How A Community Created A Garden From Sadness

VPM | By Ted Robbins

Published January 4, 2013 at 5:18 PM EST

Updated October 2, 2024

John Underhill waters flowers at a makeshift memorial for shooting victims outside the University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz., on Jan. 20, 2011. Many of the plants and flowers at area memorials were replanted at a community garden.

Brad Holland had big plans for the empty lot he owns in midtown Tucson, Ariz.

“This was going to be my dream house before the economy collapsed,” Holland says. “I had a big empty lot and said, ‘Wow, a lot of good can come out of this.’ ”

He and the neighborhood decided to turn it into a community garden. There are 21 plots and about 50 gardeners. They were about to till the soil for planting two years ago when a gunman opened fire in another part of town, killing six and wounding 13. Among those wounded in the January 2011 shooting was a neighbor who lived across the street from the garden, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Meg Johnson and Brad Holland were behind the effort to replant the memorials' flowers and plants. They also used the plastic sticks that hold cards in potted plants for crop labels. — Meg Johnson and Brad Holland were behind the effort to replant the memorials’ flowers and plants. They also used the plastic sticks that hold cards in potted plants for crop labels. Ted Robbins / NPR

Within days, candles, signs, pictures and flowers piled up in front of the hospital, the shooting site and her district office. Her staff knew the shrines had to come down sometime, but they couldn’t bring themselves to throw it all away. A month after the shooting, neighbors gathered at the garden to go through a moving van full of mementos.

“I was in charge of getting the volunteers in the neighborhood to go through the plant material,” says Meg Johnson, who has one of the garden plots. “So we literally took apart every bouquet and every potted plant. The bulbs were saved.”

Some teddy bears were sent to the garden by mistake; they went to a warehouse. Notes and cards attached to bouquets and pots went for archiving, too. The clear plastic sticks that hold cards in potted plants now hold crop labels. The rest was composted.

“It took us five Saturdays working three or four hours every Saturday to go through all the material that was here. It was quite a neighborhood event,” Johnson says.

The wounds from the shooting — emotional and physical — took longer to heal than the garden took to grow. When Giffords visited her home during her recovery in Houston from the gunshot wound to her head, Holland says she wanted to see the garden.

“The first lunch she had when she came back to my house, everything came out of the garden,” Holland says.

This is Tucson. Despite an occasional frost, a lot can grow in the winter. “The greens are hearty,” says Holland. “Here’s the arugula, spinach, kale. The tomato plants are all gone, but we still have tomatoes that are still ripening on the ground.”

Giffords moved back to Tucson last fall, though not back to this neighborhood. There are few indications the garden was ever part of the tragedy — just evidence of what grew from it.

Tags

NPR News NPR News

Ted Robbins

As supervising editor for Arts and Culture at NPR based at NPR West in Culver City, Ted Robbins plans coverage across NPR shows and online, focusing on TV at a time when there's never been so much content. He thinks "arts and culture" encompasses a lot of human creativity — from traditional museum offerings to popular culture, and out-of-the-way people and events.

Robbins also supervises obituaries or, as NPR prefers to call them, "appreciations," of people in the arts.

Robbins joined the Arts Desk in 2015, after a decade on air as a NPR National Desk correspondent based in Tucson, Arizona. From there, he covered the Southwest, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

Robbins reported on a range of issues, from immigration and border security to water issues and wildfires. He covered the economy in the West with an emphasis on the housing market and Las Vegas development. He reported on the January 2011 shooting in Tucson that killed six and injured many, including Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Robbins' reporting has been honored with numerous accolades, including two Emmy Awards—one for his story on sex education in schools, and another for his series on women in the workforce. He received a CINE Golden Eagle for a 1995 documentary on Mexican agriculture called "Tomatoes for the North."

In 2006, Robbins wrote an article for the Nieman Reports at Harvard about journalism and immigration. He was chosen for a 2009 French-American Foundation Fellowship focused on comparing European and U.S. immigration issues.

Raised in Los Angeles, Robbins became an avid NPR listener while spending hours driving (or stopped in traffic) on congested freeways. He is delighted to now be covering stories for his favorite news source.

Prior to coming to NPR in 2004, Robbins spent five years as a regular contributor to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, 15 years at the PBS affiliate in Tucson, and working as a field producer for CBS News. He worked for NBC affiliates in Tucson and Salt Lake City, where he also did some radio reporting and print reporting for USA Today.

Robbins earned his Bachelor of Arts in psychology and his master's degree in journalism, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He taught journalism at the University of Arizona for a decade.

See stories by Ted Robbins