04/11/2026
I’ve written a small tribute for Yoon Lee on substack today (free, link in bio).
We lost one of our gardeners this last week. An amazing man called Yoon Lee.
Yoon had been part of the community gardens for many, many years and was always a delight to talk to. His style of gardening was wild, grounded in permaculture and food forests. He grew all sorts of plants from across Asia – bitter melons, turmeric, ginger, giant passionfruit, gourds – and was very, very generous with his cuttings. I have a little guava tree, ready to go into the ground, that he gifted me this winter. I’ll be planting it this week, thinking of him. Hopefully it will fruit and I can rejoice in Yoon’s guavas for years to come.
Yoon sometimes ruffled feathers at the gardens. His plot wasn’t cookie-cutter, with everything planted neatly in rows. There is more than one way to garden. Instead, it was wonderfully wild, vivacious, abundant, challenging and absolutely organic in every sense of the word. I freaking LOVED IT.
Yoon would bicycle everywhere with his trailer in tow. He built structures for plants to climb. There were seven-metre bamboo arches at his big plot for pumpkins, squash and melons to grow up over the summer months. I once asked him how he got those giant bamboo poles there, and he replied that he towed them on his bicycle, on a main road, in the middle of the day, on a weekend, some six kilometres from his house to the garden. This would undoubtedly have upset traffic, but it delights me so very much. Yoon was one-of-a-kind.
I don’t have a tonnes of photos of Yoon’s garden, nor many of him, but here are some of his taro plants and giant savoury melons, bigger than half my torso. (Continued in comments)
