The parkway garden sits on a commercial stretch of Glendale’s Brand Boulevard. It’s a modest patch of native plants, hardly visible from the road.

But this baby plot is the pride and joy of the tight-knit group of green thumbers who tend to it. They gather there every last Sunday of the month for Club Gay Gardens, a garden club catering to queer Angelenos, to maintain the parkway strip, learn about native gardening and connect with other plant lovers.

At Club Gay Gardens’ September gathering, attendees ranged in age and botanical savvy, with some boasting degrees in horticulture and others just happy to lend a hand. After a brief round of introductions — pronouns optional, astrological signs mandatory — they were broken into groups of seed-sorters, pavers, planters and detailers (a euphemism for trash crew).

Club regular Juno Stilley sat inside with the seed-sorters, grinding white sage between her fingers. Stilley, who grew up in L.A., attended her first club meeting in 2023 and since then has established her own landscape design and maintenance business, Juno Garden.

Before Club Gay Gardens, Stilley said her landscaping operation was just “a little seed,” but attending club meetups equipped her with the educational resources and sheer confidence to turn it into a full-time gig.

Juno Stilley reaches for a dried bundle of stems while sorting seeds.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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Stilley can identify most plant species in the parkway garden at a glance, but she still comes every week that she can, excited to glean fresh wisdom.

“I always learn something when I’m here,” Stilley said, “because there’s so many people who come with different sorts of plant knowledge, and there’s infinite different things about plants and ecology.”

When it comes to plant expertise, Club Gay Gardens co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe is among the stiffest competition, though she’s far too humble to say so herself.

The 27-year-old urban ecologist and biodiversity educator, originally from New Jersey, has spent the last five years working in composting and native gardening. She’s also a skilled community organizer and often cited as the glue that holds Club Gay Gardens together.

“We’re really trying to find ways to help people reimagine their connection to space, too,” Club Gay Gardens co-founder Maggie Smart-McCabe said. “When you’re walking down a street, you should feel at home there.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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In 2022, Smart-McCabe met her match in Linnea Torres, a 29-year-old graphic designer for Junior High, the mixed-use arts and event space near the parkway garden. The club co-founders connected on Instagram after Torres posted some photos of the garden — at that time, they were the only person taking care of it — and planned to meet up a few weeks later.

“Basically, it was a blind date between the two of us,” Smart-McCabe said. Luckily, the pair gelled easily, but they also realized that maintaining the native garden would be too tall an order for them alone.

“We were like, ‘Let’s try and just call out and see if we can get some volunteers to show up,’” Smart-McCabe said. “And people showed up.”

For months, it was just prep work: sheet mulching, teaching and more sheet mulching. The soil was so compacted that each time they dug a planting hole, it took an hour to drain. By the following spring, the first wildflowers had sprung up, and the native plants were digging deep root systems.

Progress has come in waves, with hot L.A. summers turning the plants “crispy,” Torres said, and passersby always leaving behind strange litter. Recently, they found an Abraham Lincoln magnet in the brush.

“People are gonna stomp on your plants,” Smart-McCabe said. “It’s pretty brutal, like, the parkway strip is a pretty hostile environment.”

But as the garden has grown, its eldest and most mature plants have started shielding its youngest, and walkers have been more careful about where they step. When patches do sustain damage, the gardeners are persistent in nursing them back to health.

“Every seed needs certain conditions to thrive, and I think so do people,” said Nina Raj of the Altadena Seed Library. “Especially for queer folks, I think that’s a potent metaphor.”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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That persistence feels like a queer instinct to Nina Raj, founder of the Altadena Seed Library. The community-run initiative provides free seeds to L.A. residents through a network of exchange boxes throughout the area, one of which is at Junior High.

“There’s something really potent about queer people rooting for the underdog,” Raj said. “And so something like a little parkway garden that takes a lot of extra care is really sweet, because you’re kind of rooting for it to thrive despite all the odds.”

Smart-McCabe agreed that queer people are drawn to spaces where they can take care of something together.

“Maybe that kind of helps people with any other sort of negative relationships they may have with home,” she said.

At the parkway in late September, Smart-McCabe plunged her shovel into the dirt a third time. The club co-founder was beginning the day’s plant demo, and on her first two swings, she’d hit grate below the ground. This time, as she sunk the metal into the earth, the sound was soft.

“Yes! We found soil! At the parkway!” Smart-McCabe shouted victoriously. The group cheered as though she’d won the Powerball jackpot.

Linnea Torres prepares to place a plant into a planter box.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Beside Smart-McCabe’s planting hole is a raised plant bed, which the gardeners designated as the “goth” bed with dark plants only. On the opposite end of the parkway is its fraternal twin, the “rainbow” bed — a free-for-all of colorful plants. In between, rows of mallow and other native plants were separated by pavers.

As Smart McCabe began sending club attendees to their stations, Cassandra Marketos announced that her trunk was packed with donations from Silver Lake’s Plant Material. The plants were too dead for the nursery to sell.

“We love rejects,” Smart-McCabe said with a grin.

Like many of her peers, Smart-McCabe grew up envisioning home gardeners as conforming to a very particular archetype: usually wealthy, often white and always women. With Club Gay Gardens, she and Torres sought to deconstruct that archetype.

They did so with the club’s name, a riff on the 1975 documentary “Grey Gardens,” which chronicles the lives of ex-socialites Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, who, despite retiring to a rundown Long Island estate, continue sporting luxurious furs and gowns as they go about their daily lives.

Gardeners at the September meetup were dressed in various looks, from frayed overalls and baseball caps to babydoll dresses and chokers.

Bex Muñoz waters a planting hole in a raised garden bed.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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Niamh Sprout wore a smattering of chunky silver rings, which complemented the long black nails she had dug into the parkway soil as Smart-McCabe did her plant demo. It was nearly impossible for Sprout to scrape the dirt completely from under her nails, but after a lifetime of being “raised by plants,” as she put it, she was used to the mess.

“I don’t have the traditional hands of a gardener,” Sprout said at the seed-sorting table. “For me, it’s gotten to the point where, like, I’m so used to it, and it doesn’t feel so strange.”

“Everyone’s always been like, ‘Oh, so how do you take care of plants?’” Niamh Sprout said. “I’m like, ‘I just listen to them. They just tell me how they need to be taken care of.’”

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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From the beginning, Smart-McCabe and Torres didn’t want Club Gay Gardens to exist in a vacuum. They wanted to politicize the act of gardening and place it within a broader social justice framework.

As part of that mission, the pair each year hosts an event called Pisces Plantasia, which features native plant resources, local artists and more. In its first year, profits from the event went to the Palestine Children Relief Fund. This past year, they went to the Altadena Seed Library and the No Canyon Hills legal defense fund.

The club co-founders also regularly speak during meetups about food accessibility and improving people’s access to urban green space, something club member Katya Forsyth believes is not valued enough by city planners.

“The basis of all human society, human life, is the soil and the plants that grow out of it,” Forsyth said. “It’s so abundant, and it wants to give us so much, and we’re like, ‘I’m gonna put some concrete over you.’”

The parkway garden on Brand Boulevard might be small, but to Forsyth, it’s a definite step in the right direction.

In the future, Smart McCabe hopes to help establish Club Gay Gardens satellite locations across L.A. and to create more professional development opportunities for local gardeners. In the fall, she’ll get some support on that front through a grant benefiting Club Gay Gardens, the Altadena Seed Library and ecological landscaping business Soil Wise.

The grant will allow four Club Gay Gardens members to take a six-week course on working safely with contaminated soils, which Smart-McCabe said is especially needed in the aftermath of the January wildfires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.

Smart-McCabe has a favorite saying about native plants in Southern California: “First they sleep, then they creep, then they leap.”

It’s a reference to how these plants have adapted to a cycle of hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters by establishing deep tap roots that keep them hydrated even during long dry spells.

“So that means in their first year, they’re not growing as much as they are establishing their root system,” Smart-McCabe said. She likens this phenomenon to the slow but steady growth of Club Gay Gardens.

As the club co-founder discussed the details of the new grant with grantees, club regular Bex Muñoz began to tear up.

“We’re leaping,” they said.