Walking stories

Nature and nurture in San Francisco

June 14, 2023

Of course Charles Dickens was right about the cities and the times, and of course je suis the Madame Defarge of the DMV Heights area.  

New gardens on Page Street, just up the street from our house, are thanks to Friends of the Urban Forest, a Johnny-Appleseed non-profit that greenifies the city.  Home-owners on Page were invited to sign up if they wanted the spaces around sidewalk trees expanded, and/or holes made in the sidewalk for additional gardens. 

Before the project began, Page was a leafy street with many lovely houses, more graceful than they were Pacific-Heights-like fancy.  Most of its trees, planted about 35 years ago as part of a city project, are mature.  Under their canopies, Greenberg and I, neighborhood strollers, were delighted, a month or two ago,  to see chalk marks on the sidewalk where additional gardens would be added.   A few weeks later, we watched as cement was chipped away, earth and mulch and native plants added.

The new plantings, specified by horticulturalists well-acquainted with the local climate, are likely to thrive, but for right now, they are small.  So some of the particularly enthusiastic  residents have been adding their own shrubbery to augment what the  Friends planted.

On the corner of Page and Baker, where the first planting looked sparse, we watch the homeowner fill his new space with beautiful greenery:  A Japanese maple, a small spruce of some kind.    We stop to chat with him as he pauses for a moment in his chore, putting in a shrub with dramatically large leaves that seem to make a self-assured statement about urban survival. “Looks great,” I say to the gardener.  

This plant, he says, leaning on his shovel for a moment, was given to him by someone up the block.   She said she was moving and she couldn’t take it with her, so maybe he could use it outside.  He’s honored her generous spirit  by planting the gift immediately. Also, he tells me, other neighbors have dropped off more plants for him to use in his newly-expanded garden,  pitching in without being asked so as to create a beautiful place on the corner.

The man tending to his garden has lived here for five or 10 years.  He tells me about the contributions to his gardens, and then mentions the corner sing-alongs; I’m thinking about our outdoor pancake breakfasts, and the laminated Valentines to individuals that some well-wishers have posted  on parking regulation signs for the past two years. This is a wonderful neighborhood, he says, and he really feels it’s the right place for him.   I nod, we move along across the street, and then the gardener turns back to returning the favor of the people who donated by working on making his garden more beautiful.

Exactly a block away, on the northwest corner of Page and Broderick, there’s another newly expanded garden.   The next day,  when Greenberg and I stroll past, it looks like it’s doing fine. Around this one, the home-owners have built a rainbow-colored enclosure,  about 18 inches tall, to keep neighborhood dogs out and prevent them from trampling on the plants or worse.

This corner plot is in front of a house that’s always had a well-tended flower garden nestled around its front steps.  A few months ago, the home gardeners put in some flowering shrubs – a hydrangea, some geraniums – to  replace some daisies that had gone leggy. 

When we pass today, the new garden right alongside the Page Street curb is doing fine.   But there’s a gap in the garden that’s  right up against the house,  and in that gap is nothing but a sign on a stick plunged into the dirt. 

  “To the asshole that stole my azalea,” the sign reads, and then goes on to say, roughly, that the thief deserves to rot in hell. (I’d quote it exactly, but when I decided to write about this, and went back to take a picture of the sign, it was gone.  Perhaps a  pacifist spouse had advised the sign-poster that it wasn’t a wise idea to make public accusations of assholery, even if the perp was unlikely to identify him- or herself.)

Anyway, the tale of two gardeners  – each eagerly and willingly approaching the job, one coming away delighted and the other filled with fury – echo the current hullabaloo about the state of San Francisco.  Both images are valid, true reports from the frontlines, and they have to exist at the same time, side by side in our minds and hearts.

About eight years ago, I read David Kessler’s “Capture.”  Very simplified, it’s a book about the seeds of mental illness that may be sown when one’s thoughts get captured by a single idea or train of thought.   I’ve thought about that often in San Francisco, a  city analyzed over again by not only its residents but also world-wide opinion-slingers who have taken the “humble” out of  “IMHO.” Sure, everyone is entitled to an opinion.  But it’s neither helpful nor healthy to allow ourselves to be tangled in the web of obsessive self-regard.

The point of the book:  While capture can draw attention to positive  things; capture can also consume you.  Perhaps San Franciscans, addicted to mirror-gazing and daily weigh-ins in the form of analyzing what the New York Times and CNN and the Wall Street Journal say about us, might find better ways to express their love for our city. 

 Accept it. Plant a tree and damn the assholes, all at once. .