There’s a small wooden sign poking up from the back of an empty lot on Pope Street, about dead center between Hancock Avenue and Reese Street. An arrow points down to a “path to the garden.” The two-foot-wide walkway descends to the left and doubles back into a ravine once filled with kudzu; before that, a creek, called “the branch” by neighborhood residents, flowed before it was piped and filled over with topsoil.

Now, thanks to the sweat of headstrong volunteers, it’s a beautiful, cascading produce garden with terracing rock knee walls and polygonal beds that are filled and filling with vegetables. It’s an overgrown ditch transformed into one of the most beautiful places in the city.

Less than a year ago, Karen Witten stared down the ravine, brimming with kudzu up to her head, and saw its potential. After hauling off over 5000 pounds of vines, Witten, a retired doctor who has taught and practiced medicine on three continents, planted the garden with the help of her husband Wray and an array of volunteers including children, the homeless, students, long-time residents and members of Hill First Baptist Church. The team used only their hands and basic tools in clearing, sowing and tending the garden, leading one volunteer to name the ravine “the handmade garden.”

Although many people in the neighborhood played large roles in the garden’s growth, Witten is clearly the determined, driving force behind its continued success.

Having moved from Colorado to Athens after retiring, Witten familiarized herself with her new neighborhood by fanning out from her Hill Street home on daily walks. Eventually, she took it upon herself to clean up an empty lot on Hancock Avenue across from the 13 Roses tattoo shop. As she dug into the “depth of trash,” locals stopped to talk and shared memories of 60 to 70 years of neighborhood history. Witten was cleaning out the foundation of the Calloway Building, they said, a two-story building that had housed black-owned cafés on its ground floor and apartments up top. According to Hill First Baptist deacons, some of the best hamburgers in town were cooked on the grills at Zed’s and Hardeman’s cafés.

As trash disappeared, neighbors said the cleaned-up lot looked like a garden, so Witten planted a small plot in the old foundation. When the lot’s owners decided to build on the site, she thought the wide ravine that spread out from behind the Hancock Avenue homes would be a great place for a new garden.

Witten and husband Wray started clearing trash and pulling vines from the empty lot between Hill First Baptist and a green, stick-framed rental on Pope Street in December 2008, and although they were still unsure of the ravine’s potential as a garden, their efforts attracted the church’s attention. The deacons and attendees were pleased with their work; anything that makes the neighborhood look better makes the church look better, they said.

A 60-year-old homeless man named Tommy Lewis Chester soon joined the Wittens’ efforts, showing the couple how to pull out kudzu roots. Chester, who remembers swimming in the branch as a boy, thought the job would move quickly if they burned the vines or cleared the land with a bulldozer. In the end, though, he went along with the Wittens’ elbow-grease style.

“I don’t think we really appreciated what we were tackling, and it turned out to be a massive undertaking, but it was fun,” Witten says. “We just kept working down the side of the ravine and finally got to the bottom, and started clearing the bottom… that’s when we decided we’d talk to the church about maybe planting some things as well as clearing the kudzu, and they were very receptive to the idea.”

After the vines were pulled up and hauled off—about five months of work—the Wittens shaped up a terrace of beds and an irrigation system using methods they’d picked up while living among mountain farmers in Ethiopia. All the rocks used in the terrace were dug up from the ravine, a process that also unearthed rusted, dirt-caked metallic treasures that neighborhood kids display on a wooden bench “museum.”

With most of her years spent in Colorado and Ethiopia—two dry climates—Witten was unfamiliar with how to plant in Georgia’s ecological zone. Luckily, the locals were full of advice: Chester told Witten what types of plants grow best in Athens and introduced her to the wild onions that grow around the neighborhood; calls were made to the cooperative extension agent; and Chris Todd, a retired child development professor who met Witten while working on the Obama campaign, donated time, seeds and rain barrels to the project. Without access to faucets, rain barrels are the only way to collect water for a garden that’s only watered by hand, so Witten asked the church if they could capture the rain flowing from the church’s gutters. Again, they agreed.

The Reese and Hancock neighborhood has been in transition for a number of years, and Hill First Baptist, a historically African-American church built in 1893, is trying to stay viable as the community changes demographically. They see the garden, and the relationships grown from it, as a way to stay vital in the neighborhood. The new people moving in are “still our neighbors,” says Ed Thomas, a chair trustee at the church. “Our doors are open, but the students aren’t coming in.”

The 150-member congregation—whose average age is “50-ish,” according to Deacon James Alford—has been very supportive of the garden. Thomas and Alford say the garden has been good for race relations and has brought the community together, and that Witten, who is white, has been a “solidifying agent” for the diversifying community. By reaching out and partnering with projects like the garden, Thomas and Alford hope their church can reemerge as a headquarters for the new community.

Over the spring and summer of 2009, the garden produced a bounty of collards, okra and peppers that Witten, Chester and Todd delivered to homes in the area. Chester and Todd weeded and harvested the garden over the summer while Witten was in Africa. They’ve planted fall crops of lettuce, cabbages and squash, and they’ve worked up new beds for any green thumbs who want to join in the fun. Everything seems to be in place for the project to become the “garden for the neighborhood” that Witten envisions.

Witten says there haven’t been too many obstacles other than “just getting to know nature, getting to know Georgia.” But there is a vagrancy problem in the area, and Witten continues to clean up trash and beer cans from the garden. The church and the community deal with these issues, as well: in a stark reminder of the neighborhood’s transitional state, Chester, a major contributor to the garden, was arrested recently behind an abandoned house and charged with public indecency and sodomy.

Witten says we must remember that the homeless conduct their lives without the privacy of walls. The community knows Chester’s good nature, she says.

Chester, speaking from the county jail, says he’s proud of what the garden has become and looks forward to getting back to work when released. Deacon Alford says he has little sympathy for Chester, but adds that he doesn't have a problem with Chester’s continued work in the garden. Alford says Chester’s involvement is very positive and a good example.

“The garden is the best thing for him,” Alford says.

Todd is amazed at how welcomed she has felt in the neighborhood, although she lives nowhere near the garden. The intertwining of economically and demographically diverse elements of the community is one the garden’s greatest successes, she says: “How often do you have college professors and homeless people working together equally?”

Andre Gallant