Just below the city’s surface, a wild streak

The corn is green in Pico-Union and it’s hard not to see that as symbolic of something -- possibility, perhaps, or reclamation.

It rises shoulder high from a tiny community garden on Pico Boulevard, just west of Vermont Avenue, a convergence of streets as hard on the eyes and the soul as the front pages of most newspapers these days. There are roses here, too, and a row of cactuses, another of Salvadoran beans, a neat line of sugar cane. Some of the plots are still empty, some full of just one thing -- peppers, or tomato plants -- and some hold an inexplicable mix -- corn and sunflowers, cilantro and daisies.

The garden is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and where the ground has not been tilled, it is beaten flat as concrete, furred by yellowed grass, edged in weeds; a shovel or hoe would not seem enough, a jackhammer might be required. But two dozen plots have somehow been carved into the ground and the churned-up soil is chocolate brown if a bit stony.

Until seven months ago, this was just another of the many empty lots that dot the city, those startling patches of dirt and grass and morning glory that appear where there should be cement, cubes of sudden space where it seems there ought to be another store or gas station.

From South Pasadena to Santa Monica, these lots sit like staked-but-forgotten homesteads. They are full of weeds and trash and mystery: Who owns them? What happened? Couldn’t they, shouldn’t they, be used for something?

Of the many local objects of desire, the fruited vine often gets short shrift. Yet it is the need for the luscious, the laden, the green growing thing that shapes this city as much as anything else, gives it color and form, fragrance and sustenance.

Fidel Sanchez saw it in his mind’s eye last year whenever he looked over the lot at Pico and Vermont. Sanchez is a community organizer and a member of Pico Union Shalom Ministry of the United Methodist Church, which owns the lot. There are plans to build low-income housing on it in a couple years, but, Sanchez thought, it should be put to some use in the meantime. So he started the garden.

In fact, the corn that is rising now is the second planting -- the first crop was harvested weeks ago, part of it surreptitiously, under cover of night.

“Yeah, we had some of our corn stolen,” Sanchez said. “About five or six ears. Nothing to do about it. I hope they were hungry.”

Twenty-five church members have plots now, and there are 12 families on the waiting list. Each little garden has its own personality -- a rag-doll scarecrow here, a bit of white plastic border there. A cross stands in the middle of one, and a sign for a local Head Start program in another -- local kids are learning a little farming. The church held a Mother’s Day lunch here, and on weekends, the older folks in the area bring their chairs and just sit beside the creaking corn and fluttering tomatillo plants.

“There isn’t a park around here,” Sanchez says, “so this is their park. We have Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans ... You see that corn?” He points to a plot near the back of the garden. “That is Peruvian corn. Medicinal.”

The corn is green in Pico Union and it’s hard not to see it as a reminder of how the city has changed us and not changed us. All sorts of people need to work and eat, and even in this country, surfeit has never guaranteed that everyone will. And despite its various high-falutin’ industries, Los Angeles is a farm town. Still. The ranchos have been reduced to street signs, and only real old-timers remember the endless orange groves, but the need to grow things to eat pushes through the cracks of modern urban life like crabgrass through concrete.

As spring simmers into summer, Los Angeles drips food -- community gardens, backyard plots, and redwood containers balanced on apartment balconies are everywhere you look. The groves may be gone, but the orange trees, grapefruit trees, Meyer lemon and lime trees, sway with fruit. Figs and avocados litter the sidewalks, kumquats and loquats spangle branches like Christmas tree ornaments, tomato plants cascade over fences from backyards into alleys or simply appear like grass in the narrow strip of dirt between street and sidewalk.

In Los Angeles, people use endive and kale to border their roses, plant red leaf lettuce where some would have begonias, grow rosemary hedges instead of boxwood, tend herb gardens in which the basil towers and the Italian parsley spreads itself as wide and feathery as forsythia. Mint and sorrel mingle with the birds of paradise and princess trees, and wild mustard runs over the hills like gorse, turning a drive along the 2 into an impressionist painting at nightfall.

By midsummer, there are places in this city where it’s hard to see the ground. Amid the buildings and the parking lots and the freeways, gardens push against boundaries like Samson in the temple -- squeezing through chain link, crawling up brick and fence post, overrunning a border of marigolds seemingly overnight.

In our own backyards on a July day, in gardens like the one at Pico and Vermont, there is a wildness among the stone and glass. It is unexpected, unsettling even, given the nature of city. Cities are what happened after Eden fell. How far could we, should we, go to reclaim Paradise? How far could our desire for the laden branch, the towering corn take us?

Given half a chance, the orange trees would mate and beget new groves, the fig trees and wild mustard would pull down the freeways. Unchecked, the tomato and zucchini plants would cover the houses and swimming pools and motels, the rosemary take over the world.

The corn is green in Pico Union and it’s hard not to see that as a reminder of how fluid our definition of city is. No matter how formidable they may seem, concrete and glass and asphalt are temporary things. And beneath them lie the stony soil, the morning glory and the green, green corn. Just waiting for a little breathing room.