Mariana and Pepe took a permaculture course. Now avenida Satélite is filling with plants

A fourth straight weekend, and the same stretch of Avenida Satélite keeps filling with plants. The Tulum reforestation effort behind it is run by neighbors, not by any institution.

Residents and members of Tulum Unido spent the weekend on the avenue as part of Jardines Urbanos de Tulum, a nonprofit neighborhood initiative designed to reclaim public space and encourage people to care for the environment on their own block. The work itself is plain. Volunteers plant plants along a section of the roadway, then water and tend what previous weekends left behind.

What separates it from a one-off cleanup is the ambition attached to it. The organizers are not treating Avenida Satélite as a finished job. They want the strip to serve as a model that other colonias can copy on their own streets, turning one stretch of roadside into a test case. The test does not end when the last plant goes in.

It began with a permaculture course

Mariana and Pepe, the two residents driving the project, said the idea came out of a permaculture course they took. What started as their own experiment has widened week after week, with more neighbors joining each time the group goes out to the avenue.

The course matters more than it might sound. Permaculture is a design method rather than a gardening style, organized around systems meant to sustain themselves with minimal intervention once they take hold. That idea lies beneath everything the group says about the avenue, because a self-sustaining strip is the only kind of legacy a volunteer project can realistically leave behind.

The method is deliberately unglamorous. Gather what people already know how to do, add the hours they can spare on a weekend, and put it all on one stretch of street until something grows there.

Mariana and Pepe want no one's name on it

They were explicit about that. The aim, they said, is to bring together the knowledge, skills, and time of different people around a common objective, with no one designated as the face of the project. The group works under a slogan that translates as hands in the soil, and the phrase describes the arrangement accurately enough. The credit is supposed to stay in the ground.

That posture also defines the limits. A neighborhood initiative with no institutional weight behind it cannot order anyone to stop leaving garbage on a green strip or to water a plant somebody else put there. Its only real instrument is repetition. Show up often enough, on the same stretch, and the stretch stops reading as abandoned ground.

Planting is the easy part

The organizers named the hard problem themselves. It is neither volunteers nor plants. It is awareness, the slow work of getting a neighborhood to treat a green area as something worth protecting once the novelty of planting day is gone.

Two things undo the effort fastest, and both were on their list. Trash accumulates on recovered ground. Plants get abandoned as soon as nobody is checking on them. Sowing is not enough, they said, which is exactly why the group keeps returning to the same section of Avenida Satélite rather than opening a new front every weekend.

That decision is the argument of the whole project. Four consecutive weekends on one avenue says more about maintenance than about planting.

A Tulum reforestation model built for other colonias

The participants see a payoff beyond the plants. Improving urban areas, they said, improves how Tulum looks to the people who live in it and those who visit, and gives neighbors a reason to share the same space instead of driving past it. In a town whose growth has outrun its public infrastructure for years, a recovered strip of roadside is a small correction. It is also one residents can make without waiting for a budget line or a permit.

The social side is what the participants describe most readily. Not shade, not aesthetics. A stretch of street where people who live near one another end up in the same place doing the same thing, which over four weekends has drawn in neighbors who did not start out together.

Their stated hope is that other colonias look at what happened on avenida Satélite and organize something comparable, and that the accumulation of those efforts moves Tulum toward a cleaner and greener version of itself.

The answer will not come from another planting day. It comes from what this strip looks like months from now, once the group's attention moves on and the watering falls to whoever lives closest to it. Mariana and Pepe have already identified that as the part that decides whether any of it counted.

Would you spend a weekend replanting a green strip on your own street in Tulum? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.