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Jan 5, 2018 · In 2003, the Garden Conservancy and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy formed a partnership with the National Park Service to restore and maintain key gardens on Alcatraz. Through the Alcatraz Historic Gardens Project, the partner organizations preserve, rebuild, and maintain the gardens created by those who lived on the island during ...
Dec 22, 2020 · All the soil and plants you'll find on Alcatraz today were brought to the island by people. Today, the restored historic gardens are lovingly maintained by a team of volunteer gardeners in partnership with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
Mar 26, 2024 · Sol Mercado began gardening in earnest in 2017, at the tail end of her 16-year sentence at Central California Women’s Facility. One day, she noticed that something was being built in the prison ...
- Culture Reporter
- Overview
- An infamous island
- Historic roots
- A break from prison
- Grounds for a revolution
Here’s how a desolate rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay became a tourist hotspot—and horticultural haven.
On a gigantic rock in the San Francisco Bay, purple dahlias sway in full bloom against a sapphire sky. Their presence is a paradox: What, exactly, are they doing on Alcatraz?
Apart from a few scattered grasses, there’s no vegetation native to this island. “The Rock” is exactly that—an imposing, inhospitable bluff of exposed sandstone a mile and a half from San Francisco’s shore. Sunny days are glorious, but the elements here are fickle and unforgiving: Winds whip at astonishing speeds, and fog often envelops the island so completely that it vanishes from view.
Its isolation is infamous. Home to one of the world’s most notorious penitentiaries, it’s known as a place where life was punished, not propagated. And yet, for nearly 150 years, roses have bloomed and ivy has spread across the site’s 22 acres.
Alcatraz has a long, complex history: A bare rock became a military bastion, a notorious prison, an abandoned oddity, and a site of groundbreaking protest. Even once it came under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service in 1972, the Rock’s future wasn’t set in stone.
When it opened for visitors in 1973, the response was overwhelming; it became the most popular tourist attraction in the Bay Area by a long shot, with 50,000 visitors in the first year alone. Today, nearly 1.4 million people a year board a ferry at San Francisco’s Pier 33, cross the Bay, and step off onto the island’s sole dock—in the same spot since the mid-1800s—to explore.
Alcatraz Island, situated in the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
(Related: These old prisons are open to visitors.)
The cell house is undoubtedly the main draw. This is the place to see where Al Capone and Robert “Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud were held, where escape attempts were devised and executed—the stuff of lore and continued speculation. But even the Rock is not remote enough to elude a global pandemic. While the island itself is currently open, the indoor cell house is not. A new self-guided audio tour, however, offers a chance to wander the grounds surrounding the concrete structures, and experience an Alcatraz full of color and fragrance.
Many of the geraniums, cordylines, and aeoniums that line the paved pathway from the dock were originally planted by military families a century ago or more. There are dahlias and poppies, sweet peas and nasturtiums. As a buoy bell clangs in the near distance, visitors are free to wander around at their own pace (masked and socially distanced, of course).
Before the gardens, there were birds. Like all land, the island—an untamed place where seabirds went to nest—was considered sacred by the region’s Ramaytush Ohlone tribe. But when Spanish colonizers arrived in the late 1700s, the local Native American population that wasn’t assimilated was largely wiped out from disease and exploitation, and little knowledge remains of their exact relationship to the uninhabited outcrop.
After San Francisco emerged as a gold rush boomtown in the mid-1800s, the U.S. government began work on an island fortress to protect the nearly $2 billion in gold flowing freely through the Bay Area (modern equivalent: roughly $62 billion). In 1859, the first soldiers arrived to man the cannons, bringing their families with them to live in the newly erected brick buildings. As the infrastructure expanded, women began to transform the barren landscape on a more intimate scale.
“Almost as soon as people got out there … they put their hand to softening [the landscape],” says Martini. “It was a very human thing to do, trying to make [it] habitable.”
One of the first references to Alcatraz’s gardens came from an 1867 letter by the wife of a U.S. Army lieutenant stationed on the island. “Everything grew luxuriantly, although it was so cold all the month of August that people wore furs,” she wrote. “Outside in the garden the fuchsias climbed over the top of a high fence. The scarlet geraniums almost as tall as one’s head were loaded with blossoms. The pinks were the finest I had ever seen.”
Alcatraz was doing double duty as a minimum-security military prison. When the island’s brick buildings were deemed obsolete, incarcerated men were the ones who took on the labor of destroying and rebuilding. They chipped away at the sandstone, permanently shaping the terrain that held them captive. Soon, their labor included landscaping.
(Related: Why do zen gardens relieve stress?)
“The military was being pressured by San Francisco to ‘beautify’ the island, so residents could look out and see something green,” says Fritz. In 1924, a massive donation of hundreds of pounds of seeds from the California Spring Blossom and Wild Flower Association brought even more color to the terrain with nasturtiums, poppies, and other blooms. “The [south] side that faced the city was just rocky cliffs at the time. They planted Persian carpet flowers to beautify and stabilize the slopes, and that’s also when the larger cypress and eucalyptus trees came in,” Fritz says.
These images of Alcatraz Gardens, made in the 1950s, show the gardens as they were during the height of the prison’s notoriety. Though some incarcerated men were able to work in the gardens, others only passed by on the way to get their work orders, and others didn’t recall gardens at all.
Photographs courtesy Golden Gate National Recreation Area Joseph H. Simpson Collection, c. 1950s
For many incarcerated men, the opportunity to garden offered satisfaction both personal—given the restorative benefits of this tactile, open-air task—and professional. “The military prison actually had a vocational training program for gardening, so [incarcerated men] could learn a trade,” Fritz says. This is one of the earliest examples of horticultural therapy for incarcerated people, a practice that has gained momentum as a means to reduce recidivism, and is currently implemented in programs from California’s San Quentin to New York’s Rikers Island.
Dr. LaNada War Jack of the Shoshone Bannock tribes has long been familiar with Alcatraz. Her great-grandfather, Tahmonmah (War Jack), was captured by U.S. cavalry and nearly imprisoned on the island for attempting to return families to their homelands during the Bannock War of 1878. Alcatraz has housed imprisoned Native Americans multiple times throughout its history.
(Related: Why do people visit these “dark tourism” sites?)
War Jack herself moved from Idaho to California in 1967 “on government relocation,” she says, affected by assimilationist policies intended “to take away our religion, our ceremonies, our language, our identity.”
The first Native student enrolled at University of California Berkeley, War Jack became one of the student leaders of the 1969 “Indians of All Tribes” occupation of Alcatraz against government-sanctioned genocide and broken treaties. Resources on the abandoned island were scarce. The hundred-some protesters who ebbed and flowed over the subsequent 19 months received food and supplies via “people from the mainland,” she says.
From December 1969 to June 1971, Native activists occupied Alcatraz Island based on their interpretation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which they believed granted them the right to reclaim any land originally theirs sold to and subsequently abandoned by the U.S. government. Although intending to use the island as a Native school, cultural center, and museum, the protestors eventually lost momentum and were removed by federal marshals after nearly 19 months.
Photograph by Bettmann Archive, Getty Images (Left) and Photograph by Ralph Crane, the LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images (Right)
Plants of Alcatraz Historic Gardens. Alcatraz gardeners needed tough plants that could survive with little water or care. The first ornamental plants that arrived to Alcatraz in the mid 1860s were typically favorite garden plants brought by soldier's families that called Alcatraz home.
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Dick talked about the herculean effort to clear decades of weeds and overgrowth and the excitement of rediscovering paths, retaining walls, and a surprising array of garden plants that survived amid the ruins. “Bulbs were a favorite garden plant of the island’s residents,” Alcatraz’s director of gardens Shelagh Fritz wrote recently in ...
Sep 1, 2022 · San Francisco. Garden Visit: The Gardens of Alcatraz. Kier Holmes September 1, 2022. Alcatraz Island is famous for being a long-ago maximum security prison where Al Capone did time and three infamous prisoners escaped. But that is really only part of the story.
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