Around the corner from my house was a little playground called “Niños Unidos,”  built on an empty, weedy lot by a bunch of parents who fought the city for years to reclaim the space. As soon as the playground opened, it became full of kids climbing and running and screeching happily all day long, and every Sunday it hosted a free farm stand.

The stand was run by a guy called Tree—a shy, skinny, ponytailed old hippie with a scratchy voice—who thirty years ago had planted hundreds of fruit and nut trees on the streets of the barrio. He was a total tree freak: mad for sycamores, almonds, jacarandas, London planes, magnolias, apples, maples, flowering pears.  He tended at least four community gardens, including a gigantic, verdant piece of paradise behind his rather crummy apartment, fenced with bamboo and dense with persimmons and poppies. The first time I met him was at a town meeting where he stood and introduced himself to the mayor: “My name is Tree, and I care about the trees.” Earnestly, he added, “I care about the mature canopy.”

“I just love trees,” he told me once, “but I really love the idea that people can eat from trees. I don’t object to ornamentals, but when I moved to the Mission I wanted to plant food.”  Now Jordanian women picked almonds from little sidewalk forests he planted back in the 1970s, and Mexican teenagers gathered figs from trees planted before they were born.

When Ninos Unidos was built, Tree had started a community garden there, and divided it into plots and showed other people how to join him in growing food. He built raised beds and staked some espaliered pear trees along a chain-link fence. Then he set up a little table to give away the extra produce from the garden—beans, herbs, apples, squash, kale—and dug up seedlings and gave them away, too, so other people could have plants.

He offered tips on composting, collecting food scraps from kitchens and hauling them away on his bicycle. He went to neighborhood after-school programs and began teaching the kids to weed and water and prune. He wrote a blog, interspersing advice about potato towers and drip irrigation with praise for “the beautiful miracle of gardening” and gratitude for “being connected to the love energy out there.” He scavenged manure, borrowed wheelbarrows, and built another new garden in a new nearby lot. And then other gardeners—people who didn’t even know Tree—started bringing the surplus food from their home gardens to share at the farm stand.

Soon more neighbors showed up, bearing big bunches of roses and wildflowers, and giving away buckets of ripe tomatoes. The playground parents began swapping recipes: here’s what to do with fava beans; hey, try these striped squash. A few urban beekeepers offered little jars of honey from hives they kept around the city. Tree, who also kept bees, found a new friend who’d studied classical languages and would read aloud to him from Virgil’s Georgics as they worked the big extractor. “’Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now take up the tale,’” Tree quoted. “Oh, those Greeks and Romans really loved bees.”

Then a bunch of garden nerds, church volunteers and a high-school teacher started organizing to glean fruit from the variety of trees that produce so profligately in San Francisco. Like the members of nearby Temple Emanu-El, who’d planted a garden on their cemetery and gave the food away, they were inspired by the Biblical command “do not harvest the corners of your fields and vines, but leave it for the poor and the stranger.” These modern gleaners printed up leaflets and knocked on doors, offering to harvest backyard trees, leave whatever the owners wanted, and bring the rest to the free farm stand to give away. They scavenged in public parks as well, and from street trees.

Another group of urban gardeners offered to prune and care for the gleaned trees, and the circle widened. A slightly obsessed arborist who loved to talk about root stock designed a Google map for the group. It had pins showing every tree identified by the gleaners, and information on location, size, and approximate ripening time. By summer there were a dozen people out harvesting throughout the city on the weekends, high-school kids with ladders and buckets, guys in pick-up trucks coming back with heaps of gleaned lemons and plums and oranges, offering it all to passers-by at the makeshift tent in the middle of a garden in a slum.

I walked over there one day after church with my daughter Katie. Tree’s blog the week before had been effusive with happiness. “If I could sum up my feelings right at the moment into one world,” he wrote, under a photo of some lettuce, “it would be gratefulness. If a person doesn’t get a chance to feel grateful I would guess that would be a sad situation, because it is a great way of feeling high.”

The garden was full of families, and fragrant with the scent of sweet peas. Tree gave us beets he’d grown, and then another woman gave us epazote that she pulled out of her bike basket, and then someone else gave us two gorgeous heads of radicchio. I promised a Guatemalan woman that I’d bring her plums from our tree as soon as they were ripe. “We have so many we don’t know what to do with them,” I said. “Good for eating, and for cooking.”

Katie was amazed. “It’s kind of like heaven,” she said, watching everyone swapping food. We started to leave, and Tree ran after us shouting hoarsely, “Don’t go! Wait!”

I turned around. “I have pie!” he said.

And he pulled out a gigantic blackberry pie he’d baked, with berries someone had picked from the side of the road up on a nearby hill. And we stood there at the side of the lake, with the crowd, and Jesus, and the homemade blackberry pie on a turned-over five-gallon plastic bucket, and Tree cutting up big pieces with a beat-up old knife and handing them to all of us under the mature canopy saying, ‘Taste it, isn’t that delicious? I made it for everyone. There’s plenty.’

God gives us everything we have: and whenever we are willing to receive that blessing and pass it on, we live in the kingdom of abundance. He gave the food to the disciples, who gave it to the crowds. And they all ate as much as they wanted. 

Excerpted from Jesus Freak by Sara Miles. Copyright © 2010 by Sara Miles. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.