Towering sunflowers brighten many of the Bradner Gardens Park plots. The city wanted to sell the park for market-rate housing, but the community protested and won.		The scarecrow marks a composting bin well hidden by last summer's corn.
Flowers mingled with vegetables in P-Patches create a cheerful effect. Bradner Gardens Park includes about 60 P-Patches, as well as specialty gardens that demonstrate ornamental plants, trees appropriate for urban spaces, and growing techniques.		The Food Bank Garden is part of the Children's Garden. Last year, local elementary and day-care kids planted, harvested and donated more than 100 pounds of produce.

I ARRIVED at Bradner Gardens Park on a Saturday morning with canvas gloves, extra energy and a good attitude - the essentials for a day-long work party.

Bradner is perched atop the I-90 tunnel on a ridge overlooking the south end of downtown Seattle and the Olympics. The city had tried to sell the splendid view site to developers for market-rate housing, but the often-ignored community, on the periphery of the Mount Baker neighborhood, surprised itself by organizing and taking on city officials. And winning.

Now the heady political triumph was history. It was time to make good on promises and transform the sleepy park and its handful of P-Patches. In fact, the community was building much more than it expected.

I was assigned P-Patch B-59, one of the brand new patches. I couldn't help thinking, wouldn't it be nice to rent a small backhoe, scrape out this dismal-looking, crusted-over dirt, and bring in some decent topsoil? I expressed this thought to Joyce Moty, P-Patch site coordinator, who was marching around in her trademark baseball cap. She was aghast. We've got rototillers, she said, building up a head of steam. "This soil has good minerals. All it needs is organic matter mixed in. One of the things we're trying to do is to teach people what makes good soil."

I stood chagrined, initiated into the mysteries of soil building in a strictly organic garden. The rest of the day I spent with a cranky rototiller, a rear-tined brute that had long ago dropped out of obedience school. It was all I could do to hold on as it raced over the ground at sprinting speeds.

Meanwhile, silhouetted against the sky, Michael Daley was adding the vanes to a restored Depression-era windmill that would pump and recirculate water from a small pond. Master gardeners were bedding shrubs at the south corner while members of Seattle Tree Stewards excavated holes for saplings. Two architecture students from the University of Washington, part of a design-build class led by Steve Badanes, were constructing plywood forms for an arched concrete bridge. Loads of compost appeared before my cranky rototiller, wheel-barrowed over by a lanky older man. There were maybe 60 volunteers digging, raking, planting. Like some 19th-century poster of a barn raising, Bradner was being assembled. The joy of working together was palpable. So this was community. Not bad.

And at the end of a shoulder-jarring day, the soil looked much improved.

Urban agriculture promotes community cohesion, and Bradner Gardens Park brings neighbors out of their homes for work parties and potlucks, and to just stroll.

That was six years ago. Today Bradner has evolved into one of Seattle's delightful neighborhood secrets, a unique collaboration of horticultural groups and neighborhood that adds up to much more than just a good place to grow mustard greens. There are a half-dozen demonstration gardens, courtesy of regional horticultural organizations who are partners at the park, including Seattle Tilth and Seattle Tree Stewards. There's a basketball court, artwork and some 60 P-Patches, a good number of them worked by gardeners of the Mien tribe from Laos. A winding ornamental border created by King County Master Gardeners has seven themed areas, including a winter garden and dry garden. "One of our goals is to make demos that could translate into the home garden," explains Cheryl Petterson, project leader.

These elements of urban agriculture radiate out from a central pavilion built by University of Washington design students, who also built steel and stone arbors that define entries to the park.

Most visitors intuit that something special has been constructed here. The abundance and diversity of plantings, the intelligence of the design, the sense of intensive individual labor combining to make something bigger than the individual parts, but still belonging to the individuals - all this as pleasingly tangible as sunshine.

"There is a fabulous vibe," says Johanna Melamed, one of Bradner's co-chairs along with Moty and Nannette Martin. "It's community created. That's what you feel. All the sweat. No one is making money. It's like the difference between a homemade and store-bought present. That's how Bradner feels."

In 1995 Bradner boasted little more than a few P-Patches, a deteriorating basketball court and some derelict portable school buildings. Word spread among neighbors that the city planned to sell the acre and a half for market-rate housing. Sell park land for housing? Meetings were held, input gathered. Design groups were organized to come up with alternatives to the city's plan.

How important was keeping and refurbishing the basketball court? What would we want in a garden?

Grants were written, partners found. Landscape architect John Barker put a plan on paper. Finally a citywide initiative was launched to prevent officials from selling off park land anywhere in the city.

In 1997 the City Council passed the "Protect Our Parks" initiative into ordinance. The daily faxing of "Bradner-Grams" and signature gathering in the rain had paid off.

"Then we said, oh my God, we have to build this park," recalls Moty.

Fertilizing and pest control are organic at Bradner Gardens Park. Results are impressive, as with these plump raspberries.

Digging, grading and piling rocks ensued in fall of 1998. Even then among the muddy half-installed underground utilities one could see a lovely bud forming. Since then the park has continued to transform, through volunteer labor, grants and donations. Most of the leadership volunteers at Bradner were women, and this seems to have helped pull off a complex project, participants say, with an emphasis on consensus, not hierarchy.

Bradner has also succeeded because many of the key people are artists - something they discovered as volunteers grew to know one another. Moty is a visual artist who had also worked for the Seattle Arts Commission. Melamed is an equity actor. Petterson is a fiber artist.

At the north end of Bradner are the small arched bridge and the windmill. They could have jumped from the pages of a storybook, and they seem to appropriately complete the park, with its mix of plant and human energies that have brought so many people together, to grow food, yes, and be inspired to have potlucks and work parties.

Community is one of those overused words, but Bradner gives it real meaning. No wonder politicians now make Bradner a regular stop, for photo opportunities, and perhaps to be reassured that there are some antidotes to the vagaries of modern life.

My role in the park has been small. I attended some early meetings, and put in my requisite annual volunteer hours as a P-Patcher. I'm grateful for the long hours others have given. I maintain my P-Patch, and stop by whenever I need a restorative hit. At harvest time I check out my tomatoes and sunflowers, wander the demonstration gardens, and admire the stonework. I thread through the warren of P-Patches. In spring they're filled with yellow and green shoots pushing up through soil. Later in summer they're full of vegetables and bright flowers, buzzing under a haze of contented insects. It's gauzily out of time, a back lot of paradise, and spending a few minutes there does wonders for the spirit.

See for yourself

An informal tour of Bradner Garden Parks will be led at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 21, as part of an Earth Day work party and celebration.

Bradner is the only place in the city where one can see multiple demonstration gardens in one easy walk. By the end of the summer the park expects to have signs for self-guided tours.

Bradner is at 29th Avenue South and South Grand Street, just off 31st Avenue South at the top of a ridge in Mount Baker, atop the I-90 tunnel. For more information, contact Joyce Moty, P-Patch site coordinator, 206-324-2597.

David Berger is a Seattle writer and artist. He can be reached at dab20@aol.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.