Recently I've come across a type of TikTok again and again.
It's people making something called seed bombs.
There are lots of recipes out there for them,
but I'm using part clay, part soil, and a pinch of seeds.
You roll them up, let them dry.
And then, you throw them,
usually at neglected patches of land,
in hopes that after it rains, your seed bombs turn into flowers.
But seed bombs like these aren't actually new.
In fact, they're part of a long history of people transforming their communities, through radical acts of gardening.
For centuries,
green spaces in cities have offered a way for people living in close quarters
to cultivate land and spend time in nature.
For New York City in the 1960s and 70s,
it was no different.
The city back then looked a lot different than it does today.
New York City had so many vacant lots.
I mean, block after block after block.
That's Karen Washington,
who's been an urban gardener and farmer in New York since the 1980s.
Abandoned buildings, burnt out buildings
tossed to the side because the city at that time was going through a huge fiscal crisis.
A sharp economic decline,
coupled with white flight when people left the city for the suburbs,
meant there was mass disinvestment.
Buildings were abandoned or left in disrepair,
especially in the city's lower income neighborhoods.
What was left was urban decay, and thousands of vacant lots.
One of the areas facing mass disinvestment in the 1960s and 70s was here,
in the Bedford-Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy, neighborhood of Brooklyn.
It's where, in the 1960s,
a resident named Hattie Carthan noticed something:
Bed Stuy didn't have enough trees.
Usually, trees dot the streets of New York City because the city has invested in planting them.
But Bed-Stuy was one of the city's most heavily redlined neighborhoods --
a racially discriminatory practice where mortgage lenders and insurance companies
denied services to people in certain neighborhoods,
which pushed Black people into specific areas.
Redlining, by its occurrence,
created the conditions for intolerable life.
Many redlined areas lack access to green space
and have far fewer trees.
It isn t just an aesthetic problem:
Research has shown trees offer improved air quality and cooler temperatures.
And it's part of the reason why, as one study showed,
temperatures in redlined areas are approximately 2.6 degrees Celsius warmer
than in non-redlined areas.
In Brooklyn, after years of neglect,
Hattie's neighborhood was losing its trees.
She wanted tree-lined blocks again,
so she set out to make it happen.
At first, raising money within the neighborhood for her efforts was a huge obstacle.
She said, "There was no money there, no inclination, and I guess everybody felt I was too old."
But at 64 years old, she was relentless.
Through her continued pressure,
she got the city to offer a tree matching program.
They'd give her six trees for every four planted.
She took the offer and as some of the only archival footage of Hattie shows --
she got right to work.
Hattie started a group called the Tree Corps,
enlisting local kids to join her.
Her helpers have grown from three kids to 30,
now fanning out into Bed-Stuy to help to bring living, growing things back to their streets.
In less than a decade,
she led grassroots efforts to plant 1,500 trees in Bed-Stuy.
Hattie did that work of cooling the city,
of mitigating some of the effects of redlining.
Hattie became known as "the tree lady of Brooklyn"
but her work transforming the community didn't end there.
In 1968, as part of a wave of redevelopment and urban renewal,
the city of New York was slated to demolish four abandoned brownstones
in Bed-Stuy, along with the nearly-century-old Magnolia grandiflora tree towering outside them.
For two years, Hattie organized against the redevelopment project
until she was able to procure historical landmark status for the tree.
In fact it's the only living thing in the city still landmarked today.
Saving the magnolia spiraled into a way to reclaim three of the brownstones too:
she convinced the city to sell them to her for $1,200.
She turned the brownstones into the Magnolia Tree Earth Center --
a space for children to get environmental education
including horticultural workshops,
and lessons on how to care for and plant street trees.
It's a place where Hattie's story continues to inspire generations of urban gardeners.
It was Hattie's grassroots movement that changed what the community looked like.
Around the same time, another New York City woman
took the idea of radical urban gardening to a new direction.
This time, it started with a seed bomb, in the Lower East Side.
At the time, it was another neighborhood struggling with abandonment and disinvestment.
And in 1973, a local named Liz Christy was hoping to change it.
At the very beginning, we were very radical.
That's Don Loggins, one of Liz's friends and fellow gardeners.
So we made these seed bombs,
would go out in the evening and toss them over the fences.
And next year it was full of flowers like a little meadow.
They had no legal access to spaces,
but made it a mission to re-green unloved parts of the city.
They started to call themselves the Green Guerillas.
Soon, the group turned their attention to one vacant lot
here on Houston Street.
She was walking by one day, this lot, and it was full of trash, three or four feet of trash.
She went back home, called a bunch of us up and said, "We have a project you might like to work on."
The group spent a year removing trash, and adding soil, fencing and plants.
To take a space that was full of garbage and trash and green it, was a radical concept back then.
What originally happened was the city came in and said,
"This is our property. You can't use it as a garden."
In response, Liz called up the press and tried to get the word out about the Green Guerillas.
And eventually, the city backed off.
In April 1974, the City Office of Housing Preservation and Development
offered them a lease for $1 a month to make it legal.
The Green Guerillas named it the "Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden.
It became the first New York City-approved community garden.
Soon, residents began planting vegetables,
hosting workshops, and sharing knowledge with other gardeners.
The community gardening movement exploded.
People all across the city started getting $1 leases
to turn abandoned lots into green spaces in their own communities.
By 1985, there were around 1,000 gardens across the city.
Puerto Rican communities were also transforming abandoned lots too,
like ones here, in the Bronx.
They built gardens, and casitas where they gathered for gardening, music, and community.
The gardens are so different.
We had people coming in from Chinatown.
We had people coming in from Tibet.
They got seeds from their family and they had plots that they were growing,
vegetables that were native to wherever they from.
But these spaces, often tucked away right off busy streets, also offer an oasis in the city,
and a place to reconnect with land.
People in marginalized communities took something that was devastating, ugly,
and turned into something that was beautiful.
Community gardens grow communities --
for the people, to be run by the people,
for the benefit of the people.
After the explosion of community gardening in New York City,
there have been continuous threats to the spaces.
In 1999, Mayor Rudy Giuliani put more than a hundred gardens up for auction
in hopes of bulldozing them and replacing them with housing.
But gardeners fought back and were able to preserve many of them.
Today we're left with over 500 community gardens across New York City,
and together they make up over 100 acres of public, open space.
Thanks to the work of pioneers like Hattie and Liz,
these gardens still provide food, community, and connection for thousands.
You've got some red okra.
Some cucumbers.
I see Hattie as a light.
Everything that I created is in the name of Hattie Carthan.
Yonette Fleming runs the Hattie Carthan Community Garden,
Hattie Carthan Herban Farm, and farmers market.
She uses the three acres of land to focus on food access,
and a place for youth to become invested in this work.
As soon as I wake up, it feels like Hattie's waiting for her work to continue
so that her work will be told as a story of women who nurture communities.
Of women who go beyond themselves
to set the template for life to happen.
Hattie and Liz both passed away in 1984 and 1985, respectively.
But their work, what started with small but radical acts,
can still be seen everywhere.
It's in the little patches of green that dot the entire city.
The trees that still stand.
The gardens that now bear their names.
And the people who continue their work.
There is that ongoing fear of erasure.
We might leave without our stories being captured and told.
But we know that just like trees,
these works are deep and are lasting.
I don't know what the city is going to look like in five years,
but I hope that there are still strong allies
and still strong radical people to be around to preserve these spaces,
which are magical.
Thanks for watching this video —
it’s the last in season two of Missing Chapter.
Through our series on hidden histories,
we want to help people understand how our past connects to our present.
In this season we produced five episodes all across the US.
It took two dozen team members
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