Amy Biegelsen, reporting for The Atlantic Cities:
There’s a block in San Francisco that will soon be blossoming with cherries, plums and pears, but Tara Hui will not say where. That’s because she’s worried that backlash from city officials or unsympathetic citizens will halt the progress she and her fellow Guerrilla Grafters have made splicing fruit-bearing branches on to city trees.
Hui’s neighborhood is a food desert, and her grafting is both a statement and a solution. It’s horticulture as protest, and it’s a great idea, until it isn’t. San Francisco’s public works director isn’t thrilled with the idea—he’s concerned about pest outbreaks and probably (though he doesn’t say) infections from bad grafts. My concern is that the city would stop planting trees in graft-happy areas, making them tree deserts as well.