In an Instagram story reposted by D., @samshoemaker writes, “Two years ago @davidhorvitz asked the owner of this vacant lot if he could open the gate and build a native plant garden. It was just a dirt plot/ @terremoto_landscape and many artists contributed. This photo was taken today[.]” I texted my gardener friend Aurora about it. I had caught mention of it in a social media postalgorithmic breeze pushed into my line of sight. An event was happening there soon. “I haven’t been there, yet, though I keep meaning to—but I can connect you to D.,” Aurora responded. A couple days later, D. agrees to meet me there in the off-hours.
Seventh Avenue Garden is in Mid-City, an area of town I could never make heads or tails of. It’s about halfway between Matador Beach and the campus of Cal Poly Pomona, or about halfway between the pristinely cluttered CalArts studios in Santa Clarita and the camouflaged oil derricks off Long Beach. About halfway from the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo and the Republic of Slow-jamastan en route to the Salton Sea. About halfway between northeastern Ontario and Hawaii. About halfway between the Great Salt Lake and a watery coordinate in the North Pacific. Between Tenerife and Kanazawa. Between Bergen and Kalimantan. Between Little Ethiopia and USC. About halfway between the Grain Cafe, where I meet friends for lunch later that day, and the Labyrinth and Gardens at the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness off Adams Boulevard. As Ed Steck writes, “I’M ALWAYS AFTER A PLACE I DON’T KNOW.”
The garden shares a city block with Fast Lawn Mower Shop, Sami’s Sports, New Creation Fellowship, and Strongtower Ministry; just a couple Google Maps street view impressions ago, it was a buildingless heath. I think of LA’s remarkable fluidity, the way it tends to institutions, initiatives, collectives, storefront churches, art projects, converted cinemas, laundromats, fortune tellers, where private pursuit and nondenominational commonwealth meet in different slants of light. In the back of my head, I hear the psychogeographic romp “The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry,” the knotty centerpiece of the Fiery Furnaces’ 2006 album Bitter Tea, where the protagonist zigzags across the city pleading for—or evading—some form of salvation.
I get to the garden on time, which always feels aggressively early in LA. Across the street a man tends his own garden, a series of pots, pails, barrels, and boxes off to the side of his house’s front step. At my feet a paver has been forced upward by a subterranean root system; nearby, a gnarl of a potato-tomato hybrid. Squinting through chain link into an avalanche of middle ground makes you feel apian, all compound vision, a laser-focused pollinator of place. The lone cypress guards the gate like a Rodia spire under a rude firmament of crows. A red ribbon is braided into the fence grid on a diagonal, materials making moves on one another. I’m out here on a wooden chair set out, off the sidewalk, up to steps, in front of the locked garden gate, whose code D. has given me, but it turns out I don’t know the first thing about locks, or maybe felt like I was imposing, or was I nervous to be visiting a garden?
A sprinkler turns on somewhere, but it’s the wrong time of day. D. pulls up in a van, pulls open the very standard lock that had confounded me, adds some pleasantries, and immediately pulls at a weed. He was out of the country and is checking in on the garden after a few weeks away. “Where did that desert rose come from?” he wonders aloud.
Earlier, I was in Little Tokyo and had brought two small vegetation-adjacent snacks to share: a package of small chocolate biscuits called Kinoko no Yama (“mountain mushrooms”) and a package of salty-sweet rice crackers called sofuto-sarada (“soft salad”). We chew on the scenery and the crackers, there are other weeds to pull, a lot of worlds to attend to at arm’s length. Over D.’s shoulder is his neighbor’s wall, a backdrop of paint jobs and plaster over brick, over an older, knotty mat of soot. There’s graffiti, including a large tag of pink block letters that spell out a stanza from Yoko Ono’s poem “Cloud Piece” and whose elegant serif is lifted straight from Grapefruit:
Imagine the clouds dripping. / Dig a hole in your garden to / put them in. / 1963 spring.
D. is an artist, in addition to being a gardener, and often invites his peers to come do work here. Between us is a tousle of rebar in a cockfight with wild grass; a radiating crowd of misfit bricks looks to be placing bets. “This is by a net artist, a digital artist. It must be the ‘carbon neutral NFT’ he’s working on,” D. says, pointing down—but I’m not quite sure where. Absent of mind, I wade into a space between plantings, knee-to thigh-deep, and I hear Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson bickering in the voiceover of Swamp, their 1971 video work. “Just keep going in,” he tells her, impishly. “Don’t worry about the focus. Just keep mov—just keep advancing in, as much as you can. … There seems to be something.”
The garden occupies a plot borrowed on the strength of a handshake and perhaps the weakness of the market; as a fledgling institution, it squints beyond capital, fueled by basic maintenance, thrifting, and thriving. Let’s call it a waiting room with reading materials. An intermission that, over time, swivels with activity as seasons (such as they are in LA) bend and, nevertheless, could disappear at any given point, giving way to other, likely predatory, forms of speculation or a practical change of tack. “How do you know Aurora? I keep trying to get her over for an event,” says D. “We’re having one in a couple nights. Are you still in town?” It feels like I’m speaking with another version of myself, me asking myself tentatively if I could come over and watch myself unlock my own door. “I’M ALWAYS AFTER A PLACE I DON’T KNOW.”
D. sees a freshly arrived pile of pink jars (“People just drop stuff off”) and tosses one onto an existing pile just to see what it will look like. It shatters, not so predictably. Everywhere upheavals of earth, piles of rubble, snatches of life on the verge, tremors of pottery or poetry.
D. describes the event that’s about to start: “Instead of dial-a-poem, we’re doing dial-a-poet, so each participating poet has to agree to have their personal phone number given out. So you can call up, like, Ed Steck, and you can talk to him.” I didn’t expect to hear Steck’s name, as he’s not the first poet I’d namedrop in a social encounter. I revisited his incredible book The Garden in the lead-up to my trip to LA from Salt Lake City, where I live. “Ah! I’ll tell him someone stopped by who knows your book,” D. says. I like how when we’re speaking in the garden there is always the syntactical dirt threatening us back into Mid-City or one of any number of grids or worlds beyond. That the garden is a skein, a live-wire biology of gossip, a thing heard through—but also is itself—a grapevine. I ask D. if he knows Amanda Ackerman, whose book The Book of Feral Flora opens with a blistering questionnaire. “What is the opposite of being exotic?” and “What does it mean to be native?” are questions I pose to D. about the place we are right now. He redirects a second later, picking up on a detail about my background I shared earlier. “Do you know Duane Linklater? He’s also from Northern Ontario,” he says. I think of my parents harvesting a wheelbarrow of zucchini each September.
Here is an incomplete list of gardens I know or have heard of: Ones whose perimeters are formed cynically by the back walls of adjacent buildings erected at ordinance-required setbacks from property lines upheld with chain link. Gardens whose livelihood is fallow, ordained by figures invested in Zillow auguries, attenuating all “inhabitation” save weeds. Gardens whose primary care provider is an underground system of tubes connecting a municipal water service to sprinkler heads at various coordinates, spaced by crop, spray diameter, and proprietary industry knowledge, monitored remotely and intermittently by property owners. Gardens whose cat, raccoon, squirrel, coyote, and bobcat highways, if captured by infrared photography and adjusted for scale, resemble the greater Los Angeles noodle soup of interstates and interchanges.
Here is an incomplete list of details about this particular garden. A large table weathers away off-center. Behind it, various lengths of timber are propped upright, somewhere between past storage and future use, the fallow, amiable clutter of the present. Against the wall a family portrait of tools stand at semiformal attention: shovel, pitchfork, broom. Over there a thatch of miscellaneous branches because you never know, and also it’s a habitat for just the right freeloader. What look like members of a Gulliverian wind chime or a Lilliputian infrastructural boondoggle support one another on their own little leftover concrete plinth. A horizon of picket due south. Some broken mirrors catch shards of blue sky. An errant shoot of something reedy cuts horizontally across a photographic frame. A chipped plastic chair pairs nicely with a succulent swaddled by stones. It all teems so casually, like the small talk of philosophers. An overturned bucket at an earthen crossroads acts as a stool and a store and a herm and a drum. “I really want people to come by, even if they just sit here. That makes it public,” D. says.
The neighbor across the street begins hosing off dusty surfaces, causing the vines to drip with water that feeds roots. I joke to D. that he has gardening competition. “Yeah, he wanted a plot in here, but I said it’s not really a community garden. He wanted to plant tomatoes … but then he said he also wanted to use it for parties.” D. interrupts himself and points to the crows overhead, clicking his tongue to get their attention. “See that? That’s a ledge. It looks like a coyote. I should move the hose again.”
D. is friends with the landscape architecture studio Terremoto. He drove around LA with the studio principals and tried to figure out what they wanted to do, how they might work together. “One time we found a busted pipe in Elysian Fields and put some plants around it. They grew and grew until someone came around and fixed the pipe,” D. recalls. Then one day, on this site, they started putting this plant here, and that tree there. “Someone came over here and told me”—D. makes a sweeping gesture to address the whole cosmos of the small plot—“‘This is Terremoto’s masterpiece!’” He flashes a mischievous grin. “And I was like, ‘I’m the one taking care of it.’”
There are two primitive wooden jackhammers that Terremoto made for flattening ceramics. D. sees a freshly arrived pile of pink jars (“People just drop stuff off”) and tosses one onto an existing pile just to see what it will look like. It shatters, not so predictably. Everywhere upheavals of earth, piles of rubble, snatches of life on the verge, tremors of pottery or poetry.
A hole in the fence is for a neighborhood coyote. A guy broke in the other week; he was breaking stuff, D. says, “But there’s already broken stuff in the garden, so you can’t really tell.” This gardener is present. He holds court as courtesy, courts risk, braves elements, occasionally moves the hose. Several times during the visit, D. encourages me to either come back to the garden or invite someone there. I could return in the day or at night, alone or with others. What I took at the time to be an amiable public-relations script now seems more like an incantation of repetition and difference, how we might be invited to return every time by a different wind, we might register a unique refraction of light, and surfaces might acquire the grime or waft or dapple of their day, and the returning each time, with the self or others of their itinerary, might become a vigilant refrain of mind. To go there with friends, to go at night, to go without glasses, to go with a telescope, to go three drinks in, to go in prayer, to pair with music, to pair with coyote, to pummel earthenware, to entreat soil, to talk to the rose, to dial a poet, to harvest rosemary, to embroider into chain link, to organize a rally, to plot our next move, to chart the relative proximities of gift to grift to graft, to graph to grave to grieve, to groove to grove to growth. In the words of Destroyer, a chorus is a thing that bears repeating.
If thought is misty or torrential, if thought is irrigable, if the garden is a cross between oasis and snake pit, if both retreat and attack, if the landscape architects dropped (by design) the datum of the garden a sixteenth of an inch enough to let thought irrigate from all tributaries, and then if those same landscape architects sloped the datum up again, an infrathin hydraulic, letting thought flow back to all tributaries, generating a tidal pulse draining and replenishing thought, all from an overlooked plot in Mid-City.
“You should take some of these morning glory seeds back to Utah,” D. says, and I comply. On my way to the bus my fingers pestle the seeds in my pocket, scratching up my phone screen. I kick myself for forgetting to bring up Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose work I’ve also been revisiting.
Later that same day I talk with Suzy, another local gardener, about D. and his work, about conceptual generosity, about the generosity in both a single invitation and over a long duration: Come to the garden. Pick your angle, or its inflection, and it’s transactional, careful, sensual, cerebral—a commons. Recounting a recent event they worked on together, she smiles and says, “He’s the only one who came to help clean up the next day.”
My visit to Seventh Avenue Garden was in midsummer, and I’m writing this around Christmas, as some wars unjustly fade from threads while others justly take hold of all channels, while still others unjustly never break through the pablum of the everyday. There is no sense, as much as we might crave it, of relent—let alone sense. It feels indirect and inadequate to think in response to gardens when matters press, but then again I think of Finlay’s gentle order to consider certain gardens not “as retreats when they are really attacks.”