Allan Appel Photo
They arrived in New Haven only in April. They will return to their home in Luzhou before the end of the year. And yet the garden where they are growing “ghua” or melon and enough other Chinese vegetables to feed several soccer teams is as big as a soccer field, and more beautiful.
Meet Xiaoping Li (left in photo) and Yonggui Diao, part of a crew of perhaps a dozen largely Chinese people of grandparently age who are temporary tenders of one of the New Haven’s most remarkable gardens.
The couple came from their home in Luzhou, a city of some five million people in Sichuan Province, to New Haven this spring to visit and help their son, a post-doctoral student in biology at Yale, tend his 2‑year-old child.
Through an unwritten arrangement, along with the apartment they moved into came the responsibility from those who left to tend a section of the garden.
They obtained some seeds, planted them and joined a team of what they described as about five or six families adding up to 10 or 12 people who tend both designated plots as well as the garden as a whole.
The garden is comprised of two rectangular plots of cabbage, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, Chinese beans, pumpkins and much else growing in rustic profusion in a grid of wild-looking twig-made frames on Division Street between Prospect and Mansfield.
The frames are called “jiazi,” Li said through a translator. They are made from the twigs and small branches fallen from the trees shading the garden.
From them hang pretty much everything that is growing in wild profusion: “huaghua” or cucumber and “kooghua,” a bitter melon (pictured).
“Ghua” in Chinese means melon. The north and eastern borders of the plot sprout splendid jiazi growing “sighua” another kind of melon.
Li and Diao explained that the yellow flowers that jauntily wave above the vines are not the hibiscus they might appear to be at a distance, but belong to the “sighua.”
On the south end a “nanghua,” which the translator called a pumpkin, grows from a twig made trellis.
A Chinese vegetable garden traditionally has nothing but vegetables, no flowers.
In this thriving communal garden, some of the rotating gardeners, like Li and Diao, are not even vegetable gardeners at home.
“We have a flower garden and only inside our house,” they said.
So how could they help take care of a vegetable garden, one so immense that a large second plot down the hill toward Mansfield equals the eastern one in size?
“It’s natural to us,” Li responded. In her view Chinese people in general are natural gardeners.
“But there are skillful gardeners and bad ones,” Diao added.
Li is clearly among the skillful. She was particularly proud of her “tianjao” or green peppers and the “quizi” or eggplant.
Both retired now, they put in several hours a day in the garden right after breakfast, they said. They enjoy the leisure and especially the vegetables, which they cook.
Because of the language barrier, most of these older Chinese people do not get out into the city much, according to a younger Chinese man who at around 8 in the morning came by on his way to catch the bus south on Prospect.
“It’s a way for them to socialize,” he said.
Indeed Li said they eat mainly at home, from the bounty of the garden. They have gotten out a bit, and enjoyed pizza. She pronounced it “delicious.”
Li and Diao seemed to view the garden as a place set aside by Yale University as an aspect of its relationship with their son.
They live in the tidy brick apartment complex a block by the edge of Yale’s campus, as do many Asian graduate students and their visiting family members.
One recent morning, as the younger people were catching the bus to Yale and other destinations, Li and Diao were walking along well grooved paths among the rows of bean, melon, and mustard on their jiazis.
The couple’s backs were slightly bent from the heavy buckets of water dangling from their arms.
“The season is changing,” Li said. “The cabbages are going in.”
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