Los Angeles architect and artist Fritz Haeg is trying to help people garden and eat better. Along the way, he's also having great fun raising the hackles of homeowners associations.
It is possible to do good and make mischief at the same time, as Haeg's Edible Estates project is about to prove in Baltimore. Haeg is looking for a local lawn to rip up and replant with "a highly productive edible landscape" - meaning fruit, veggies and herbs.
He doesn't want just any lawn. He wants a front lawn, preferably along Main Street, U.S.A.
The house "should be on a somewhat lengthy typical residential street lined entirely with uninterrupted groomed front lawns," the project guidelines say. "[I]n some ways `conventional,' `iconic,' `American.'"
In other words, someplace where the neighbors will freak out.
"We would particularly like to do the Edible Estate prototype on a street where the interruption of the endless lawn would be dramatic and controversial," the guidelines say. "A monotonous housing development of identical homes and front lawns would be ideal!"
Creating a stir is the whole point, Haeg told me in a phone interview yesterday.
"It wouldn't be really meaningful to do these projects in places where it's already been accepted," he said. "It's meant to be a provocation on the street. ... The project is really about contrasts, showing these diverse, productive, edible gardens" against a "monoculture of lawns."
Haeg planted his first Edible Estates garden in Salina, Kan., on Independence Day 2005. Since then, he's planted in Lakewood, Calif., Maplewood, N.J., and London. He's also put out a book, Edible Estates, with this subversive subtitle: "Attack on the Front Lawn."
Next up: Austin and Baltimore.
Haeg is coming to Charm City at the invitation of the Contemporary Museum, which has commissioned a garden as part of a larger exhibit that will "break down the barriers between art and life," said Irene Hofmann, executive director of the museum. Baltimoreans who'd like to volunteer their lawns should send images of their houses and streets to info@edibleestates.org. There is no firm deadline to apply, but Hofmann said Haeg is coming to town in a few weeks to tour sites and make his pick.
Warning to my Southwest Baltimore neighbors: I'm thinking about offering up my own lawn. The way the newspaper industry is going, I'll need to live off the land.
The computers didn't work on purpose
