The Global Garden, the Los Angeles Times

In November 2011, the Los Angeles Times launched a weekly column called “The Global Garden.” It was spin-off of a previous weekly column written by the same author, Jeff Spurrier, where for a year, he visited community gardens across the Los Angeles County, from Ventura to Long Beach, from the foothills to the coast, from the inner city to the suburbs. The goal for that column was to meet some of the people who worked and ran the gardens, and to explore how the different spaces functioned. Along the way, though, Spurrier found himself encountering not just discussions of leafy greens and tomatoes, as expected, but a whole slew of strange and foreign plants, fruits, vegetables, and herbs. He found that the diversity of crops grown and harvested in Southern California said a lot about the diversity of the people and the place itself. And so “The Global Garden” was born.

In the first installment he looks into hoja santa, a giant herb native to Central Mexico. He starts by talking about where he first encountered it – at Proyecto Jardin Community Garden in Boyle Heights – and then describing how it grows and what it looks like – an aggressive plant with edible leaves the size of dinner plates that take well to sun or shade, as long as they’re given enough water. He gives a bit of history – how the plant got its Spanish name. And then finally he talks about how it’s traditionally prepared. In Mexico it’s added to stews, mole sauces, and chocolate drinks, as well as used as an edible wrapping for tamales, eggs and the like. The tips and tricks go on. The rest of the series follows a very similar format, sometimes with anecdotes about the gardeners themselves, examining everything from taro to hibiscus flower, to stinging nettle to sugar cane.

Each article is short – a mere 550 words or so – and incredibly approachable to the average person. They seem more like an introduction than anything else. And yet as a whole, I think what this column does is incredibly important. It provides evidence that one of things that makes Los Angeles so great – its diversity – holds up through the food that can be grown, and therefore the food that can be eaten here. Fast food seems to be taking over, especially in poorer, ethnic communities. Those are the places where community gardens are the most important. In particular for my thesis (where I’m focusing on the importance of cooking attached to growing your own food at community gardens), I’m interested in how this makes traditional cooking for certain communities entirely possible. If Mexican immigrants want to cook what they’re used to – what they know and love – they have that option.