Leslie Bennett
Leslie Bennett founded Star Apple Edible Gardens in 2010 and has been creating and caring for farms and gardens in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sierra Foothills since 2008. Her life-long interests in land use, environmentalism, design and cultural preservation drive her work and help her to build connections between people and the land with which they live. Creating edible gardens whose value can be measured by the feelings their beauty inspires as well as by the food they produce is how Leslie works to deepen urban residents’ connection with the environment.
Leslie’s urban gardening vision began to take shape when she studied environmental science and public policy as an undergraduate at Harvard. Through her subsequent environmental and public health work in far flung corners such as Geneva and Cape Town, she became convinced that our health, identities and relationships with each other are closely linked with how we see ourselves in relation to the earth and the landscapes that surround us. Leslie focused her legal studies at Columbia University and the University College London in the areas of cultural property and landscape protection; these studies increased her appreciation of how a sense of place helps develop individual and community vitality and identity. Through her work in the areas of international corporate law, indigent criminal defense, British historic preservation and European agricultural policy, it has increasingly seemed to Leslie that food serves as a great connector between people and the disparate politics that so often divide them.
Learning to grow her own food has been an integral element of Leslie’s path toward more grounded living. She has apprenticed and volunteered at organic farms in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica; Surrey, England; and Nevada County, California. Leslie is a certified permaculture designer (2007), has completed Ecology Actions’s GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-Farming Workshop (2008) and has participated in the Bay-Friendly Landscape Training & Qualification Program for Maintaining Existing Landscapes (2010). Leslie is a current member of the Weston A. Price Foundation and the Biodynamic Association of Northern California. She is also a Backyard Garden Mentor with City Slicker Farms in West Oakland. She works closely with the non-profit entity, Teamworks, supporting the development of the South Bay's first worker-owned green landscaping cooperative.