army Plaza, the houses gradually lower themselves, too.  That is to say: the grand stoops north of Eighth Avenue become a bit more modest, a bit less bourgeois, avenue by avenue, block by block, as you continue down toward the canal, until the parlor floors often disappear entirely.  The buildings tighten, the proportions made awkward by narrowness, and the brownstone turns to brick, or is fronted with that fake (Flint)stone that spread across Brooklyn like a blight in the sixties and seventies.  FEDDERS signs shout from the facades.  The front spaces, too, become less and less likely to be planted - though still more likely than they were when I first moved into New York, when most yards seemed to be paved.  (Speaking of Lenten roses, I used to haunt the corner of Eighth Avenue and First Street just to see the hellebores that the co-op gardener had planted there; it was so wonderful to see flowers in winter, flowers at all.)

On Warren Street, I was surprised to find, behind the metal fence of a housing project, a sign that grandly announced, "Mr. McDonald's Vegetable and Flower Garden of Hopes and Dreams."  A bright-white fake-wood picket fence surrounded the garden on three sides, with the fourth side open to the street as though presenting the garden on a stage.  From the street, I couldn't tell what Mr. McDonald might have planted for the warmer weather.  Caught in the fence and blowing about the yard were wrappers and receipts and miscellaneous bits of trash.  It was a proud garden, anyway, and I thought about coming back in the spring to see how people used it.

I walked until Warren Street ended in a rump.  "Property of New York City Housing Authority," announced a large sign.  I wondered for whose benefit the sign was.  Could anyone have looked at the buildings blocking the street grid and doubted that they were public housing?  Was the sign a reminder for the residents?  An assertion of dominance against street gangs?  ...What would it feel like to come home to such a sign, a daily reminder that the space in which you live is not and cannot really be yours?  I turned north, walking around the project's border, past the Jehovah's Witness hall and New Sing Wah Kitchen and Sunny's Laundromat and bodegas whose windows still wished me a happy new year, and turned onto Wyckoff Street.  Once again, waist-high metal fences protected dead grass.  Look, but don't touch!  The whiteness of the brick facade was worn away in patches of dull yellow and grey.

Two blocks up, the New York City Housing authority welcomed me to the red-brick Gowanus Houses but stopped from overtly claiming ownership.  The squat windows overlooking the street were filled with off-season air conditioners and ersatz stuffing - plastic, rags, probably whatever was handy.  As I moved up the slight slope toward Smith, the yards got greener and the stoops ever-so-slightly higher.


III.
This is the front space of my new building.  I do not know whether I would call it a "yard."  I certainly would not call it a garden.  It is planted mostly with broken glass; the other side is used as a general holding place for trash cans and recycling and bicycles and, yesterday morning, a full six-pack of beer.  "This street seems to be in transition," remarked my wonderful uncle, as he and my wonderful aunt helped me to move in.  My aunt pointed with pleasure to the Lenten rose in bloom in the front garden of the neighboring building.  Some buildings on the street have planted trees or shrubs or even perennials.  Delicate yellow and white and purple crocus are blooming now; the daffodils are very soon to follow; the dogwood branches are luminous orange-pink.  I am not the world's biggest fan of hemerocallis, but even I was cheered by the green clumps underneath the stout cherry blossom tree at the end of the street; and I have to give credit, just for trying, to the building that is "planted" mostly with that awful dyed-red mulch.  What I have never understood is how you could have the gift of space, of a potential plot of land, in a city like this, and not use it.

The garden designer Lyndon Miller has suggested that people take more pride in their neighborhoods when they are made beautiful with public gardens.  This is not simply a variant of the broken windows theory, and it is not just an argument for more ball-fields and parkland and community vegetable gardens, though all those things are wonderful and necessary in their own ways.  It is a specific argument for the importance of beauty, for the aesthetic role of the garden.  Plant a garden for public enjoyment, strengthen a community.

...The community, and the self, too.  I now see all my past attempts at gardening, however brief, as interventions, and not just in the landscape.  Last night, my new roommate and I opened a bottle of wine and talked about, oh, everything.  I mentioned the yard in the front of our building.  "The landlords could at least plant grass?" she said, her tone suggesting the likelihood that this would happen.  "If I was going to be here, long-term, I'd do it myself, for free," I told her, and I meant it.  But I am so tired of renting, and of leaving my gardens behind.