Forestiere's Underground Gardens: Forty Years Alone

Baldassare Forestiere arrived in Fresno from Sicily in nineteen oh one expecting to farm. The land he had purchased turned out to be hardpan beneath the surface, a layer of calcium carbonate so dense it defeated the roots of any tree he tried to plant. The Central Valley summer heat ran past one hundred degrees for weeks at a time. By nineteen oh six he had come to a conclusion that most people in his position would not have reached: he would go underground.

For the next forty years, working alone, with hand tools, Forestiere excavated. He dug rooms, passageways, courtyards open to the sky, and underground planting beds where carefully positioned skylights admitted exactly the angle of sun that the citrus and fruit trees he grew would need. He grew trees underground. He grew them in chambers he had carved out of the hardpan that had defeated his surface farming, and they bore fruit. He built a bedroom and a kitchen. He built an aquarium chamber and spaces he described as chapels. The scale of the project, ten acres of excavated space reached through underground passages, is not a number that means anything until you stand in it.

What Forestiere did not build, though the records show he designed rooms for it, was a family. He never married. The spaces he dug for a wife and children were built and then left empty and then he kept digging for forty years anyway.

He died in nineteen forty-six before he had finished. The property is a California Historic Landmark and is still open to visitors in Fresno, which means the excavation outlasted him by eighty years and counting. The standard description of Forestiere is eccentric, which is the word applied to solitary acts of creation when they cannot be explained by ambition or profit. A more accurate description might be patient. He was a man who chose the underground over the surface and spent his life making it worth choosing.