News	Lion's Tooth by Peter Koch

Dandelion: a widely distributed weed of the daisy family. Genus Taraxacum, family Compositae. Origin late Middle English: from French dent-de-lion, translation of medieval Latin dens lionis, or “lion’s tooth,” for the jagged shape of its leaves.

As any green thumb will tell you, there are some flowers that are needy; they require complex equations of light, water and special fertilizers, and near constant attention. But then there are the more adaptable ones, like dandelions, which, no matter where you drop their seeds, will serendipitously find a patch of good soil, take firm root and flourish. If he were a plant, West Side resident Blair Woods would most certainly be the latter kind. Though he comes off as a little impulsive, and sometimes even foolhardy, rarely do his flights of fancy disappoint in the end.

Take, for instance, his month-long journalism career. Woods brought it up to me on a recent sunny afternoon, with the kind of straightforward, matter-of-fact statement that characterizes all his speech: “I had a job like that before,” he said, eyeing the voice recorder I balanced beneath my pen and pad.

It was 1989, just after Woods had graduated from University of Arkansas, Fayetteville with a degree in journalism, when he landed his first job as a rube reporter at the Northwest Arkansas Morning News in Rogers, Arkansas. “Three times in the first four weeks that I worked there,” Woods explains, “I’d come into work at the newspaper and there’d be a note at my desk saying, ‘Cover the City Council meeting,’ or ‘Cover the School Board meeting.’” Problem is, those events conflicted with Woods’ other, better-paid job as a bartender. He only called off the bartending job three times before he stopped to do the math. “I decided I couldn’t afford to do that,” he says. And so ended his short and unimpressive journo career.

From Woods’ point of view, of course, he’s the better off between the two of us. He’s contented in the path his life has taken, and it shows in his easygoing confidence. After all, he easily picked up and moved on—all the way to Buffalo, in fact—a tale whose idiosyncratic nature warrants its retelling. And here he is, seated like a king on a nylon-webbed lawn chair in the yard of his latest success, the newly opened Urban Roots Community Garden Center, with handfuls of eager gardeners swirling about him. It’s from this perch that Woods launches into his story.

“My wife and I literally moved to Buffalo on a whim,” he says. “We didn’t know anybody, we didn’t have jobs, we didn’t know anything about the area.” Having grown up in Smalltown, Pennsylvania, Woods knew he wanted to move back to the Northeast when he finished college. So he and his girlfriend (now his wife), Monique Watts, spent spring break 1990 driving around a largely uninspiring Northeast. On the way home, pointed west on I-90, Monique suggested they swing through Buffalo. “We drove in the 33 to the Scajaquada, and she saw the zoo on the right, the history museum on the right, the Albright-Knox on the left and Delaware Park. The sky was just like this,” he says, looking up, “deep blue and big, big clouds like that—just a perfect April Day.”

Buffalo had her hooks in the young couple. “Let’s move here,” Monique said, and they did.

Woods’ neat, 1890s-era house is just down the street from Urban Roots, where it’s surrounded by a rundown neighborhood that is slowly stabilizing, with no small thanks to Woods. It’s this house, in this neighborhood that turned him into an activist. He and Monique bought it in 1991, back when he says, “every house in the neighborhood was owned by an old Italian woman.”

They bought the house quickly and for simple reasons: They wanted a yard for their dogs, and this was a cheap neighborhood. “We got taken, there’s no doubt about it looking back,” Woods says, reflecting on the $50,000 they paid for the house. “But we were 26 years old and didn’t have any money.”

While Woods and Watts were busy building their dream at 362 Rhode Island, the Italian ladies died off one by one, and the neighborhood changed. Distant relatives sold off all the houses for a pittance—some going for as low as $3,000—to whoever showed interest. “I didn’t pay any attention to that,” Woods says. “And we worked on our own house, and we made it what we thought was—not to be cliché—what was an oasis in the middle of dreck.”

And it certainly is that. Once a duplex of Buffalo’s popular Industrial Vernacular style, Woods converted it to a single-family home years ago. After an estimated $100,000 in repairs and improvements over the years, the inside of the house appears as though it were torn from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. And hidden behind a nondescript gate on the side of the house is the true oasis, the backyard, surrounded by a tall wooden fence for the dogs.

About five years ago, Woods’ house was finally the what he wanted it to be and he began to look beyond his own property. What he saw dumbfounded him.

“I woke up then and said, ‘Holy shit, there used to be houses there, there and there.’ They all burned down, and I didn’t pay attention.”

During the first 10 years, he says, he and his wife just figured that it wasn’t their problem, that the city would come and fix things sooner or later. He met housing activist Harvey Garrett around the same time, and his perspective changed dramatically. “Harvey told me, ‘You’ll wait forever if you wait for the city.’ So that’s when I started. I bought a couple empty lots, planted gardens and all that stuff.”

After a long pause, Woods laughs and says, “Anything else?”

In his modest estimation, really all he’s done is plant a few gardens. In reality, though, what began as small efforts aimed at improving his and his wife’s quality of life have kick-started a subtle transformation in the neighborhood. Woods didn’t know it then, but he was sowing the seeds of community activism when he first walked into a neighbor’s yard and, without express permission, planted a garden. “I just walked into their yards and said, ‘I’m going to put a garden in here.’”

Nobody argued, but they did laugh at him.

“They said, ‘They won’t last, you know. Kids will come and destroy them.’ All the neighbors that laughed at me are now taking care of their own gardens.”

From his front porch, you can look out across the street and see three houses with brightly blossoming flowerbeds and neatly trimmed hedges. One woman has since added planters to her front porch and has hanging baskets that overflow with red flowers.

Next he purchased two vacant lots—one on Lowell and one across and down the street—and planted more gardens. Now plots of flowers and ornamental plants dominate the one lot, and a small vegetable garden squats in back. On the other lot he planted two willow trees, which have since fallen victim to the October snowstorm.

So why gardening? “The real push for gardening came after I’d seen what 16th Street had done,” Woods says. He’s referring to the beautification of nearby 16th Street in the past five years or so. The formerly hardscrabble, two-block street has experienced a rebirth at the hands of Joseph Hopkins and a growing army of other hardworking green thumbs, and now features more than a dozen gardens in the city’s annual Garden Walk. “It’s an agent of change,” he says of gardening, “and it’s cheap.”

Woods didn’t stop at gardens. Pointing to one of the nicer-looking houses in the neighborhood, which sits catercorner from his house across Lowell, Woods says, “One day, a guy came out here and literally spray-painted the whole house a hideous gray, and the owner put it on the market for $25,000.” Naturally, it wasn’t selling. So Woods took the initiative. “I called up the property owner, and told him, “I’m going to paint your house, and I’ll pay for the paint.’” Which he did. Soon there was a small line of potential buyers, and the house quickly sold for $35,000.

And now, of course, he’s sitting directly in the center of his latest gift to the community—Urban Roots Community Gardening Center. Given Woods’ style, it’s no surprise the way he leapt into this project. “I read a Buffalo News article three years ago, Garden Walk time, about 16th Street. That block completely transformed itself, largely by one bullheaded guy [Hopkins] who did the same thing I’m doing, forced himself into neighbors’ yards and said, ‘I’m planting a garden in your front yard.’”

The News did a preview of Garden Walk and interviewed one of those people who mentioned, in passing, that she and her neighbors keep each other informed of all the sales at the suburban nurseries. For Woods, that was a light-bulb moment. “It was like ‘How stupid is this?’ And I looked at it and said, ‘There are 300 people on Garden Walk. If those 300 people couldn’t support a business that’s six blocks from their house…”

He sent out an anonymous email to 50 people, and asked them to forward it to anyone they thought appropriate. The message was clear and plainspoken: “I want to open a garden center. Who wants to help me?” Offers of help came in and they started meeting sporadically in the fall of 2004. Woods chose the cooperative model in order to get the necessary money without taking out a loan. “So we got a great group of 15 or so—all of whom were varied enough in their walks of life that we had a real estate guy, a construction guy, a graphic designer, a copywriter. So we had everything but a lawyer and an accountant, really, to do everything. The group was great and we put it all together in two years of monthly meetings.”

Urban Roots opened in April with more than 150 member-owners signed up. Woods has been truly amazed by the support. “We had 100 [members] in our first month, when all we could tell people was ‘Drive by this corner store that’s selling crack and has a bunch of “hoods” out front, and this is our business.’ And people still sent us $100 checks.”

Now there are 226 members, and business is thriving. There is a constant stream of customers into the yard at 428 Rhode Island, and excited buzz pervades the place. Woods and I sit still for a minute and people-watch. A gaggle of gray-haired women talk loudly about shade requirements and height potentials of a certain plant. Another woman exclaims that, in a reversal of the old trend, she has come in from Grand Island after reading about the new garden center. Under the beating sun, another lady frets over a hanging plant because she can only find a single one. (“If I don’t’ have a pair, I’m off balance.”) And then in his final understated declaration, Woods stands up, says, “Right now this is my life, for better or worse,” and walks away to help a customer.

So, in the end, this a story about one person who cared enough to pick up a shovel and quite literally “dig in” to his neighborhood. He simply planted gardens, which were seeds of hope for him and his wife. And, like a dandelion, the seeds carried on the wind to the rest of the neighbors, where they’ve taken root, and what once was considered a weed is looking more and more like a flower with each passing day.

For more information on Urban Roots Community Garden Center, visit urbanroots.org. For more information on Woods…well, visit Urban Roots, because that’s where he’ll undoubtedly be.