It’s easy to spot Mary Hickey from afar. She’s the only person carrying a shovel on Van Ness Avenue. She plods along the avenue’s wide sidewalk in her red rubber boots, scanning the long row of metal planters bordering Fort Mason Park. Peering over one planter, she pulls out a Corona bottle wedged under the leaves of an agave plant.
Although her gloves, shears and rubber boots might suggest otherwise, Hickey isn’t a longtime gardener. She became one earlier this month, she says, after becoming “kind of fed up” with the appearance of the planters in her neighborhood.
“I started noticing in the whole city the condition of these planters,” Hickey says. “That they aren’t being maintained. There’s weeds and garbage and graffiti and everything else.”
A few years ago, rows of planters just like these — long, metal and oval-shaped — popped up on sidewalks around San Francisco. Although the plants served to beautify some neighborhoods, most locals seemed to agree on their tacit purpose: to prevent unhoused people from camping in front of homes and businesses. Planters often appeared on the former sites of tents or encampments. When filled with soil, the large metal planters weigh over 2,000 pounds…