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.

You’ve just moved into a house. It’s in the neighborhood you want to live in, you did your research, you’ve just been through everything with realtors, insurance agents, your bank, your accountant, now you’re working with contractors to fix, tweak, and polish all the little things that aren’t right about the building.

But besides all that, you also find yourself staring at the land around the house. The green strip that decorates the property, provides a buffer, a sense of space for the architecture to stand within. There’s probably grass, maybe a patio, a tree here and there, roses perhaps, and a handful of plants, some with flowers and some without, that you recognize from all over the city but you could never in your life attach to a name.

This is your land. These are your nameless plants. These are your resources--your water, your soil, your nitrogen--and what you do with them is your choice alone. You are not only a homeowner, but also a land owner. You own and administer California real estate, some of the priciest square footage in the world. What should you do with it? Your strip that used to be ranchero, and then it was an orchard or farm, before it was claimed by the city, parceled into a home.