Gardens of Alcatraz a beautiful escape
Once filled with bad boys and blooms, restored beds thrive at former infamous prison
Alcatraz, the forlorn island in San Francisco Bay, is known for the hardbitten men whose names are among the legends of the Rock.
The Birdman; Machine Gun Kelly; Capone.
But on a misty October morning, I boarded an Alcatraz Ferry in search of other colourful residents of the windswept fortress. “Mrs. Langtry.” “Dorothy Perkins.” “Caroline Jane.”
As we pulled away from Pier 33, sailboats leaned with the wind, slicing the fog. Ahead, the former federal prison loomed forbidding and drab, luring visitors toward the rocks.
But then we disembarked and met Monica Beary. Sporting a head bopper with bouncing flowers, she stood ready to soften the hard edges of the sandstone citadel. Beary is a volunteer docent for the Gardens of Alcatraz, and hers is one of several tours and talks on offer. The setting — an 1850s-era military installation turned maximum-security lockup — is now a National Historic Landmark and part of the expansive Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Before we gaze upon Langtry and other such Alcatraz plants with names, Beary displays the earliest known photograph of the Rock. The 1853 image depicts a bare ocean outcrop. In the late 1800s, soil was brought in from nearby Angel Island to support cannons. Military families stationed there used the soil to plant flowers. Soon, Alcatraz began to sprout like a Chia Pet.
By the time the Federal Bureau of Prisons assumed control in 1933, much of the island was landscaped. Freddie Reichel, secretary to the warden at the time, arrived and observed, “There were flowers all over the leeward side of the island, (including) a beautiful rose garden.”
He got permission for convicts to cultivate the beds. Among those felons was prisoner No. 578AZ, Elliott Michener, who had gained trust when he turned in a set of keys he’d found. A counterfeiter, Michener’s talent with greenbacks led to a green thumb — and nine years of access to fresh air.
“He knew nothing about gardening,” Beary told visitors. “He read backs of seed packets and read books. He convinced the prison to collect grey water (bathwater) and also incinerator ash and kitchen scraps for compost. He and other prisoners built terraces from rubble rock.”
Michener’s devotion drew the respect and friendship of warden Edwin B. Swope and his wife, Edna, a sociable flower enthusiast. It also earned him a sense of normalcy. Michener became a houseboy of sorts for the Swopes and built them a greenhouse. When Michener was transferred from Alcatraz, he mourned the plants and wrote to the warden, “I believe that my best and only practical course is to get back to Alcatraz (from Leavenworth prison). At Alcatraz, I could at least grow Bell roses and delphiniums seven days a week and enjoy considerable free- dom and trust, and in general make the best of things.”
After prison, Michener rejoined his friend and fellow inmate gardener Dick Franseen in Wisconsin. Both worked in horticulture. In a 1952 letter, Michener wrote to Swope: “Dick and I are getting along well and for the first time I’m learning how much better one can do living honestly than by, say, counterfeiting! And we have a favour to ask: Will you send us a bush of our old (Gardenia) rose?”
That pale-yellow rose still blooms behind the remains of the warden’s house.
Thirteen years after Michener left Alcatraz, the prison was shuttered and the beds became overgrown.
In 2003, the Garden Conservancy, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service combined efforts to restore the gardens. More work remains, says Shelagh Fritz, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy’s project manager for Alcatraz. The restoration involved labour-intensive sleuthing to determine what remained beneath thickets of wild blackberries and other invasives. After inventorying their finds — such as the cape tulip that appeared when brambles were cleared — they used photographs to guide careful re-landscaping.
New plant varieties suited to the island’s Mediterranean climate were introduced. Fritz says that visitors, especially from the Bay Area, can glean ideas for plants that are tolerant of wind and drought. They also may spot residents that inhabit the island voluntarily, including eight types of bees, plus hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, pelicans and oystercatchers.
“The gardens were restored and planted with non-thirsty varieties,” Beary said. “There’s no rain between May and October, and it never goes below freezing.” (May is peak flower time, but blossoms begin with daffodils in March; various blooms con- tinue through September.)
Along one path, Beary pointed out the white-margined nightshade.
“It has thorned leaves, as if the plant is trying to defend itself,” she said. “It’s prickly. You have to be tough to live here.”
To foster plant survival, volunteers and staffers have developed awardwinning compost and added a gravity-fed system for rainwater.
On Alcatraz’s west side, in the inmate garden, cormorants, snowy egrets and Western gulls nest. But prisoner-planted trees — fig, apple, black walnut and New Zealand Christmas — along with globe artichokes still grow beneath a decaying gun tower.
The setting is quiet, save for the mournful bell of a buoy in the bay, and you wonder what the inmates pondered as they toiled within view of mainland freedom just over a mile away.
That western hillside, Michener wrote, “provided a refuge from the disturbances of the prison, the work a release, and it became an obsession. This one thing I would do well.”
Before prison, from a young age, Michener led a hardscrabble life of wandering. It’s as if, at Alcatraz, like the tiny airborne seeds of Jupiter’s beard valerian that land and bloom profusely — almost impossibly — from crevasses in the island’s stone, he finally established roots.