Gloria Ward wanders around her colorful garden in Treme. Moving carefully between sections of different plants, some medicinal, some food, she fusses with fences knocked over by the strong winds of the past week and points out which plants need watering.
“ I haven't been out here in a week because I'm just tired of all of it,” she said. “They have just killed my spirit. 78-years-old, and I gotta fight over a garden.”
Miss Gloria’s Garden is a community garden on Dumaine Street that offers a wide range of classes for New Orleans youth, from gardening and cooking to music and meditation. It is also a space that is open for artists in the neighborhood to use, and houses a nonprofit, Developing Young Entrepreneurs, which uses the arts to provide guidance and create potential job opportunities.
In early January, Ward received a 30-day-notice from property management company HRI Properties to vacate the garden. It said Ward failed to provide tax returns for her business, and her lease would not be renewed.
In response, nearly 1,400 people have signed a petition to save Miss Gloria’s Garden.
”(The garden) gives me a lot of clarity and peace,” said Tamarie T., a local funk musician. “And I know that if it does that for me, I know it does that for a lot of artists. Because I bring people over here and they be like, man, this is healing.”
The garden is located on the Bell Artspace Campus — a collection of low-income housing for artists. Artspace and HRI Properties did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Most of HRI’s letter focused on a shipping container, which the company said Ward is not allowed to have on the property. Ward said she uses the container to lock up her tools after they had been stolen several times.
“ Having tools exposed is also dangerous. It presents an entirely different kind of risk on your site,” said Devin Wright, research and policy manager at Sprout, an organization that provides social and technical support to small-scale farmers.
“So the best thing to do is to have stable and secure and safe housing for those tools on your site. It prevents theft, but it also prevents injury for folks who might be wandering through that site,” she said.
Wright said she has seen these kinds of tensions between urban farmers and property owners across the city.
“ This has happened with a number of other kinds of social good organizations or social good landlords in town,” she said. “ They have this pretty romanticized idea of what these projects look like, and they wanna be part of all the rosy parts of it, but don't have any kind of grounding in the realities of what that looks like.”
She added that purchasing land doesn’t solve all the problems urban farmers face, but it “really does help.”
Ward said HRI has since told her she could stay, but she might move the garden anyway to avoid additional problems in the future. Ward has already moved her garden several times before ending up in its current location on Dumaine Street.
“ I don't wanna beautify their property anymore,” she said. “So if I could, I'd love to find a place, get some money together and move. And let them just have their property, because they're not doing anything with any of this.”
Ward said she’s received a few offers to buy properties in other neighborhoods, such as the Lower 9th Ward. But Zohar Israel, a longtime neighborhood resident and the second chief of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang, doesn’t want the garden to move. He said the garden functions as a much-needed food source and performance space.
“ She's been offered other places to set up the garden, but we want to keep her here,” he said. “We had other people that live in the complex that enjoy the garden the same way I do, so the main thing is just for us to try to keep her here.”
