The Department of Parks and Recreation will soon choose how to remediate the landscaping at City Hall after damage it sustained during its Occupation. They’re considering some excellent changes for the space. They aim to incorporate about fifty percent native plant species into a new design that scales back on turf in order to showcase a more water-wise plant palette. Native and waterwise landscaping are the future. This is a noble effort.

But the design can go further. Should the emblem of our city, the nexus of municipal power, boast a landscape of only grass and flowers? Is that what we stand for? I think Los Angeles should ask more of its landscapes, public and private. I think we can do better. At City Hall we should also grow food crops in a demonstration garden, out front for everyone to see.

After attending a few of the redesign meetings downtown, we drew up plans for a City Hall landscape restoration, Farmscape-style. You can view a small version of our plan above, or click here for a high resolution version of our design.

At Farmscape, we care deeply about sustainable and socially responsible land use. The food we grow for ourselves in gardens tastes great, is good for our health and reduces the resource footprint of our diets. The gardens themselves visually re-humanize the urban landscape and insert growth and seasonal change into our midst.

What we do with the land outside our buildings is a very public exhibition of our values. And at a landmark like City Hall, our decisions echo across the city. Landmarks are models for landscaping options to all residents and land owners in charge of LA real estate, and that’s how movements are built.

Still you ask: Is it feasible? Is it reasonable? Isn’t gardening a throw-away hobby?

Gardening is not an idle hobby. Farmscape manages nearly one hundred intensive edible gardens across the city and has grown at least 30,000 pounds of produce by organic methods in these gardens. We estimate a well-managed garden in LA can grow at least 3-5 pounds per square foot per year, meaning a garden instead of several hundred feet of lawn could on average yield more than twenty pounds of heirloom fruits and vegetables per week. Fruit orchards perform even better on a pound-per-square-foot basis. For a small fraction of the anticipated maintenance budget for the City’s preferred landscape design -- $135k annually -- we could easily provide weekly maintenance of a demonstration garden larger than 1000 square feet.

If we decide to grow food at City Hall, we wouldn’t be acting without precedent. Cities like Portland, San Francisco, Provo, and Baltimore have already built their own City Hall gardens, in the wake of the highly publicized White House garden. Los Angeles would be able to outdo them all, however, because our climate is so favorable for year-round gardening. Southern California is a vegetable gardener’s paradise.
But at City Hall? Don’t gardens look unkempt?

If maintained correctly, food crops can and do make sense in public landscaping. Gardens and fruit orchards can be very attractive. If designed well from the start and maintained consistently by a skilled gardener, intensive plots look orderly and beautiful in a landscape.

Convinced at last, you want to know: How can I help?

The city solicited feedback on their plans for City Hall, and you can offer your opinion on their website. Tell them you want our city to grow vegetables and fruits at City Hall. Tell them you’d prefer the Farmscape plan, or something similar.

In a presentation last week at the Claremont Colleges I declared that a new era of gardening is upon us, that food production is making a cautious but steady return to our lives in the city. More and more people are rediscovering the pleasure of planting crops in their landscape with a real, tangible return. And they learn to love cooking with the fresher and superior yield from a well-tended home garden, delighted to host a transparent personal food supply right outside their kitchen window. 

But to be granted a full re-invitation to the city, this new era of gardening calls for a reboot of gardening aesthetics. We need to uproot the cynical and condemning connotations of gardening. I suspect that many people assume of gardening that it must be sloppy, or counter-cultural, or Luddite, or hobbyist, that it is unkempt and if it is to be done, it necessarily belongs out of sight behind the shed in the side yard. Gardening is an after-thought if not a nuisance. How many legal battles have we seen lately over whether food production is an "appropriate" use of the landscape?

I want gardens front and center. Farmscape is about making a landscape out of food production, we sponsor bold, farm-forward landscaping. In this spirit, we need to build a new gardening aesthetic to break people's assumptions about how much can be grown in a garden, about how productive their own yard can be, about how "appropriate" gardening is for the city, about how beautiful and fulfilling it is to host a garden in the urban landscape. We need to turn stigma on its head... with art.