So there I was a few moons ago, playing bingo under the stars with my good friend, Krista. We were in the courtyard of Current Space, matching wits with hipsters and artsy folk, when I glanced up toward the boarded-up facade of the adjoining warehouse high above us. There, jutting defiantly through the crack of a boarded window was a leafy branch, stretching out into the night sky like the spar of a ship’s prow.
“Check out that ghetto palm,” said Krista.
“Ghetto palm?”
“Yes,” she said. “Up there.”
Like some urban Virgil, Krista had cast light in the undergloom of our ravaged metropolis. ”Ghetto palm” – a term with cultural currency. A creature of our communal folklore. What is the linguistic valence of that name? Is it our shrugging acceptance of decay, or perhaps a whimsical sigh, a knowing smile – half pride, half exhausted despair – over the blasted beauty of our post-industrial landscape? Perhaps there’s a metaphor in this strange flowering, a tribute to the weed-like tenacity of our urban spirit.
I asked Gigi if she knew what they were. “YES!” said Galadriel “Gigi” Rosen. “I’m assuming she meant Ailanthus Altissima – or Tree of Heaven or Stink Tree or apparently, Ghetto Palm. Which just might be the best thing EVER.” Gigi was a font of wisdom on these fronds: “It has a chemical in it that inhibits plant growth around its roots and it’s a chinese medical too……. dude.”
I asked Gigi if we should perhaps go on the hunt for more ghetto palms…
“YES!”
And display our haul in some kind of running blog-feature, in which we would invite others to share their own finds with us…
“YES!”
And so we set out to scour the city, whether for trees of heaven, shrubs of hell, or palms of purgatory. Or, more broadly defined, “shit growing of out weird places.” Our search bore fruit (which begs the question whether any of these ghetto palms do too, how poisonous it might be, and whether it tastes good.) We’ll be sharing our finds in the days and weeks ahead, but we’d like to put out the call to our greening colleagues: tell us where we can find them; snap a picture and send it to us, or post on your sites and blogs and let us know so we can highlight them. Let’s map out our city-wide ghetto-palm orchard together, and even the forest beyond Baltimore.
Hasdai
