The 60’s in the Rearview
Before the advent of mega-nurseries, the South End experimented with alternatives to the Big Box Plant Sellers we got now. Half of us back then thought we could grow our way to prosperity, skip a real job and just tend our Gardens of Eden. Avant-Gardens was a Mother Earth, granola munching collection of disillusioned big city emigres bent on subverting the capitalist system by starting a communal garden on Camano. They pooled their meager resources, piled into a 1963 VW bus painted with flowers and vines that broke down once on the way, bought 10 acres of prime nettle land with a 1920’s shack leaning romantically toward the edge of a bluff that fell straight to the Sound.
For years the old hippie bus could be spotted in various locations, broken down once again, a herd of itinerant repairmen at work in the rear end’s engine compartment, usually with a VW Repair Manual for Total Idiots open to smudged and torn pages. It was rumored they could pull a blown engine and replace it with another equally unreliable one in 15 minutes flat, side of the road, pouring down rain. Practice, any VW mechanic can tell you, makes perfect.
The old bus hauled specimens the Avant-Gardeners collected at old homesteads, back in the woods, up creekbeds, culled from neighbors’ cuttings, which the merry band transplanted, propagated, divided, moved to new beds they were forever making from land reclaimed temporarily from blackberries, nettles and salmonberries. No one knew how they got money to live on, but we all knew they never sold much of what they grew. Speculation ran rampant that they raised cannabis in a backroom of the shack under halogens, but it was never substantiated, meaning, they didn’t sell it to us if they did grow it.
Over the years the Avant-Gardeners became synonymous with an era long lost, an anachronistic group who most of us other transplants considered kindred spirits. We mostly wished them luck. Luck, of course, runs its limits. The old VW still sits, now a relic in a vigorous blackberry patch. You look in there you can almost read AVANT-GARDENS painted on its side. Somedays you can almost see the 60’s looking back at you out of the opera windows as the bus navigates the berry boulevards headed toward the bluff.
Hits: 37