Tale of the Binational Friendship Garden Part I

This is part one of a four part historical account of the Bi-national Friendship garden. The entire tale comes from my perspetive as the principal organizer of a program called Border encuentro which initiated the project as one of our "Common interest themes" that bring people together through the border fence to get to know each other and make friends.

The garden is located about one-hundred feet East of the historical bi-national Monument and Friendship Plaza at the Southwestern and Northwestern most points of the United States and Mexico and sits atop a Mesa overlooking the Pacific Ocean dissected by the international border. A community project, the garden of native plants is united as one through the rusty metal fence in the spirit of bi-national friendship and collaboration. It’s main purposes are to create a space where people from both countries can get to know each other and make friends and collaborate to contribute to the improvement of the region’s environment and native habitat across the US/Mexico border.

March 2007 - November 2008

Inception to Revival

I started out by promoting the idea to environmental organizations, schools, and the general public and explaining and convincing authorities, Border Patrol and State Parks, in charge of the area on the US side at the time, and the local Delegation of Playas in Tijuana. From the get-go, there was a great deal of enthusiasm. One-hundred native plants were donated from Aquatic Wetlands Adventures in San Diego and purchased at Recon Native plant nursery in Imperial Beach. All the plants were chosen from a list of Natives in supply at Recon. On March 20th of 2007, we had a bi-national planting ceremony with forty-eight students from the middle school, Colegio Tijuana, and a group of students from Kearny Mesa High School in San Diego.

With everyone together working on both sides of the fence, the Colegio Tijuana students organized themselves into teams of six and planted and decorated eight one-meter square gardens all connected to create the area against the fence covered by the garden on the Mexican side. They made it a competition to see who had the coolest looking garden plot and had the most knowledge of the natives they planted. The students on the US side along with some native plant experts on both sides, were the judges. Some named their plots. I remember “Border compadres” was one of the names. These Mexican middle school students came from two classes taught by Fabiola Hernández Flores, who motivated her students to use the garden as a school project. Daniel Rosales, a professor at Kearny Mesa High School in San Diego, worked with an after school community advocacy group of students to do the same. Once completed, the garden covered a total area of about 6ft from North to South through the fence spanning about 12ft on the US side and around 25 ft East to West on the Mexican side. The students worked hard and had fun as they collaborated in planting seeds of friendship to create the bi-national garden of native plants.

Throughout 2007 and the first part of 2008, people were allowed to access the garden on both sides of the border. During this time, I was the one who was mostly tending to and maintaining the garden. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The more time I spent with the plants, the more I started to feel like we were caring for each other. I imagined the O2-CO2 life cycle working directly on me as I expelled what felt like negative energy knowing that they take in and nourish what I let out and I gain life from the oxygen they produce. I always finished with a more calm and tranquil perspective on life. It was quite therapeutic. I was there with the garden about once a week throughout the summer months and into the fall of 2007. The man who lives in the light house there would lend me buckets and let me use the water for the plants and when it got late or when he wasn’t in, the Yoga instructor, my friend Javier about a block away, would do the same. My dear friend José who lived and worked in the area surrounding the garden and worked as the bathroom attendant, would also help with lending a faucet and hose and would give the garden a once over when I couldn’t make it.

José had plenty of other duties as the keeper of a large area around the garden and light house, employed by the bi-national artistic organization, In_Site that chose the area for their biennial artistic “Intervention” and did a beautiful redesign of it in April of 2004. He lived in a small studio behind the bathroom and kept up the area made up of hundreds of plants and a large look out area that included a vista of the Ocean on both sides of the border. He embraced his work and called the area, a small portion of which included the garden that he mostly left to me, his. In February of 2008, he was forced to leave his position as the keeper of the area when it was turned over from In_Site to the Tijuana Municipality. He had no work and wasn’t sure where to turn. Out of desperation, he decided to try to cross the border and I didn’t hear anything from him until over a year later because he was detained the whole time at a US immigration detention center where there’s very little contact allowed with the outside world. I tried to find him, but was only able to find out that he was being detained somewhere near Los Angeles.

I continued to work with the garden with ocassional help from volunteers from El Grupo ecologista de Tijuana (GET) and Proyecto fronterizo de educación ambiental (PFEA), two excellent local enviros who had participated in the inception event and celbration of the garden in March and Nov. of 2007, throughout the hot summer of 2008. .

We like to choose November as the celebration month as it is the best month for planting in our region, just before the rainy season. In November of 2008, Border encuentro combined poetry with the annual binational garden planting celebration and collaboration with the event "Blooming expressions" in which several environmentalists, poets, and people from the community gathered from both sides of the border in the morning to replenish the garden with native plants. GET had found an abandoned native plant nursery in Rosarito, and Recon Nursery and Fundación esperanza, also in Rosarito, donated plants as well. We rearranged the one-meter squares and expanded the garden slightly on both sides. Members of the community from both sides of the border banned together once again and worked for hours.

Like the original planting in March of 2007, some new species and new friendships were planted and added to the ones that had survived from the first planting, in hopes they would continue to grow.

After the planting, everyone convened just west of the garden to eat and transcend barriers with our verses inside the friendship circle united through the corrugated fence.

click here for part II of "The Garden Tale"