Blooming Neighbors

July 27th, 2010

   We can learn a lot from Buffalo. You’d think gardeners in this Lake Erie city would be a pretty discouraged bunch with all of the snow dumpings, late freezes and Canadian cold they get.

   Quite the contrary. I just got back from my first visit to the 2-day Garden Walk Buffalo — the nation’s biggest walking garden tour — and I can tell you it’s an awesome, inspiring place for plant geeks.

Phoebe McKay's Putnam Street front yard... one of many with no lawns out front at all.

   More than 350 residents opened their gardens for free tours to anyone who wanted to have a look. I plowed through about 100 of them. Most of the yards are small city lots, but these folks are making the most of what they have.

   Plenty of homes have no lawn out front at all. Weedy grass and meatball yews are replaced by layers of mixed perennials, hanging baskets, window boxes, flower pots on front stoops, spots of colorful annuals and eye-grabbing specimen shrubs, such as the Japanese-maple-like ‘Black Lace’ elderberry, the golden cut-leaf ‘Tiger Eye’ sumac and lots and lots of hydrangeas.

   Some of the gardens are absolutely incredible — among the best home gardens I’ve seen anywhere. My two favorites: James Locke and Annabelle Irey’s Victorian-style home at 75 Lancaster Ave. and Martin Lemke’s serene back yard at 378 Little Summer St.

   The first has a 20-foot-wide side-yard garden surrounded by a white picket fence with a mulched path leading past a pergola sitting area. Then the path leads into an island perennial garden, then a water garden and then a back colorful back border that finally dumps you out into a flower pot garden (once a driveway) that has a landscaped doghouse. Yes, hopelessly addicted gardeners even landscape their doghouses.

A sitting area that's just one part of James Locke's and Annabelle Irey's Lancaster Avenue side yard.

   The Little Summer house has virtually no front yard, but when you walk through the skinny side concrete walk, the back opens up into a Better Homes and Garden centerfold. The space is only about the size of half a basketball court, but it reads much bigger as lawn paths lead around wide garden beds filled with shade plants and statuary placed perfectly as focal points along the way.

   Not everyone on the tour is a Martha-caliber designer. You’ll find color clashes, spacing conflicts and a few invasive species if you want to be a critic. But the cool thing is that most of these people are ordinary, non-Master-Gardener homeowners doing something extraordinary.

   And what a difference it makes. Imperfections and all, the neighborhoods look so much more alive and inviting than the cookie-cutter landscapes and 4-foot-wide foundation beds that are so common to our developments.

   But more important than that is what the simple act of planting has done for Buffalo’s neighborhoods.

   I got to talk to a lot of these Buffalo city gardeners about how this all happened, and it turns out that gardening builds communities.

Martin Lemke's gorgeous back yard.

   Marvin Lunenfeld and Gail McCarthy got the ball rolling 15 years ago when they came back from an urban garden tour in Chicago and got their neighborhood interested in what became a 19-home tour.

   People there spruced up their yards and curiously enough, it became contagious.

   Soon, other neighborhoods joined in, and now the momentum has ballooned into gardens all over the city and an event that’s fast becoming a national tourism draw for Buffalo. (See www.gardenwalkbuffalo.com for more details.)

   “My neighbor and I started planting out front, and next thing we knew, others were doing the same thing,” one resident told me. “Pretty soon, almost everyone was fixing up — if for no other reason than they didn’t want to be embarrassed.”

   “You know, the best thing is that it gets neighbors outside talking to one another,” another resident said. “When you actually know the people living around you, you watch out for each other and care about each other.”

   It shows. To me, it was glaringly obvious that the blocks where Garden Walk caught on were almost entirely neat, clean and well maintained. You’d want to live there.

   Driving through other blocks, you’ll see the trash-strewn, graffiti-blighted, old-mattress-on-the-porch look that’s so endemic to U.S. cities.

   I can’t say that gardens fix everything that’s ailing our cities, but it’s sure helped Buffalo. Wouldn’t it be great if Garden Walk was contagious beyond there?