Rock Garden

<p>One too many prison breaks landed counterfeiter Elliott Michener on a forlorn island, where the outline of one of the world’s most vibrant cities peeked tauntingly out of the fog.</p><p>He would never be able to reach The City — an impassable 1.4 miles of frigid water away. But on that 22-acre rock, Michener and a handful of other trustee prisoners of Alcatraz defied lashing winds, mist, fog and grinding deprivation to create something soothing, soul-sustaining and beautiful.</p><p>“The hillside provided a refuge from disturbances of the prison, the work a release, and it became an obsession,” Michener would write of his passion for gardening in one of the least likely environments in the West — the federal penitentiary on Alcatraz. “This is one thing I could do well.”</p><p>The “Gardens of Alcatraz” sounds like an oxymoron. But the touching, horticultural story of several generations of determined rock-dwellers has recently been unearthed — literally — from beneath 40 years of overgrown blackberries, honeysuckle and ivy.</p><p>Thanks to a $250,000 matching grant from the Save America’s Treasures Program (secured by The National Parks Conservancy in association with the Garden Conservancy), the stark remains of one of the world’s most notorious prisons are once again being softened with flowers.</p><p>A team of ever changing volunteers headed by landscape architect Carola Ashford (who works under the auspices of the Garden Conservancy), and the rock’s first full-time paid gardener, Shelagh Fritz, began by restoring the once manicured landscape along the main road winding up from the dock to the cellhouse.</p><p>“This planter box was nothing but a cigarette butt ashtray for years,” said retired parks ranger and Alcatraz historian John Martin, pointing to a planting trough atop a wall that has now been cleaned out, equipped with drip irrigation and planted with hardy geraniums. Hard mesh wire covers the soil to keep out nesting gulls have have proven to be the gardens’ biggest pest.</p><p>Now the team has moved on to “Officer’s Row.” When the old Victorians inhabited by island officers and their families were torn down in 1941, rock residents turned their foundations, set on the warmer and more protected east side of the island, into a riot of flowers scored by brick-lined paths.</p><p>For the century that the San Francisco Bay island was inhabited — first by the U.S. Army and later by the Federal Bureau of Prisons — employees and their families, as well as prisoners, fought the elements and the odds to grow everything from rose bushes to gladiolas, dahlias to fruit trees.</p><p>It was a remarkable feat considering the fact the rock named by Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala “La Isla de los Alcatraces” (Island of the Pelicans), was, by nature, just a barren chunk of sandstone pushing out of the chilly bay waters covered with nothing but white bird guano.</p><p>To grow anything, soil had to be brought over from Angel Island and every gallon of fresh water was hauled over by ferry.</p><p>“In the early photos we have of the island during the 1860s there was nothing but brick and granite and bare rock. People were obviously trying to make this place somewhat homey and what softens more than landscape?” said Martin. “In the early days people would write about how windswept and barren this was. And by the 1880s people would talk about how bucolic it was.”</p><p>The gardens are an object lesson to anyone attempting to cultivate under extreme conditions or along California’s rocky, frequently foggy coast.</p><p>When completed in 2010, visitors will be able to “fully experience the evidence that beautiful, well-tended gardens have the power to transform both a harsh environment and a hardened human spirit,” said Garden Conservancy President Antonia Adezio.</p><p>Ashford admits she had her doubts when she first applied for the job. There were few visible signs of gardens. Since the prison closed in 1963 a large cypress had overtaken much of the terraced area, crowding out and shading many of the original plantings.</p><p>But Ashford found the project tapped into her dedication to landscape preservation as well as her “strong feelings about rehabilitation and gardens having the ability to heal. The nurturing that goes into a garden is the kind of thing that brings you back into society in a way that is important.”</p><p>The project eventually will include the restoration of a rose garden and the lush but wind-whipped west side of the island, where Michener engaged in intense cultivation and maintained a greenhouse in the 1940s. It has already been a fascinating exercise in horticultural archaeology and historical research — figuring out what might have been grown in the original gardens. It’s evident that the need to boat in all island water didn’t hinder residents from growing showy but thirsty cutting flowers like dahlias, carnations and gladiolas so fashionable at the time.</p><p>Those are too impractical to reintroduce. But Ashford said some 200 other plant species managed to survive 40 years of complete neglect, including fuchsias, pelargonium, magenta and red centranthus massing out of outcroppings and walls and many bulbs, from iris and freesia to narcissus and crocosmia.</p><p>“Some things are still coming up and we’re not sure if they’re weeds or ornamentals,” said Ashford. “Maybe birds are still bringing in things. So whenever we uncover a new area, new bulbs come up all the time. We just found a yellow iris in bloom and we didn’t have a yellow iris on the island. But now it has had enough sustenance and light to show itself.”</p><p>It was Freddie Reichel, secretary to the first warden when Alcatraz became a federal prison in 1933, who amused himself by gardening and eventually convinced the warden to allow select prisoners, like Michener, to tend the grounds.</p><p>Reichel knew The Rock couldn’t sustain the type of water-intensive gardening that the military had maintained. So he contacted the California Horticultural Society and wisely sought out plants native to Mediterranean type climates similar to coastal California, that can flourish in thin, rocky soil with minimal fertilizer and water.</p><p>Among the survivors are a New Zealand Christmas tree whose red blossoms can be seen from The City, the succulent Aeonium from North Africa, Crassula from South Africa and purple Hebe from New Zealand.</p><p>“I kept a record of my failures, for I had many,” Reichel wrote. “The main thing was to assure some success by trying many things and holding on to the plants which had learned that life is worth holding on to even at its bitterest.”</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.</p>