Volume 143, Issue #5
'PLANT LADY' TELLS ALL
Edible red and yellow flowers float atop a sea of mixed greens in a bowl sitting on a table at the front of the classroom. To most, it’s a salad. To part-time environmental horticulture instructor Pam Peirce, it’s the culmination of her life’s knowledge. Today she will inform the students in her Vegetables and Herbs class about the salad’s weeds, lettuces and flowers, and teach them how to grow and prepare their own. “To make a salad, you need four people,” she says. “A spendthrift for the oil, a miser for the vinegar, a judge for the salt — and a madman to do the tossing.” There’s laughter as she exits the room to wash her hands. Upon returning, she carries the salad around the classroom for everyone to see. It looks as beautiful as it does delicious. She cautiously adds oil, vinegar and salt, then tosses vigorously. Greens escape from the bowl and land on the table. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says to the soiled leaves before discarding them. “Don’t worry,” student Stephanie Baker says, “you’re a madwoman.” Laughter permeates the classroom again as Peirce finishes tossing. “All right, we have forks, cups and napkins,” Peirce says. “If you want to come up and have some salad, please do that.” All fifteen chairs skid across the linoleum. After doling out portions into paper cups for everyone, Peirce tastes her own creation. The verdict: “A little too much salt, I think,” she says. “I didn’t have the right judge on hand. Yes, too much salt. Sorry.” She’s the only one who thinks the salad is less than perfect, but no one is about to argue with an expert. A GARDENING SAGE Peirce literally wrote the book on gardening in the Bay Area. Actually, she wrote two. Her first, “Golden Gate Gardening,” is a 400-page textbook that she uses to teach the Vegetables and Herbs class, and her second is “Wildly Successful Plants: Northern California.” Between these, she wrote two national gardening books and parts of many others. The dedication in “Golden Gate Gardening” reads, “For my parents, Sheldon James Peirce and Lynton Wicks Peirce, who taught me to think, to garden and to dream big dreams.” Her mother, Lynton, was a city girl. “She was a very unassuming gardener, but she was a gardener,” Peirce says. “She never talked about gardening or read gardening books. She just did it. She planted something that would bloom every month of the year and my father planted food crops that fed us.” Her father, Sheldon, who recently turned 100, grew up on an 80-acre subsistence farm in Indiana. His mother pushed him hard in school so he wouldn’t have to raise his kids on a farm like she did. “I got a whole list of stuff his family ate and it ended with, ‘…And even the young raspberry leaves,’” Peirce says. Sheldon earned a master’s degree in physics, nearly obtaining a doctorate before the Great Depression forced him to become a meteorologist with the government. Despite his mother’s wish, Sheldon never completely cut his farming roots. He encouraged his daughter’s love for plants, teaching her names in both Latin and English when she was young. Following her interests, Peirce majored in botany at Butler University, a small liberal arts college in her hometown of Indianapolis. After earning a B.A., she attended graduate school at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. As a teaching assistant there, she found the university valued research more than teaching, which conflicted with her teaching aspirations. “I thought I could do a better job of helping people understand the plant world than the approach they were taking,” she says. “People need to see plants. They need to see them and they need to understand them. It’s as if you taught the form of a sonnet but not what it was saying.” After graduate school, Peirce came to San Francisco in 1967. “I decided to get into horticulture, to write and teach and go wherever that led me,” she says. She first wrote about horticulture in gardening columns for neighborhood newspapers. It didn’t pay, but it gave her a start. Today, Peirce is the weekly Q&A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Home & Garden section. She receives about 20 e-mails a week, which is more than she can answer with her busy schedule. Her Jan. 20 column was about an edible weed called wild onion. “I got e-mails from people saying, ‘Oh my God, it’s a weed!’” she says. “Well, I told them it was a weed. But I’ve always said, ‘If you can’t beat it: Eat it.’” Peirce co-founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in 1983. The organization worked with community gardens, trained at-risk youth in horticulture and gave jobs to at-risk adults. Peirce left SLUG's board of directors in 1999. Five years later, SLUG was mired in scandal after it paid its workers thousands of taxpayer dollars to campaign for Gavin Newsom's mayoral run and then pressured them to vote for him. “It was a very painful experience to have that happen to an organization that you founded,” Peirce says. “It was all over the newspapers. I used to feel very good about it because provided information and good jobs for people.” AN INFLUENTIAL INSTRUCTOR Peirce began her teaching career at the old San Francisco Ecology Center in North Beach. She designed the first class she taught, a 5-week vegetable gardening course. She first came to City College as a student in 1980, enrolling in two semesters of plant identification courses to learn California plants. When Mike Smith, a former instructor, asked if anyone would like to grow vegetables in the greenhouse, Peirce took the job. “I sat there with Mike and then department head Gene Duncan and did what I call ‘talking resume,’” she says. “It’s when you see someone who might have a job for you and you talk your resume instead of sending it in.” The conversation was fruitful. Duncan hired her as a part-time instructor, a position she’s held ever since, and Mike Smith, an editor at Ortho Books at the time, hired her to find photogenic gardens in the Bay Area. “What I really wanted to do was write, but Mike hired me as a photo scout, so I came to writing by photography,” she says. She would eventually write three books for Ortho Books and become photo editor and a photographer. Apart from writing and teaching, Peirce would like to do radio or sound essays but has not had the opportunity yet. “I think I could do that, but when you get older, you know you’re going to make your mark doing what you’re already doing,” she says. “You could do something else, but you’re too busy doing what you’re already doing.” As an instructor at City College, Peirce has left a mark on her students and coworkers, like instructor Malcom Hillan, who has worked in the Environmental Horticulture department with Peirce for 16 years. “Pam is a goddess and we’re very fortunate to have her at City College,” he says. “She’s very conscientious about the way she approaches her classes, has a very strong command of what she teaches and has a strong scientific base. There’s a lot of myth and rumor in gardening, and Pam does a good job of setting that aside and relying on solid, scientifically-based information.” One of her former students, Dolores Gamez, is now one of 11 gardeners at the San Francisco Botanical Gardens Arboretum. When she enrolled in Peirce’s Vegetables and Herbs class in 1992, she had recently immigrated from Spain and did not vision having a career in gardening. “I didn’t think she would influence me that much, but she did,” Gamez says. “She became a mentor and a friend.” Peirce helped Gamez with her English and even offered to pay her rent when she fell on hard times, actions that led Gamez to invite Peirce to stay with her family in Spain for two weeks. “She pretty much became family at that point,” Gamez says. “She met my parents and they thanked her because she was there for me during my hard times here. All along she was helping me transfer to State, with English and my other courses. I know I’m not the only one she helps. Every semester when she sees a new student immigrant who might need help, she’s there.” e-mail:adixon@theguardsman.com BATTLECRY FOR A GENERATION INVADES SAN FRANCISCO
Thousands of evangelic teens flocked to the city on March 9-10 to worship, praise and rock out. They came from the north, south and east to engulf San Francisco in evangelical praise and protest against destructive pop-culture in an annual event called “BattleCry for a Generation.”
The event brought 20,000 Christian teenagers from California, Nevada, Texas and other Western states to join hand-in-hand as “culture warriors.”
The high-adrenaline Jesus-fest integrates Grammy-nominated Christian rock bands like P.O.D. with reflective Bible study and zealous sermons. The interactive concoction held at AT&T Park — with a pre-show pep-rally at City Hall — was met with applause by its guests and jeers by its picketing protesters. “In our generation, there are young men and women who fail to fully grasp their gifts, and that’s why there are so many who fall daily,” said Nick, a high school student from South Lake Tahoe. “But at the same time there are young men and women who are grasping it, and events like this are assisting in that to bring up our generation.” After bopping, singing, head-banging and moshing to invigorating rock tunes for two-and-a-half hours, the teens evacuated the stadium for a dinner break. Standing firmly near of the exit doors were a handful of adult demonstrators presenting signs that read “BattleCry leads to Hell.” “They’re false Christians,” said Darwin Fish, a demonstrator and leading member of A True Church, a group that rails against what its Web site calls “false teachers.” “They’re hypocrites because they claim to follow the Bible, but they do things that are contrary to the Bible. It’s all about money, not about God and his word.” Heated debates about Bible verses between the demonstrators and parent chaperones were a mere lull beneath shrieks of “Jesus loves you!” and “J.C.! J.C.!” chants from the pumped-up, hyperactive youth. “The Bible teaches many hard-core things that people do not want to believe,” Fish said. “They want to believe in the love of God, but not the hate of God. God hates people too.” During the “Reverse Rebellion Rally,” held on the steps of City Hall, graphic signs bearing the BattleCry logo and bold red letters proclaiming “I have a voice” met severe opposition from several activist groups. The radical organization The World Can’t Wait met a group of several hundred teenagers, parents, and youth pastors as rivals and waved their handmade signs in defiance.
Ben, a San Francisco local who wouldn’t give his last name, circled the crowd with his bicycle and voiced his individual opinion. “These people are an American-born Taliban. They are a group advocating a theocracy who want to impose their personal religion on everyone else in this society. “They’re anti-gay, anti-abortion and saying terrible things about the people who live here. That’s not Christian behavior,” Ben said. The two-day extravaganza is the brainchild of Teen Mania, a youth organization founded in 1986 by Ron Luce, a well-known televangelist with a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Luce explained the rationale behind Teen Mania in an interview on Fox’s popular opinion show “The O’Reilly Factor.” “There’s young people all over America (who) are realizing they’re caught in the middle of this cultural war,” Luce said. “They’ve got violence shoved down their throat, sexual images, point and click pornography … and they’re saying, ‘You know what? We believe in Jesus Christ and want to take a stand. We don’t want the makers of media to make us.’” Teen Mania will host two more BattleCry stadium events this year — Detroit in April and Baltimore in May — and regional rallies in 20 cities across the country. “This is about taking hold of what God has given us with tenacity and passion beyond measure,” said Nick, a high school student. “That is what we are fully and full-heartedly called to do.” e-mail:bmarsh@theguardsman.com |
Teens lift their hands in praise while listening to Christian rcock bands.