Here’s a little-known fact for you. If you show up at your neighbors’ houses with a milk crate full of the fragrant basil and marjoram you heartlessly ripped out of your garden in a fit of passion, you can make friends.

The good sort of friends.  The sort of friends that offers you things growing in their own yards.

Like aloe.

And lemons.

And grapefruit and oranges and pomegranates.

And suddenly, the weeks ahead are full of the promise of much backyard deliciousness.

I live in one of the biggest metro areas in the country.  One of the biggest nonwalkable metro areas.  Phoenix is no New York, no Philadelphia, where the sidewalks are wide and people actually use them.  Pedestrians are an endangered species here, due to the fact that Phoenix is suffering from a rather astounding case of urban sprawl.  This only bears mentioning because both the big-citiness and the palpable antagonism toward pedestrians mean that the small town Midwestern neighborliness with which I grew up is something you don’t find so often out here.  If you play your cards right, you may not even know what your neighbors look like.

All of which explains why I wasn’t necessarily expecting the reaction I got when I did a turn as the herb fairy.  The Unicyclist and I started with the neighbors on each side because we know them the best.  (Yup, we do know our neighbors’ names and faces, and we do the small talk thing on occasion.  In fact, one of our neighbors routinely leaves bags of clothes, gardening tools, odd bits of decor, and food behind our gate for us, but that’s another story.) Both of them were baffled, then excited by the large bundles of herbs we offered them, excited by the sharp green perfume and by the fact that it grew in the dirt right under their noses.   Caught off-guard when the Unicyclist and I came tap-tapping on their doors, they reflexively did the first thing they could think of: They tried to reciprocate.  One neighbor told us her citrus trees would be coming ready soon, and we’d be first on her list.  Another neighbor told us to take some of the early lemons off his tree before we left and told us we could stop by and pick anytime we wanted.  As we worked down the line, we were offered aloe plants by a neighbor we’d never even met before (which we turned down because our own patch is somewhat exuberant already), pomegranates, and many, many thanks.  One woman was particularly excited to be able to surprise her son, a chef in training, with the herbs when he got home from class.

Today, one day later, we are rich.  The Unicyclist and I have a guaranteed supply of free grapefruit, oranges, and lemons for the next many months (citrus season really starts in late December and can extend to May).  Since I got some of the basil and marjoram jungle cleared out, we were able to create space in our garden for new plantlings: snapdragons, peas, beans, spinach, sunflowers, strawberries, lettuces, cilantro, thyme, and marigolds.  And, of course, there’s the wealth of newly opened doors in a city where it’s easy to keep them closed.

It’s amazing how much you get when you give away.

It’s funny–this is exactly the sort of giving that Robin Wheeler advocated in Food Security for the Faint of Heart.  I just wasn’t expecting such a warm reception in an urban landscape.  It seemed the sort of thing people do in my small hometown in Wisconsin…and it is.  My mom has had some pretty amazing trades and community gardening with her wonderful neighbors over the years.

I guess people everywhere like plants.  And they like to share.

Perhaps there’s hope for humanity yet.