confessions of a guerrilla gardener

"I LIVE IN FROGTOWN," I told my friends in New York nine years ago, when I moved to this neighborhood in St. Paul. For them, the name conjured up an image of quaint little village lamp posts draped with baskets of petunias. I couldn't restrain the snort that escaped from me when I heard that. "Trust me—" I said, "—there isn't a Starbucks within miles."

Who knows where the moniker "Frogtown" was coined—but the land used to be swampy and has always been populated by immigrants. Most likely, it was a combination of the name, Froshburg, (frog city) that its German settlers used for it and the ancient and politically incorrect nickname used for the French, who also settled here. Either way, Frogtown was populated by frogs and the name stuck.

Frogtown has never been gentry-fied. It's pure hoi polloi. A bevy of working-stiffs, emigrants & refugees. It's the largest, poorest, youngest, most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the Twin Cities. Without a doubt—it's the 'hood. I got my first clue to this when the neighborhood patriarch, who'd live on my block for the past 60 years, asked me,

"Why would you move here voluntarily?"
Well, coming from New York, it looked like a normal neighborhood to me…and besides, it had a double lot for my passion—gardening—at an affordable price.

Now, I'm not a social butterfly and I'm sure no social worker so if it wasn't for my garden, I never would have met my neighbors. But it seems that if you're always on your knees, digging in the dirt, you're granted a diplomatic passport in the 'hood—anybody will talk to you.

So, in my nine years of crawling around my yard on all fours, I've met just about everyone in Frogtown—little kids stopping by for a drink from the hose on a hot day and ancient Hmong women who grin toothlessly, point at my flowers, nod, and grin again; barefoot hookers coming home after a night's work, carrying 4-inch stilettos; dignified old men in hats pushing grand babies in strollers; gang-bangers looking for lost pit bulls and sleepy mothers waiting for school buses; twitchy tweakers waiting for dealers and dog walkers who keep track of my blossoms. Neighbors—all of them.

But I confess, my garden grew out of my frustrations with all the garbage in the gutters, the ugliness of poverty and the total lack of pride in the neighborhood. Why, I wondered, are rich neighborhoods so clean and ghettos so dirty? 

I remember as a kid, asking my mother if we were poor. She answered without any shame,
"Yes, baby, we're poor." So my next question was,

"Then, how come we aren't dirty?"

"Because," she said laughing out loud, "darling, soap is cheap!"

I never forgot her answer. Poor doesn't have to go hand-in-hand with dirty—or ugly.

But in a place where the relentlessness of poverty sucks away any enthusiasm, where litter blows freely from curb to curb, hopelessness eventually becomes part of the landscape. Depression is a season