The people who are transforming Philly’s vacant lots into green spaces

Xiao Hui Star kneeled on her haunches, with her hands in the dirt as she cleared a spot to plant a flowering perennial in late summer. Surrounding her was a native garden replete with golden sunflowers, beans, squash, pawpaw and corn. She ruffled tufts of sweetgrass, which emitted a vanilla-like fragrance. Birds fluttered by and swooped down into a small bath filled with hard clam shells. Sandwiched between a brick home and a playground in west Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, the native garden featured plants endemic to the region.“These are very special endangered varieties that we are rematriating back to the soil,” said Star, who is part of Rhode Island’s Narragansett tribe. She is also the manager of new initiatives at the Philadelphia-based organization We Are the Seeds, which hosts public events and education on Indigenous arts and culture. “Who knows how many centuries it’s been since a Lenape corn or a Nanticoke squash have grown in this soil.”Unlike a typical garden plot, the 2,250 sq ft Seeds Indigenous listening garden sits atop a longtime vacant lot. In April, the organization began planting on the city-owned lot as an act of the LandBack movement – an Indigenous campaign of returning sovereignty and stewardship of land to Native people. Native plants offer food and shelter to the local insects and birds that evolved along with them over thousands of years. They also require less water than exotic plants, since they thrive in the soil and weather of the local environment.Sisters Tailinh Agoyo (left) and Xiao Hui Star next to the main crops grown by Indigenous people in North America – corn, beans and squash – otherwise known as the Three Sisters. Photograph: Melissa Hellmann/The GuardianOver the past six months, We Are the Seeds has converted three vacant lots in Philadelphia into native gardens. They hope that their project will serve as a model that inspires others to transform some of the 40,000 vacant lots in the city into green spaces. “That’s where the growth would go,” said the organization’s co-founder and director Tailinh Agoyo, who is also Star’s sister. “That’s where the ripple effect would happen.” Studies show that revitalizing vacant property can lead to less violence and improved mental health in the area.The seeds – including maypop and garden phlox, among others – come from organizations that save and propagate heirloom plants to promote agriculture biodiversity, such as Experimental Farm Network, Truelove Seeds and the Seed Savers Exchange. We Are the Seeds’ native gardens are tended by Indigenous people – Star and her father Tchin, an artist and educator.The city of Philadelphia has also ramped up efforts to address its vacant lots, which are a result of decades of redlining and disinvestment. In April, the city launched a pilot program, Lotscapes, to transform 10 of the city’s 8,000 vacant lots into green spaces. Launched through the city’s office of clean and green initiatives and the Bloomberg-funded innovation team, the program aims to make it easier for community members to legally transform vacant land in their neighborhoods by applying for licensing or ownership. “The ultimate objective”, said Casey Kuklick, the city’s office of clean and green initiatives deputy director, “is to scale the ability of community groups to be able to … access land in the first place from a legal perspective”.For the pilot program, the city has partnered with community organizations to envision how to revitalize the land. In the current design stage, community members are choosing whether to transform the lots in their neighborhoods into gardens, gathering spaces with benches and tables, and areas with interactive structures. In the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, the city is working with a health center to create interactive elements for a future green space that will also serve students from the elementary school next door.‘You can’t eat concrete’When Star set out to transform vacant lots to native gardens, she searched on a city website for all of the properties owned by the Philadelphia land bank, a public agency that acquires vacant and tax-delinquent properties. She made a list of vacant lots with ample sunlight and took soil samples of her top options to ascertain their toxicity levels. The west Philadelphia lot she chose was a sparse lot with a lawn mowed by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, a non-profit that maintains some vacant lots in the city; it lacked features that grounded the community and honored the native plants.We Are the Seeds was inspired to create native gardens in Philadelphia after helping the Indigenous-led Ashawaug Farm in Rhode Island develop their branding and education initiative. Transforming vacant lots “was the way we could implement our big ideas right away without having to deal with a lot of legal [hurdles]”, said Agoyo. “We just wanted to get our seeds in the ground.”They hope to secure a mortgage and deed to the land through the state law adverse possession, which allows people to gain possession of vacant land if they have tended it as a garden for at least 10 years.Wildflowers in the Seeds Indigenous listening garden in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, offers food for pollinators. Photograph: Melissa Hellmann/The GuardianBefore assuming management of the land, We Are the Seeds spoke with community members who enthusiastically supported the garden’s development. They also received support from the city council district. In April, the organization hosted an opening ceremony at the lot where Indigenous dancers performed the corn dance. Neighbors from a nearby community garden participated in the dance, and a youth football team helped cast seeds after completing practice at the field next door.While the garden is not designed for sustenance, neighbors are welcome to take corn and herbs from the land.“Part of the vision for the garden is for not just Indigenous people, but for all people to come and have that reconnection to the land, because we cannot survive without the land,” Star said. “You can’t eat concrete.”The organization has received funding from the Philadelphia-based non-profit People’s Media Fund to erect a podcast studio where they will interview community members about their connection to the land. They will also archive audio recordings from Philadelphians about their Indigenous ancestry. In the future, the garden will feature sculptures and soundscapes.Agoyo hopes that native gardens soon spread throughout the city. “Start in your backyard. There’s just so much that we can all do individually to make a difference,” said Agoyo. “ I want everybody to feel what we feel when we come here, when we see something has grown or taken shape.”