The parkway garden is located on a commercial stretch of Glendale's Brand Boulevard. It is a modest plot of native plants, barely visible from the road.
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But this children's plot is the pride and joy of the close-knit group of gardening enthusiasts who tend to it. They gather there every last Sunday of the month at the Gay Gardens Club, a garden club that serves queer Angelenos, to maintain the parkway strip, learn about native gardening, and connect with other plant lovers.
At the September meeting of the Gay Gardens Club, attendees ranged in age and background in botany, some with degrees in horticulture and others simply happy to lend a hand. After a brief round of introductions (pronouns optional, astrological signs required), they divided into groups of seed sorters, pavers, planters, and detailers (a euphemism for trash crew).
Club regular Juno Stilley sat inside with the seed sorters, grinding white sage between her fingers. Stilley, who grew up in Los Angeles, attended his club's first meeting in 2023 and has since established his own landscape design and maintenance business, Juno Garden.
Before Club Gay Gardens, Stilley said his landscaping operation was just “a small seed,” but attending club meetings gave him the educational resources and complete confidence to turn it into a full-time job.
Juno Stilley picks up a bunch of dried stems while sorting the seeds.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Stilley can identify most of the plant species in the parkway garden at a glance, but she still comes every week she can, excited to gain new wisdom.
“I always learn something when I'm here,” Stilley said, “because there are so many people who come with different kinds of knowledge about plants, and there are endless different things about plants and ecology.”
When it comes to plant expertise, Gay Gardens Club co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe is among the toughest competition, although she's too humble to say so herself.
The 27-year-old urban ecologist and biodiversity educator, originally from New Jersey, has spent the last five years working in composting and native gardening. She is also a skilled community organizer and is often cited as the glue that holds the Gay Gardens Club together.
“We're also really trying to find ways to help people reimagine their connection to the space,” said Club Gay Gardens co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe. “When you walk down a street, you should feel at home.”
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In 2022, Smart-McCabe met his match in Linnea Torres, a 29-year-old graphic designer at Junior High, the mixed-use arts and events space near the parkway. The club's co-founders connected on Instagram after Torres posted some photos of the garden (at the time, they were the only person tending it) and planned to meet up a few weeks later.
“It was basically a blind date between the two of us,” Smart-McCabe said. Fortunately, the couple hit it off easily, but they also realized that maintaining the native garden would be too difficult a task for them alone.
“We thought, 'Let's try to call and see if we can get some volunteers to show up,'” Smart-McCabe said. “And people showed up.”
For months, it was just prep work: leaf mulching, teaching, and more leaf mulching. The soil was so compacted that every time they dug a hole to plant, it took an hour to drain. By the following spring, the first wildflowers had emerged and native plants were digging deep root systems.
Progress has come in waves: Hot Los Angeles summers make plants “crunchy,” Torres said, and passersby always leave strange trash behind. Recently, they found an Abraham Lincoln magnet in the brush.
“People are going to trample your plants,” Smart-McCabe said. “It's pretty brutal, the strip of the avenue is a pretty hostile environment.”
But as the garden has grown, its older, more mature plants have begun to protect the younger ones, and walkers have been more careful where they step. When patches suffer damage, gardeners are persistent in nursing them back to health.
“Every seed needs certain conditions to thrive, and I think people do too,” said Nina Raj of the Altadena Seed Library. “Especially for queer people, I think it's a powerful metaphor.”
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
That persistence seems like a strange instinct to Nina Raj, founder of the Altadena Seed Library. The community initiative provides free seeds to Los Angeles residents through a network of swap boxes. throughout the areaone of whom is in high school.
“There's something really powerful about queer people supporting the underdog,” Raj said. “And so something like a little garden on an avenue that requires a lot of extra care is really nice, because you're encouraging it to thrive despite all the odds.”
Smart-McCabe agreed that queer people are drawn to spaces where they can take care of something together.
“Maybe that will help people with any other kind of negative relationship they may have with their home,” he said.
In late September, on the parkway, Smart-McCabe plunged his shovel into the ground for the third time. The club co-founder was beginning the day's plant demonstration and in her first two moves, she had hit a grate beneath the floor. This time, as he sank the metal into the earth, the sound was soft.
“Yes! We found land! On the avenue!” Smart-McCabe shouted victoriously. The group cheered as if they had won the Powerball jackpot.
Linnea Torres prepares to place a plant in a pot.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Next to the Smart-McCabe planting hole is a raised bed, which the gardeners designated as the “Gothic” bed with only dark plants. At the opposite end of the avenue is its twin sister, the “rainbow” bed, a free play of colorful plants. In the middle, rows of hollyhocks and other native plants were separated by paving stones.
As Smart McCabe began sending clubgoers to their stations, Cassandra Marketos announced that her trunk was full of donations from Silver Lake's Plant Material. The plants were too dead for the nursery to sell.
“We love rejected products,” Smart-McCabe said with a smile.
Like many of her peers, Smart-McCabe grew up imagining that home gardeners fit a very particular archetype: usually wealthy, often white, and always female. With Club Gay Gardens, she and Torres sought to deconstruct that archetype.
They did so with the club's name, a riff on the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” which chronicles the lives of former socialites Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, who, despite retiring to a run-down Long Island estate, continue to sport luxurious furs and dresses as they go about their lives. daily.
Gardeners at the September meeting were dressed in various styles, from frayed overalls and baseball caps to babydoll dresses and chokers.
Bex Muñoz waters a planting hole in a raised bed.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Niamh Sprout wore a few chunky silver rings, which complemented the long black fingernails she had dug into the avenue floor as Smart-McCabe did her plant demonstration. Sprout found it nearly impossible to completely remove the dirt from under her nails, but after a lifetime of being “raised by plants,” as she put it, she was used to the mess.
“I don't have the traditional hands of a gardener,” Sprout said at the seed sorting table. “For me, it's gotten to the point where I'm so used to it and it doesn't feel so strange anymore.”
“Everyone has always said, 'Oh, so how do you take care of plants?'” Niamh Sprout said. “I say, 'I just listen to them. They just tell me how they should be taken care of.'”
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
From the beginning, Smart-McCabe and Torres did not want Club Gay Gardens to exist in a vacuum. They wanted to politicize the act of gardening and place it within a broader framework of social justice.
As part of that mission, the couple hosts an event each year called Pisces Plantasia, which features native plant resources, local artists and more. In its first year, proceeds from the event went to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. Last year, they turned to the Altadena Seed Library and the No Canyon Hills legal defense fund.
The club's co-founders also regularly speak during meetings about food accessibility and improving people's access to urban green spaces, something club member Katya Forsyth says urban planners don't value enough.
“The basis of all human society, of human life, is the soil and the plants that grow in it,” Forsyth said. “He's so abundant and wants to give us so much, we thought, 'I'm going to put some concrete on you.'”
The parkway on Brand Boulevard may be small, but for Forsyth, it's a definite step in the right direction.
In the future, Smart McCabe hopes to help establish Club Gay Gardens satellite locations in Los Angeles and create more professional development opportunities for local gardeners. In the fall, it will receive support on that front through a grant that will benefit the Gay Gardens Club, the Altadena Seed Library and the green landscaping company Soil Wise.
The grant will allow four members of the Gay Gardens Club to take a six-week course on how to safely work with contaminated soil, which Smart-McCabe said is especially needed after the January wildfires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
Smart-McCabe has a favorite saying about plants native to Southern California: “First they sleep, then they crawl, and then they jump.”
It is a reference to how these plants have adapted to a cycle of hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters by establishing deep roots that keep them hydrated even during long periods of drought.
“That means that in their first year, they don't grow as much as they establish their root system,” Smart-McCabe said. She compares this phenomenon to the slow but steady growth of the Gay Gardens Club.
As the club's co-founder discussed the details of the new grant with the beneficiaries, club regular Bex Muñoz began to cry.
“We are jumping,” they said.
