A Campus Garden? It Should Be Elementary

The Too Hot Tamale is surprisingly unbefuddled by the lesson we’re getting on bees, blossoms and bureaucracy. But then celebrity chef Mary Sue Milliken has her 8-year-old son in tow, and he attends a public school.

Readers whose children don’t will be exasperated by the saga of 24th Street Elementary School’s struggle to plant a garden.

Survivors of the Los Angeles Unified School District will be encouraged.

I find myself flip-flopping.

It’s hard to be too pessimistic after hearing kids shriek when dirty fingers encounter their first writhing worm. And who wouldn’t get all upbeat upon watching a boy named James plant his garlic bulb wrong-side-up just to see what happens?

The scene that really fires my enthusiasm, though, features a boy of 7 or 8. He spots a classmate preening atop a straw bale and -- umphf! -- blindsides him, sending both whooping into the fragrant wet mulch.

That, of course, is the kind of dangerous activity that helps keep projects like this from blooming in American schoolyards (and distinguishes vivacious children from hyperprotected zombie kids). But neurotic fretting is only one of the obstacles that almost thwarted all this goofballing among the artichokes and strawberries.

I could detail dozens of phone calls, meetings and e-mail exchanges in which a district representative told a garden advocate that something simple simply could not be accomplished. I won’t because I don’t want to bore you into a stupor. Also because Emily Green and the co-conspirators who defied the system’s culture of can’t do hope their success can be transplanted to other campuses, and have shifted to lovey-dovey talk of partnership with their school district allies.

The stretch of 24th Street where the school stands begins on a run-down corner of Western southwest of downtown. It extends through an enclave of beautifully maintained Craftsman homes, and many in this middle-class, largely African American neighborhood have joined the effort to help the largely Latino school they attended back when this area thrived -- even though they won’t let their own kids attend the school, whose facilities and test scores plummeted along with the surrounding area’s economy.

For years, any effort to improve the school had been defeated by a politically connected principal who used the P.A. system to blather about such matters as her latest enema, teachers say. But she was gone by 2003, when the district’s facilities people came around with bond money and a districtwide plan to repave the vast expanses of asphalt that schools euphemistically call playgrounds.

Linda Slater, a second-grade teacher, called Green, a Times food and gardening writer who, although she had no children, had been volunteering (futilely) to start a garden at the school.

Now Green and Slater and other teachers yakked about how troubled they were by the sight of children running about on days when the sun-baked asphalt seemed capable of melting sneakers. They raged at the notion that it was OK for kids to play with only chain link separating them from the fumes and cacophony of the Santa Monica Freeway.

“I wanted to call Amnesty International,” says Green.

What struck these plant lovers as particularly cruel was the fact that many of the school’s 1,100 students have roots in the farmlands of Mexico or Modesto but live in over-packed apartment buildings where it’s easy to imagine that concrete is the Earth’s natural groundcover.

Why couldn’t the money earmarked for asphalt be spent to make part of that blacktop wasteland greener, they wondered? The district had a million reasons why that would be far too hard to do.

I don’t know Slater. I know Green. She’s a pain. A human battering ram. She seems to take twisted pleasure in discomfiting obstructionists.

When the district’s facilities people seemed to be dodging her, Green called Supt. Roy Romer’s office. No one called back. She called again. And again. And again. And again.

Meanwhile, she e-mailed people who she thought might be interested in helping children understand the biology of carrots and nutritional benefits of broccoli (and cc’ing the missives to the district).

“We did not go away,” Green says.

Chef Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame had been intrigued with the successful tasting garden chef Alice Waters had started at a Berkeley school. She took up the 24th Street cause.

As Silverton and others endorsed the idea, resistance within the L.A. Unified bureaucracy began breaking down.

I often encounter people on the verge of blubbering helplessly about some little common-sense change they couldn’t push past the LAUSD or teachers union.

This may be the first time, however, that I’ve heard ranters say they came to realize that even bureaucrats sometimes have legitimate reasons for resistance. Well-meaning community amateurs are always waltzing onto campuses with grandiose ideas, only to flake out and leave behind big messes.

Attitudes changed, Green says, when the conspirators presented the district with professional plans, demonstrating that “we weren’t stupid hippies.”

Some teachers still envisioned amputated limbs and skewered eyeballs should children actually be handed rakes and shovels. The conspirators talked the awfulizers down, and slowly the idea took root.

About a year ago, the group created the Garden School Foundation to pay for maintenance and materials, and Silverton’s La Brea Bakery began helping to support it by selling bread at a local farmers market.

Last year students, teachers, parents and neighbors turned out for a “big dig day,” creating a circular test garden in the school’s courtyard.

While Milliken, of “Cooking With Too Hot Tamales” cookbook fame, and the others in our group stand admiring this space, a young teacher who isn’t even working that day swings by to inquire about beets she wants her students to use to dye fabric. Other teachers tell me they’ve built the required curriculum into their garden time, teaching everything from the math of growth rates to the science of photosynthesis there amid the corn and sage.

I should admit now that my enthusiasm for this project is flavored by the taste of sorrel.

“It’s a zesty, lemony flavor,” declares Nick Tan, the part-time garden educator the foundation hired, as we hesitantly chew the leaves he’s just plucked.

Then Green leads us all to a swath of land alongside the freeway. Sirens wail. Exhaust wafts. But with big piles of dirt looming where there was once only cracked asphalt, we have no trouble imagining the urban Eden the district is already sculpting into the land: More than an acre of green, including a three-quarter-acre garden with shaded areas for families to join their children after school and a “woodland” the school’s students said they craved.

Canary Island pines will muffle the freeway. A native plant garden is also in the works, paid for in part by the $25,000 first prize the project received last month from the Garden Club of America.

Finally, the conspirators are now confident that the district will help them build a new teaching kitchen, where Silverton and others will supervise children as they turn what they’ve grown into meals. The hope is that their garden school will be a model for any campus that wants to become more pleasant.

Not all problems are solved. The conspirators would love to plant peach and plum trees, for instance.

But fruit trees attract bees, and just think of the tragedy that might befall a human child in proximity with a flying insect.

“Can’t do,” the district says.

And yet I’m pretty sure that someday I’ll return to the garden and find a Hot Tamale helping children make plum jam.

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