Prototype Issue
Scavenging Simplified: The Fallen Fruit Project Art Maps Pinpoint Public Fruit
By Lucinda Michele Knapp
(page 1 of 1)Bet you didn’t know it’s legal to eat fruit from trees on public land. Let’s go one step further—bet you didn’t know there were fruit trees on public land.
Three LA artists, Matias Viegener, David Burns and Austin Young, have made it their business to show you just where those trees are. Through the Fallen Fruit project, which they started in 2004, they create online maps of areas containing public fruit—fruit that anyone can pick or gather. In so doing, they encourage us not just to pay attention to the growing seasons and unique nuances of LA’s treescape but to rethink our entire urban landscape.
“Part of our goal was to create ways of re-examining and reinventing the city’s neighborhoods, but in asking people to see the city in a new way, we’ve also learned to see its residents in a new way,” Viegener says.
The trio’s website, www.fallenfruit.org, displays maps of Hancock Park, Mid-Wilshire, Echo Park and Silver Lake and offers tips on creating your own fruit map. There are peaches on Hyperion, carob trees on Descanso, figs on Norton and bananas on Ridgewood. Grapefruit can be found on Van Ness, plums on Second St., oranges on Echo Park Ave. and lemons on…Lemoyne.
Maps include trees on city property as well as those whose branches protrude from private yards into public space—legal to pick from, but you may want to be polite and ask the property owners first.
So do the artists behind Fallen Fruit have a favorite fruit?
“Fallen Fruit’s favorite fruit is the loquat, because it is the secret soul fruit of LA,” Viegener says. “It is totally unassuming and undemanding, ripens right around now [March through June] and is almost never seen in any market. It’s weird and fragile, so no one seems to try marketing it. But put one in your mouth and you will get something you’ve never tasted before, somewhere between an apricot and a lemony mango.”
LA is one fruit-filled city.
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