Potato Vines and Other Things that Don't Grow in Paradise
(Page 2 of 3)
October 2005
By Elizabeth Dwoskin, Utne.com
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Taking our mutual surprise into account, it seems as if gardening is more than a personal hobby. It is a gesture representing a kind of collective eagerness about integrating nature into an urban environment. There are unacknowledged politics gestating in the soil.
Given its history, I am sure those subtle politics could not have developed in Florida. In the past century Florida has been the fastest growing state in the union, going from being the 34th most populated state at the turn of the century to being the fourth largest today. Most of this growth began in the late 1960s and has been relentless ever since. Nine hundred prospective residents continue to move to Palm Beach County each day.
Forty years ago, an exodus of Northerners to the Sun Belt spawned a massive draining of wetlands, ultimately reducing the size of the everglades by two thirds, and fostering the kind of hit-and-run architecture that contributes to the uneasy feeling that everything in Palm Beach County was built yesterday, literally, between the time you went to college and the time you came home for your first winter break. Arising in response to the mass suburban migration, and consequently, to the growth of tract housing, the early crusaders of the fledgling environmental movement fought to preserve wetlands, floodplains, and hillsides. Tract houses featured central cooling, as all around the country, the home unit became a main contributor to an energy consumption blitz. It was at this time that pesticides sprayed on the lawns of private homes began to account for a greater portion of ground pollution than did runoff from commercial farms. Neighborhoods were built from scratch as terrain was cleared without time to spare the trees.
It was around that time that my great aunt, who is now sixty seven, planted her first potato vine in front of their house on Hillcrest Avenue in St. Paul. Though the vine never did yield potatoes, it crawled up the front of the house in a majestic way. There is a history in what appears to be individual, spontaneous, and undocumented decisions, in what merely and unnoticeably caught on.
When I was a kid, I could see that there was something wrong with the fact that the mall was the main social hub for children and adults. I could criticize consumption, but I never once considered gardening or other kinds of alternative lifestyles -- there was little in my life that would lead me to consider it. Meanwhile, I thought changing the world happened in other places. Florida was just boring. It was as if the land of Florida, like the informal economy producing immigrants that tended it, was invisible to me.