Gardener Story

Garden Location
Off of 122nd Street in Harlem
New York, NY
United States

Youth Program
Project Hope

Program Contact
Haja Worley

Gardener Story Author(s)
Michelle Mulcahy

Gardener Interviewed
Haja Worley

Date of Interview
March 23, 2005

Project Report
• Gardener's Background
Haja Worley has always been involved in gardening. While Haja was growing up in Patterson, New Jersey, they grew collard greens, tomatoes, green beans and peach trees in their yard; they enjoyed fresh vegetables in the summer and fall as well as canned and preserved goods in the winter. As a boy in Patterson, Haja also worked on a local farm.

However, when Haja’s gardening background met an urban setting, his focus shifted; the purpose of gardening was no longer to indulge in fresh vegetables or even sustenance. Haja explained that there is an assumption that community gardening movements are started by people with an already existing "affinity for gardening--an assumption not always true." Haja said it was simply that "gardens were the best way to cleanup, secure, and beautify spaces that were problems...green-space is clean-space, so the progression to gardening was natural." He further elaborated on this point explaining that community members became horticulturalists by necessity at first, but "the labor soon became a labor of love." "We could all see the potential for good in greening." In the urban setting, Haja used gardening as a tool to foster community participation and to reclaim a neighborhood from drugs, prostitution and unsightliness. He calls his Project Harmony Garden "an attractive community spot" and his gardeners, "guardians of the land" and "grassroots developers".

The Project Harmony Garden was started by an elderly community member and Worley’s future wife, who herself had a background in farming from her childhood on an Iowan farm. These two initiated the garden because they were troubled by the amount of vacant lots in the neighborhood that were used as a dumping ground. Haja became involved after he met his wife in 1987. They got in touch with Greenthumb for assistance and received aid from the City Volunteers Corps, who sent groups of youth to help clean the site. When the cleaning was done, it was not only the lot that was cleaned, but the whole block. From the beginning, the community garden was simply a vessel with which to create larger change; the garden was not started because of any special affinity for gardening, but because the community members were sick of "eye sores and garbage heaps."

Creating the community garden was also an effort to secure the area, which had been a breeding ground for "negative elements" such as prostitutes and drug dealers. However, as the benefits of the garden materialized, the "negative elements" pitched in and helped with cleaning and watching over the site. As Haja put it, "We were in a nest of snakes but we were alright." Members of the community who were known to be disruptive at first stood by watching, waiting for Haja and his fellow community activists to give up or to fail. Soon, the "negative element" became interested and enthusiastic about the progress being made. People who "one day were high on crack would the next day be helping us drag rubbish out of there." "There was a wild energy, as if we were pioneers," Haja recalled. "We were more than gardeners, we were guardians of the future of our community."

• Plants
Haja plants a lot of vegetables and fruit trees. People mainly use this food as a complement to their diet, although some people might can them or make them into jams to save for the winter.

• Planting Practices
Haja is very interested in creating an urban agriculture industry so that cities can sustain themselves if they are ever cut off from surrounding areas.

• Planting Tips
Other gardeners could learn a lot from Haja about maintaining their garden in the face of development pressure. At the time that the garden was started, no one wanted the land; Mr. Worley saw himself and the other community gardeners as "pioneers." However, when Mayor Giuliani came into office, development pressures were mounting and the administration did its best to help them along; the gardeners felt threatened by development and overlooked by City government, or worse, exploited for their hard won success. Vacant lots with gardens in them seemed to be targeted for development and building projects, the nicer the garden the more likely it was a target for development. There was no help from the mayor’s office, as the policy forwarded seemed to favor developers and gave very little recognition to the value of community greening efforts.

One morning, bulldozers showed up unannounced at the Project Harmony Garden, ready to prep the site for development. According to Mr. Worley, "The bulldozers wrecked everything. They ruined the fruit trees. They wounded the ground, and it was like they wounded me because they were destroying life, all that living matter in there, the green...destroying life in our garden, life in our community." Haja recounted efforts to negotiate with the developers and contractors themselves because he was frustrated with the city government processes. "I learned that when you are having ideas, other people are having ideas too."

Fortunately, the community was able to keep the bulldozers from completely destroying the garden, giving Haja a chance to sit down with the city to work out a compromise. In order to establish a good relationship, the city allowed Haja to keep a part of the garden, while giving the rest of the site to a housing development; in the end, the developers built on a portion of the lot, but allowed the garden to remain in another portion. The garden would have to be rebuilt, but they still had land. Speaking metaphorically, borrowing from the pruning process he said, "From the pain of the loss, we grew. Our garden came back stronger, and our new neighbors are strong supporters of the garden, of the community. When they first came, I was selfish about the garden, but now I see we want the same things." Through this experience, Haja realized the complexity of the garden’s partial loss: while the community lost a portion of its beloved garden, it also gained new neighbors whose interest and efforts helped to maintain the remaining garden and who genuinely added to the growing sense of community.

As the community grew and the garden became better established, the potential of Project Harmony was being realized because, "when you work the land and clear it off, you think in terms of both development of the land and the whole community"; Haja began to envision a whole Project Harmony Center. Today, this center runs a Garden Ranger program for kids and is continually looking for opportunities to expand. Project Harmony works to nurture a new generation of involved citizens who will one day carry out Haja’s legacy of steadfast determination and interminable hope.

Haja is an optimist: he believes that, "if you put a certain energy out, you’ll get that energy back." He is also a visionary: he envisions a time when we are going to "want all that back": the soil, parks, green malls, access to water; we will reassess how we value land and define wealth; we will become more careful stewards of the land. Haja has faith that, one day, this metamorphosis will manifest; for the time being, however, he continues to transform a small Harlem neighborhood and to mold a strong, vibrant community, one vacant lot at a time.

• Culture and Gardening
His father was a sharecropper in Virginia and his mother grew up in the South; in the South, everyone had a garden and, when Haja’s parents moved to the North, they brought their love of growing fresh fruits and vegetables with them.