My little apartment garden doesn’t provide much for food as it does simple pleasures.
When I see sprouts peek through the surface of the soil I feel like a scientist beaming at some feat of alchemical transformation, even though I know I planted the seed only days earlier. The plant cycle is hardly as complicated as turning metals to gold, but it still invokes an aura of mystery for me that defies, well, nature.
I’ve already chronicled my nauseating joy with flowers. But let me repeat: golly, they’re pretty. And tasty, too. A few arugula blossoms on a slice of country bread smeared with a fresh cheese is as painterly as it is piquant.
Almost as exciting is the shift in the plant cycle from fading blooms to seed production. We’d never know it this year in wintery San Francisco, but summer is waning and my plants are keener at recognizing this. Though we’re always encouraged as gardeners to clip spent flowers to encourage more blooms, I’m making an effort this year to let some of the flowers go to seed so I can save it. I love seeing where the seeds develop and the systems each plant has devised to disperse their germ.
Chive flowers are tasty but you’ll notice a distinct crunch if you let them go to seed.
Chives
This Clarkia flowered its socks off for months, but I think the crown-shaped funnels the seeds slide down are its most striking feature.
Clarkia purpurea
Is there a more prolific plant than the Sunflower? I could keep throwing down seeds for years from just one seed head.
Sunflower
Once the husks fall away, the pellucid rice paper remains of this arugula plant are as worthy of a flower vase as the flowers that preceded them.
Arugula
Sidewalk chalk drawings are one those urban features, like paw prints to a tracker, that remind me, indeed, children do reside in this city. Of course, the great sidewalk transit system of strollers in some neighborhoods also do that, but unlike strollers, I brighten up at the sight of chalk drawings. Somehow, they’re reassuring to me – like four-square outlines on asphalt, jump ropes, and steel playground structures. When a stick of chalk and a vast gray cement canvas can still call to a child’s imagination, well, I don’t want to get all Stevie Wonder, but I think that’s a good thing.
But when those chalk drawings illustrate some dark and savage fantasy, as in this case, with what appears to be a child giving a golden shower to a helpless turtle-cat, I thank god for birth control.
“I was here first.” Harry J Aleo
Long before I moved to (the outer reaches of) Noe Valley, I was familiar with its safe, traditional, almost suburban atmosphere. 24th Street is a showcase for middle-of-the-road eateries, shoe shops, flavored lattes, and fleecy weekend wear. It’s also the site for one of the premier stroller derbies in the city, by which I mean the roaming dog and tot zoo that occupies the avenue any given Saturday. The surrounding neighborhood, though, is filled with charming homes, relatively quiet, walkable streets, and just enough protection from Twin Peaks to slow the onslaught of fog.
Situated amongst the mercantile pablum of 24th Street is Harry J Aleo’s wonderfully looney Twin Peaks Properties office, which still displays an assortment of conservative ephemera featuring Reagan or Bush/Cheney through its front windows. He used to post handwritten notes in the front, railing against the “liberal loonies” and any other affront to his way of life. Harry was clearly a traditionalist. He once said,
Tradition means a lot to me. We have to maintain some of that tradition for future generations.
Harry’s since passed on, but his beliefs still resonate with a cranky minority wary of changes to their neighborhood.
Like many areas in the city, Noe Valley is evolving. The demographic seems to be trending towards a younger population. Whole Foods moved into the old Bell Market, challenging established mom and pop shops like the 24th St Cheese Co and Drewes as well as several wine shops, flower shops, you name it. There is an invasive proliferation of real estate offices.
And most recently, a Pavement to Parks plaza was proposed for the intersection at 24th and Noe and it’s drawn a lot of ire. Certainly, there are people who are uncomfortable with any challenge to conventional street use. I attended the first community meeting about the proposed plaza and many of the opponents made plangent cries for how it would impact the ease of their drive…around the block. What stood out to me most was the fury some individuals exhibited, indignant that the city could foist something like this on them and their neighborhood. It was every bit the Tea Party lunacy of the health care forums last fall.
Just consider the contempt shown by opponents to the plaza in this video, which features some of the same eccentricity as a Christopher Guest mockumentary:
One of the obstreperous persons shouting over the city staff in the video is Joel Panzer, “master property manager”, who’s responsible for possibly the tackiest signage in the city (at yet another local real estate office).
He’s also interested in preserving Harry Aleo’s storefront as a museum to traditionalism. After all, they were here first and they want to make sure others remember that.
Maybe all this change – even proposed, temporary change – is just too much for longtime Noe Valley residents, who demonstrated similar rancor when the city changed Army Street to Cesar Chavez Street. I don’t want to seem above nostalgia or historical preservation, but I don’t believe in traditionalism. This city and its neighborhoods are going to change, despite heroic attempts to freeze them in time. I have great hope that, in time, our streets and public spaces will be greener, more walkable, our city made more vibrant by designing for the pedestrian environment over the automobile, thus reintegrating islands of suburbia like Noe Valley into a cohesive urban fabric. The Pavement to Parks program is a great way to test different ideas while soliciting community input. As with health care reform, I trust that a very vocal, but misinformed minority won’t derail its progress.
