Flower power

You think of the Lower East Side of New York and maybe you think of salsa music erupting from the open windows of a tenement. Or drag queens in high heels parading down Avenue A in the early morning. Or hustlers and whores and eccentrics and junkies. Or police lights spinning, blue and red, outside the early morning bodega.

It's always been a walk on the wild side, even long before Lou Reed, but one of the things that we tend not to associate with the Lower East Side is gardens. Gardens? It hardly seems possible that one of the most densely populated areas in the world – home to Martin Scorcese's Gangs of New York – would end up conjuring images of grass circles, snapdragons, petunias, compost bins, vegetable patches or hydrangeas. The idea of gardeners appearing in Manhattan – in the literal shadow of one of the world's most important financial districts – seems absurd.

Yet for the last 30 years, the area known as Loisada or Alphabet City has produced an array of community gardens that have changed the landscape of what was once a stroll amongst the smackheads and syringes. Built on abandoned lots that used to brim with rubble and broken concrete, the gardens are a testament to vision, and also, of course, to greed. This is New York after all. When you transform shit into perfume, sooner or later the dollar merchants come calling.

In the early 1970s, most of New York was treated with benign neglect by politicians and businessmen alike. Firehouses were closed. Civic offices were padlocked. Ruined buildings were allowed to collapse. The neighbourhood was allowed to go to hell.

But what was forgotten – what is nearly always forgotten by those in power, then and now – was the deep and abiding human need for even the slightest touch of beauty.

The first community garden on the Lower East Side was called The Garden of Eden, planted in 1973, followed by the Liz Christy Farm and Garden on the Bowery, a street filled with drunks and junkies. Nobody thought all that much about the garden – it seemed like a few dreamers were doing what dreamers do. But the gardens took on a grass seed quality and soon they were sprouting up on abandoned wastelands all around the city, especially poorer neighbourhoods like Harlem, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.

A whole new species of environmental activist grew up – in a curious twist on the American frontier, they were taking back land that was once abandoned.

The real products of gardens are the minds behind them. Walt Whitman once wrote that he believed a blade of grass was worth more than the journey-work of stars. Certainly there was something about a garden in the vast hell-box of the city that captured the imagination of people. There was also something radical, even revolutionary about the daisies pushing up the concrete.

Today there are at least 800 community gardens in New York, and about 80 of them on the Lower East Side, maintained by volunteers. It is an experiment in human ingenuity and the power of the ordinary citizen. All People's Garden. El Jardin de Los Niños. Red Casita Garden. Even the names have a poetry to them.

But no story ever exists without a kick in the chest. Where weeds grow, watch out for the sprig of irony. The very success of the gardens is the thing that threatens them. The plots that were cast off a few years ago are now the ones coveted by developers. The Lower East Side is currently one of the more desirable places in the city. Rents have sky-rocketed. It's an age old story. Some people call it gentrification. Others call it hijacking.

Eight years ago, on 9th Street, the Holy Mary Mother of God Garden – and what a name that was! – was bulldozed for condos. Mayor Rudi Giuliani (who somehow acquired himself a saintly reputation after 9/11) was a garden-variety fascist in many respects, and he wanted to sell off the rescued lots to developers. "This is a free market economy," he said. "The era of communism is over." So he and his cronies sold the lots off. Nowadays, there's a tiny courtyard at the back of the brown brick condos, with one lonely gnarled tree – Holy Mary Mother of God, indeed.

A good few other New York gardens are under threat and it has taken volunteer groups like the Green Guerillas, Green Thumb and Better Midler's New York Restoration Project to stop the tide.

The most unusual garden I ever came across was when I was researching a novel called This Side of Brightness, much of which takes place amongst the homeless people of the subway tunnels.

Under Riverside Park and 98th Street a man named Bernard Isaacs lived in an abandoned bunker. Bernard called himself Lord of the Tunnels. He was a tough man, tall, dreadlocked, tempermental. But Bernard had a soft side too and one afternoon he showed me his "garden", a gravel-strewn patch underneath an iron grill. Bernard had planted a tree underneath a mural of Salvador Dali's 'Melting Clocks'. It was tiny and stunted … but still it was a tree all the same. He rejoiced one day when he found a single green bud on the branch.

Bernard sat there in the late afternoon night, as the Amtrak trains whizzed by. Sometimes a rat would tiptoe past, or a shout of despair would go along the tunnel. Bernard shrugged and flung a pebble at the rat to get it away from his tree. It became one of my most enduring memories of New York – Bernard, like a cast-off from a Beckett play, sitting by his underground tree, in a garden of his own making, cursing the world and its surprising moments of beauty.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy (RTÉ 1, 11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night