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Several of the UK’s northern cities are transforming once neglected passageways into bucolic oases; community spaces filled with urban art, herb gardens — and civic pride
‘Nature is inherently beautiful, it doesn’t require design’ He helped make Singapore a garden city, and the same ethos informs the design of his home. House and garden are one and the same, nature is invited in, and the outdoor spaces feel like extra rooms
The entire point of life is to take chances on dreams that seem crazy to most but feel like destiny to you…
The designer-turned-horticulturalist turned his verge into a veggie plot — and started a movement. Now he is creating a verdant installation as part of an epic LA art exhibition
Restrictions don’t seem to register with Ron Finley. Over the past decade he has morphed into an intriguing hybrid: horticulturist, activist, public speaker, entrepreneur, an irreverent LA celebrity.
While championing local guerrilla gardening groups, he has created a successful personal brand (his online MasterClass lessons in gardening are hugely popular).
He even has a nice line in “Plant Some Shit!” T-shirts. “I have always felt that Ron is an artist with the history of a gardener,” says Glenn Kaino, an LA-based conceptual artist who has guest-curated the Breath(e) exhibition at the Hammer Museum, where Finley’s installation will feature alongside other ecologically minded works by artists including documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara. “The aesthetics and the artfulness of Ron’s practice is in his garden; that functions as an artwork because it captivates people’s imagination.
If that was not interesting visually, like a maximalist installation, he would not have nearly as much energy around his ideas in the public sphere.” Plants growing in tubs and a champagne bucket, plus a painted pair of boots ‘I got stuff growing in potato chip bags, just to show people there are no constraints’ Art has long been an interest for Finley: his two grown-up sons are successful figurative painters and he has a major collection of 20th-century blaxploitation posters.
He wants the Hammer show to be tactile and immersive. In the courtyard outside the galleries, he will present an offshoot from his garden — with a mass of plants and furniture, behind a large rusty metal gate he has fabricated for the show. There will be alcoves and recesses for community interaction. There will be an armchair to fall asleep in. Over the past two decades, guerrilla gardening — in which plots are repurposed without permission — has become a global movement, with widespread “seed-bombing” of neglected corners of towns and cities.
“It’s always good to see people taking action to create beautiful pockets of plants in urban areas which improve the quality of lives for city dwellers,” says Michael Holland, author of The Little Gardener’s Handbook. “And Ron’s celebrity status helps to bring this biodiversity and hope into the headlines.” Back in his garden, Finley details the devils and the delights in his little idyll. “The joys are the hummingbirds and the dragonflies. You see those dragonflies flying tandem, it’s like this beautiful dance,” he says. “They let you know that they’re here, that you did something right. I guess they tell their cousins that some crazy Black guy in South Central planted this garden and you should come.”
Recommended Gardens Beauty and the balcony: horticulture is not just for house dwellers a balcony filled with plants overlooking the city of Manchester Are there still plants or dream features he has yet to bring into the space? Absolutely, he says. “A 10ft waterfall and a cherimoya tree that actually produces fruit.” It sounds both nutritious and wonderfully Hollywood. “We can make this city one of the healthiest, vibrant cities in the whole world. …
Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art,” said Ron Finley in his Ted Talk, a 2013 presentation now watched by more than 4.5mn people. Standing in his garden in South Los Angeles, I can see this was not hyperbole. The fashion designer turned horticulturalist has created a hip-hop-inspired oasis of greenery and street-style ephemera.
His two-storey house and urban jungle, which sits on a street corner next to a plumbing company in the West Adams neighbourhood, is like a collaboration between Monty Don and Jean-Michel Basquiat: there are mulberry and mango trees and myriad vegetable patches, but there are also pizzeria signs and stained-glass windows featuring Black Panther activists. It’s verdant and anarchic.
Finley is as vivacious as his garden; he is tall, with angular features and an intense, warm energy. And, fair warning, his language is as clean as compost. “Integrity is a motherfucker, people have very little of it right now,” he says, as we sit down at his workbench, surrounded by succulents in the bottom of his swimming pool.
Drained of water and filled with flora, the pool is the nerve centre of his non-profit enterprise, the Ron Finley Project, a venture that began with a brush with the law and now finds him propelled into the art world. This autumn, he will create a plant-based installation at the city’s Hammer Museum, part of PST ART, the largest art event in the US, a vast $20mn festival organised by the Getty Foundation.
Finley’s unlikely horticultural tale began in 2009 when, as he puts it: “I planted a food forest in front of my house.” He was tired of his neighbourhood’s status as a “food desert” — an area where affordable and nutritious food is hard to access. South Los Angeles, with its liquor stores and fast-food outlets, is the “home of the drive-through and the drive-by”, says Finley. “The thing is, the drive-throughs are killing more people than the drive-bys.”
Taking action, Finley dug up the parkway – the strip of land between the sidewalk and the kerb – and laid down fruit and vegetable seeds. “It started with the parkway, it started when my son planted a tangerine tree when he was a very young child. It’s been truly organic. You know, one plant at a time.”
People complained. He was ordered to remove his garden and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a legal fight, Finley won his case and helped change the city ordinance regarding gardening on public land. Today, a banana tree hangs over the sidewalk.
That tiny ribbon of earth was an acorn to an oak. Finley’s garden has been 15 years in the making. The self-titled “gangsta gardener” — an allusion to horticulture as protest — craned in a shipping container to make a shed-meets-roof garden, introduced pomegranate trees and installed a custard-yellow beehive: “We have an understanding: you don’t sting me; I don’t kill your ass.”
The result is a hub for community gardeners and a showcase for his educative mission. “I started this because of being Black and seeing Black people suffering. And not knowing they’re suffering from this food element. All you have to do is change your food. Change your food, change your life.” For some Black people, he says, gardening has uncomfortable associations. “My thing is no, it’s not slavery: it’s freedom. Imagine you have the land and you have the seed. You reap the harvest.”
Finley was born in Los Angeles on an undisclosed date — he describes himself as “ageless” — and grew up in the area. “One of my first jobs was gardening,” he says. “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. You make 50 cents. We mowed lawns. I used to help my mum cleaning people’s gardens.”
As a teenager with dyslexia, he taught himself how to tailor garments, making clothes in his garage. He later enrolled at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, and then developed a streetwear range called DropDead Collecxions. “I studied,” he says. “I would go to the stores and open the clothes and look at the seams.”
Finley speaks a lot about the importance of personal agency, whether in parenthood, business or putting decent food on the table. When developers bought his house from his landlord in 2016, he crowdfunded half a million dollars to secure the future of the site.
His clothing business collapsed in the 2008 recession, just as his interest in gardening took hold. “There’s no difference between gardening and fashion,” he says. “We choose to have these stupid-ass boxes that we put things in. Everything starts from that idea on the damn napkin. Everything starts from that seed in your head.”
But progress is slow, he acknowledges. The sprawling tangle of freeways and boulevards in South Los Angeles are littered with vacant lots. Finley’s hope of repurposing them as gardens has not come to fruition. “But are there a lot more people gardening in LA because of what they’ve seen? Hell, yeah.” And, he maintains, anyone can get involved. “With one window box, you can still grow something. I got shit growing in dresser drawers. I got stuff growing in potato chip bags, just to show people there are no constraints.”
Restrictions don’t seem to register with Finley. Over the past decade he has morphed into an intriguing hybrid: horticulturist, activist, public speaker, entrepreneur, an irreverent LA celebrity. While championing local guerrilla gardening groups, he has created a successful personal brand (his online MasterClass lessons in gardening are hugely popular). He even has a nice line in “Plant Some Shit!” T-shirts.
“I have always felt that Ron is an artist with the history of a gardener,” says Glenn Kaino, an LA-based conceptual artist who has guest-curated the Breath(e) exhibition at the Hammer Museum, where Finley’s installation will feature alongside other ecologically minded works by artists including documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier and Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara. “The aesthetics and the artfulness of Ron’s practice is in his garden; that functions as an artwork because it captivates people’s imagination. If that was not interesting visually, like a maximalist installation, he would not have nearly as much energy around his ideas in the public sphere.”
Art has long been an interest for Finley: his two grown-up sons are successful figurative painters and he has a major collection of 20th-century blaxploitation posters. He wants the Hammer show to be tactile and immersive. In the courtyard outside the galleries, he will present an offshoot from his garden — with a mass of plants and furniture, behind a large rusty metal gate he has fabricated for the show. There will be alcoves and recesses for community interaction. There will be an armchair to fall asleep in.
Over the past two decades, guerrilla gardening — in which plots are repurposed without permission — has become a global movement, with widespread “seed-bombing” of neglected corners of towns and cities. “It’s always good to see people taking action to create beautiful pockets of plants in urban areas which improve the quality of lives for city dwellers,” says Michael Holland, author of The Little Gardener’s Handbook. “And Ron’s celebrity status helps to bring this biodiversity and hope into the headlines.”
Back in his garden, Finley details the devils and the delights in his little idyll. “The joys are the hummingbirds and the dragonflies. You see those dragonflies flying tandem, it’s like this beautiful dance,” he says. “They let you know that they’re here, that you did something right. I guess they tell their cousins that some crazy Black guy in South Central planted this garden and you should come.”
Are there still plants or dream features he has yet to bring into the space? Absolutely, he says. “A 10ft waterfall and a cherimoya tree that actually produces fruit.” It sounds both nutritious and wonderfully Hollywood.
“We can make this city one of the healthiest, vibrant cities in the whole world. Starting by changing the food and access to food, and people growing their food,” he says. “This is not [just] for southern LA. This is for the world. I’m affecting people from Sweden to Africa, from Compton to Copenhagen.”
Hammer Museum’s ‘Breath(e)’ exhibition runs Sep 14-Jan 5, hammer.ucla.edu
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