For three nights straight, the vandals came for the garden. 

Tomatoes smashed everywhere, with bits of them embedded in a chain-link fence meant to protect the garden from this very type of malfeasance.  

Mark LaFlamme

Giant sunflowers toppled, their stalks torn off at the base. 

Squashes smashed. Pumpkins, too, and the gory remains of them smeared up and down Whitney Street in Auburn to serve as an exclamation point to this pointless rampage.

For three nights straight — Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — the Whitney Street Community Garden became the victim of an all out assault by vandals who either went over the fence or straight through it. 

The vandals didn’t come to steal the food. That might have been forgivable. 

No, these people, whoever they are, ripped apart the gardens just to entertain themselves by throwing all those plants and vegetables every which way. They caused as much destruction as they could, completely destroying the hard work of the many who toil in the garden from spring until fall. 

“It’s very frustrating to the folks who have spent all season cultivating this food and sometimes starting it all the way from seed, and now you’re at a point where you’re ready to harvest,” said Alison McConnell, community growing coordinator for St. Mary’s Health System. “It’s super frustrating to see it destroyed for no reason other than to be thrown across a parking lot.” 

Several elderly men and women had been growing their food in the garden. Many new Mainers use the garden, too, sharing growing secrets with the locals. 

“I am pretty certain this has been a huge blow to the new Mainers and I worry if they’ll garden with us next year,” said Erika Gardner, one of those who lost plants in the raids. “I think some of the older folk are also not going to come back on account of this. This is very, very upsetting for me. I’ve worked so very hard to make this community inclusive and LOVE learning the different techniques from different lands. 

“This,” Gardner said, “is a huge violation.” 

Those associated with the gardens tried several tactics to stop the invaders. They changed the fence locks and tried to strengthen the fence itself to make the gardens inaccessible at night. They called police and a few of them even sat out into the wee hours watching the grounds. 

The vandals somehow evaded all of this and wrought their destruction three nights running. 

Smashed tomatoes in a parking lot next to the Whitney Street Community Garden in Auburn. Vandals broke through the chain-link fence, background, Aug. 14, 15 and 16, and uprooted and ripped apart the produce and flowers. Erika Gardner photo

“I just find it heartbreaking,” said Michelle Berube, another gardener, “to see people’s harvests ruined after they worked so hard.”

The outrage of it took many forms. On Saturday, for example, the gardeners had planned a memorial service for one of the garden supporters, an elderly woman who recently passed. When they showed up for that Saturday morning, what they found was yet more demolished tomatoes, flattened pumpkins and shredded flowers. 

So much for the solemn ceremony to honor a fallen comrade.

“Instead,” Gardner said, “it was more heartbreak.” 

The ruination of the community garden will have a kind of trickle-down impact on the community. For many, it means the loss of food directly. They had counted on those vegetables to feed their families. 

But the impact reaches even further. 

“Some of us give our surplus back to St. Mary’s for the food pantry,” Gardner said.

In past years, Gardner has also donated kale stalks and other items from the garden to Misfits Rehab, an animal rescue in Auburn.

For now, gardeners are trying to recover what they can; to salvage anything that remains of the plants they so lovingly tended over the summer. They do so warily. 

Who knows when the marauders might come back? 

Gardner and some of the others would like to put up wildlife cameras with night vision capability to perhaps dissuade or maybe help identify the vandals, who also are suspected in a rash of vandalism at the nearby Washburn School. 

Who exactly ARE the vandals? 

Nobody involved wants to speculate much, but to me, Scooby, it sounds like kids — kids who have too much time on their hands and too little knowledge about the importance of community gardens. 

What do these little hooligans know about the sweat and strain of growing one’s own food? What do they know about the satisfaction and delight of seeing a tiny handful of seed growing into something lush and hardy; something that can be put on the dinner table to feed a family? 

Maybe the punks — and I maintain that they’re punks regardless of age — just need a hard lesson on mankind’s vital relationship with the earth; a relationship that has been fostered painstakingly since man first stood upright and looked around for ways to feed himself. 

In a perfect world, the culprits would be caught and brought to justice. In that perfect world, part of that justice would involve the back-aching toil of digging, weeding, spreading fertilizer and tediously tracking down Japanese beetles and other pests to keep the plants happy. 

Round them up, I say, and make them spend their next summer servicing a garden plot. Maybe they’ll come to love the fruits of their long labor and maybe that will drive home the error of their ways. 

But meanwhile, more practical steps are being taken to address the desecration of the Whitney Street garden. 

“We’re going to be working with the city, the school and the neighbors to try to move ahead and raise awareness about how important those gardens are,” McConnell said. “They really are a key part of people’s ability to produce food.” 

Gardner and her gardening cohorts are looking to get an audience with the city as they search for help with the ongoing destruction. Maybe better lighting will help. Maybe more cameras is the answer. 

More likely, neighborhood involvement itself will probably be what bears fruit: the more people are aware of what devilish work has been done at the community garden, the more eyes will be watching, and if the fiends push their luck just one time too many… 

I predict the culprits will be caught sooner or later. And when they are, I hope the courts give my idea some consideration. 

Let the punishment fit the crime, I say! Make them garden all summer long and the bad guys just may find that this unusual sentence is no punishment at all. 

Gardening is a privilege and a joy and without it we’d be doomed as a species.

The savages just don’t understand that yet.

It’s time they learned. 

Mark LaFlamme is a longtime columnist and crime reporter for the Sun Journal and can be reached at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.