Babe's Rose by Shelly Stiles
A rose grew in our Manhattan community garden. Even in the midst of all the garden's bright abundance, the rose was special. To view it, you'd walk up the first path, past Keith's cabbages and gladioluses, past Nat's enormous tomatoes, past Judy's vines on the fence, to the center of Alison's plot.
It wasn't Alison's rosebush. It was Babe Ruth's. Or so Pete told me. I think most of Pete's stories were tall tales, but the neighborhood was fun of rumors about him that lent credence to some of the most extraordinary of them. So when he told me about the Babe Ruth rosebush, I tried to withhold judgment. After all, Babe Ruth's mother bad lived in our neighborhood back when the elevated subway still ran up Third Avenue. Maybe he was so affected by her death and a visit to the Triborough Pub that he did plant a rosebush, in memory of Mom Ruth, at the back of our garden. As Pete told the story, when our community garden was built, a rose lover moved the shrub to what would become Alison's garden plot. You couldn't argue with the facts: there it was, a beautiful rosebush, covered all summer with red blossoms. just like the Babe's favorite bourbon.
Pete saw the rose's media value when our landlord, the city, announced its intentions to sell our garden block to the highest bidder. Some powerful people just can't appreciate how important it is for city dwellers to celebrate rhythms other than rush hour subway schedules. They can't understand the significance of a Halloween pumpkin jealously guarded for months by all the gardeners, and applauded when its four kids lit it on their windowsill on Second Avenue. They deny the life brought to a shaky neighborhood by a park built by its residents without public funds: a living testimony to hope. But maybe those people could understand history, Pete thought, and the claims of Babe Ruth's mother's rosebush.
So a notice regarding the rose appeared in the window of a local deli. We mentioned it to the several politicians and reporters who came by to share our summer picnics and talk about the future of our park. And although our argument to save the garden went nowhere, word of the rosebush got around. One November day a construction crew arrived and erected a six-foot-high chain-link fence around the Babe's rose - just the rose - in the middle of Alison's 10'xl5' garden plot. Now that the world knew about the memorial, no risks could be taken.
Development in large cities may be inevitable, but it can be delayed. Alison lived with the imprisonment of the rose behind the security fence, smack in the middle of her lettucepatch, through another garden season while we fought our case with City Hall. But the end neared. Again the construction crew arrived. The rose was to be transplanted temporarily to a yard on Long Island, where the developer's mother-in-law would take good care of it while the high rise was being built. I noted as the crew moved the rosebush that its root structure was oddly small for so venerable a shrub. But Pete had mentioned something about the Babe burying a bottle of his favorite underneath the plant when it was first moved. Must have restricted root growth.
The garden was bulldozed one October. We worked hard to dig up and give away our shrubs and perennials to other community gardens in the city, or to move them to friends' homes in the country. Of course, the Babe's rose (or somebody's rose) had already been saved. But we managed to salvage something else from the wreckage, we 80 families. In 15 years, we'd turned an empty city block into a garden of green in the middle of a city hungry for soft things. And we'd become new people in the process.
Sbelly Stiles works for National Gardening's Gardening Answer Service and our radio program; 'The Gardening Journal
Copyright NGA
Reprinted with permission HouseNet, Inc.