Ravenna

The Secret Garden
(submitted by a Ravenna P-Patch community gardener)

Tucked into a pedestrian street right-of-way, behind a row of plum trees, lies a little jewel, Ravenna's secret garden. In the late 1970s the site was an overgrown hillside with only a trampled path. The Seattle Engineering Department planned to build a stairway on the steepest part of the site and accepted the challenge of including a P-Patch on the flatter part. A beautifully designed, fully landscaped garden with space for eleven gardening households opened in 1981. The gardeners quickly outgrew their plots and adopted the hillside, naturalizing it with daffodils and tulips.

Ten peaceful years of tomatoes later, an access roadway for a adjacent development threatened to pave over the P-Patch, but the whole neighborhood galvanized behind the tomatoes, and the gardeners. Today tomatoes, not asphalt, grace the secret garden.