Community Garden on Eastside

The details are a little sketchy at the moment, but it seems a big development has taken shape on the Eastside. A vacant lot on Columbus Street near the Hanover intersection has been transformed into a small community garden. We stopped to admire it and chatted with a local who shared that the garden was open to all. There is, however, no signage and no official information for a specific point of contact in or around the garden lot.

The only other information gleaned from the colorful fellow guarding the garden, so to speak, was that the owner of the lot had agreed to let everyone use it for planting if it was kept clean and neat. With a big toothy grin he said he was trying to work a similar deal on other vacant lots on the opposite side of Hampstead Square.

The Eastside is a living, breathing community always in constant motion. Regardless of the somewhat loose organization of this little endeavor, I must say, we are glad to see it and hope the garden is successful and productive. It is certainly a lovely addition, and much better than a vacant lot unkempt and littered with trash.

In Bloom

Finally in bloom, this is a rare, white Tennessee Wisteria plant. Rather than the normal light purple flowers regularly found wild all around the South, the flower is a soft white and spectacularly fragrant. Scratch the picture to sniff (just kidding - please don't try that).

Divine Defacement

Graffiti Follow Up - In our last post, we lamented over the fact that our house got tagged. Since graffiti is a bit of a "problem" in the downtown area, we got over the feeling of being violated pretty quickly, painted over the billboard-like atrocity and now can only hope it doesn't happen again. And, so far, so good. The corner of our old Charleston single house has not been treated as a canvas for the vandal's spray can again to date.

Since we are so often exposed to the creative will and talent of our fellow city-dwellers, and with a bit of a sense of humour, we compared the random defacement of our property to a PROPER graffiti campaign, noting our appreciation for urban arts that transcend simple 'hood rivalry.

Perhaps we just identify with one graffiti style over another. Or, maybe graffiti is just cooler when it's not located on the side of ones own house! At any rate, a walk down King Street today provided another opportunity to appreciate the urban arts. We discovered a few new introspective messages left behind by the brainy bandits pushing the 1.618 graffiti campaign. For those of you unfamiliar with Charleston, King Street is an internationally known shopping district. In other words, the campaign's not-so-subtle hints against consumerism have been strategically placed.The 1.618 graffiti campaign, like all other graffiti, will eventually be cleaned up with taxpayer money. But at the very least, it is smart, modest in size and continues to beg the mysterious question, "what is 1.618?"

To learn more about the meaning of 1.618, scroll down and read our previous post. Or you can click here. Additionally, if you have any insight into the 1.618 campaign, we'd love to hear from you as we remain captivated by these marks of enlightenment showing up all over our fair city.