Blue Lupine
This warm sunny morning, only one week away from the beginning of spring, I took a walk from my house to meet up with my neighbor Steven, who wanted to show me the colorful flowers blooming in his freeway garden. For years now he has been planting a variety of native flowers, such as orange California poppies and blue lupines, inside the fence of the Santa Monica freeway next to his house. In 2003 our local journalist Martha Groves saw him engaged in this labor of love and wrote an article about him for the Los Angeles Times: Splendor blooms on the inhospitable ground next to Santa Monica Freeway.
10 Fwy-Bottlebrush
More often than not in our neighborhood the embankment along the 10 Fwy is littered with beer bottles thrown over the fence or illegally dumped bulky items. Several times during the past few years the dedicated volunteers of the Reynier Village and Helms Neighborhood Associations have organized community clean-ups of this fenced area that is maintained by Caltrans. Click here to read a post on this blog.
Morning Glory
Steven says: “I hope people realize that, like the L.A. River before it was rediscovered, the freeway borders can be much more than an unused byproduct of a transportation system. It’s valuable land that most people ignore.”
Take a walk along Regent Street between Cattaraugus and National, bring the kids for a botany lesson, enjoy the super bloom of our Southern California spring after the heavy rains.
Text and photos by Elisa Leonelli
Freeway Garden-Lavatera bicolor