All I Needed to Know I Learned From Gardening

By Brent Donaldson

against the grain

Sandy Stephens Jr. stands illuminated under the milky white light of a 30-foot wide polyurethane greenhouse. Inside, the grass is a vibrant, phosphorescent green while the outside foliage rests in the late-December chill. A cigarette his constant companion on the damp winter day, Stephens pushes his long wispy white hair back from his face as he describes a neighborhood blight transformed.

Less than 20 years ago, this spot was a trashed-out flop house, a drug house and a disgrace to the neighborhood. Its presence overshadowed the hopes of neighbors and threatened their security as well as their sense of community. When the house caught fire in 1987, Stephens and his neighbors sat on the rooftop of the building next door and urged the firefighters not to work too hard to save the crumbling piece of history they all would rather forget.

Now Stephens stands proudly, his shoulders thrown back and his vision clear amid a sea of empty planting trays inside the newest addition to the Albion Street Gardens in Mt. Auburn. Stephens, 60, broke ground on this latest addition to the Civic Gardens Center’s award winning Neighborhood Gardens Program two years ago. The program endeavors to assist community groups in converting blighted, vacant lots into valuable and productive vegetable gardens, beautification projects and parks. For Stephens, a 30 year Mt. Auburn resident, it offered an opportunity to rejuvenate his neighborhood through inspired and passionate work.

Soon after the flop-house burned to the ground, he bought the piece of land. "I wanted to make sure they didn’t build another slum on it," he explains. Gardening has been a life-long fascination that has recently come into fruition for Stephens. "When I go visit another city, I want to see their botanical gardens. I want to visit some of their parks. My initial interest in gardening was just seeing things grow from seed, and that goes back to my grandmothers. They were both farmers."

After he became inspired by a television program on Seattle’s community gardening program, a friend suggested that he get in touch with the Civic Garden Center in Avondale.

"I thought, ‘let’s not let any of these places go any further downhill,’" he says. "I wanted something the neighborhood could get behind and be proud of."

The Neighborhood Gardens Program has been filling voids in blighted neighborhoods since it began in 1981 with the overwhelming success of the Over-the-Rhine People’s Garden. The project, led by the Civic Garden Center, brought together a diverse group of neighborhood residents, community activists, social workers and horticulturalists. Since the mission of the 60-year-old Civic Garden Center is to build better communities through gardening, the idea of a Neighborhood Garden Program made perfect sense. Within a matter of weeks, the mostly volunteer crew transformed a vacant lot filled with old tires, appliances, rotting debris and broken glass into the beginnings of what is now a thriving vegetable, herb, fruit and flower garden.

"We’ve helped create over 64 community gardens," says Mary Ann Westendorf, coordinator of the Neighborhood Gardens Program, which has taken root in 27 Greater Cincinnati neighborhoods and today stretches from Covington to Carthage. "They can either be a food-producing garden or they can be a beautification project."

In neighborhoods where the gardens flourish, though, vegetable patches and warm- weather blossoms do more than provide nutritious produce and a pretty landscape between old brick buildings. "A lot of people were afraid to come into this area," says Over-the-Rhine resident Dorothy Darden, who has been involved with the People’s Garden for 25 years. "With the garden, it’s provided a sense of security."

Today, 40 community gardens and more than 1,000 participating gardeners are a part of the Civic Garden Center’s program. "Our motto is, ‘Train the trainer,’" says Westendorf, whose personal experience with neighborhood gardens dates back to 1986, when she helped start a project in her own neighborhood, Madisonville. Now a three-year veteran as coordinator of the program, Westendorf clearly understands that a successful neighborhood garden begins with commitment. Volunteers must complete 10 out of 16 three-hour training sessions before securing the support of the Civic Garden Center. "Before we start a project, we want 10 signatures of people who are going to be involved," Westendorf explains, "because we know at least five of them are going to drop out when they see how hard it is."

"It’s a very in-depth program taught by very enthusiastic people," says Stephens, who has been through the training program twice. "You’d be a lost ball in high weeks without all the information they can give you."

After completing his initial training sessions, Stephens recruited seven of his neighbors to join him as stakeholders in Albion Street Gardens. Together, they worked with other volunteer groups to clear the land of massive overgrowth, broken glass, and litter of all kinds. Less than two years after he first contacted the Civic Garden Center, Stephens and 11 other local gardeners oversee nearly 500 square feet of fenced-in, manicured gardening beds containing ornamental grasses, alyssums, geraniums, eggplants, cabbage, tomatoes, herbs, white and purple butterfly bushes, rose bushes and other plantings.

"Sandy is an avid gardener himself," Westendorf says. "He’s gotten really involved. Sandy has told me that he chooses his family, and that the Civic Garden Center is now his family."

Stephens, who has lived on Albion Street for over 30 years, spends more time outdoors, working with neighbors and seeing the impact of his work on passers-by. "People will be driving by, and pull over and come into the garden and say, ‘I can’t believe what you’ve done here, it’s so pretty.’"

The ongoing project has also increased his connection to and interactions with his neighbors. "I’ve gotten to know the neighbors by being out in the garden. Our oldest gardener is in his 80s. His son, who lives on Albion Place, bought a garden plot for his father as a birthday present."

Another impact comes not from the volunteers who work in the garden, but from the neighborhood as a whole. "We’ve noticed that there’s less trash on the street," Stephens notes. "We’ve seen people that have lived here for years actually picking stuff up."

Dave Ebner, garden coordinator for the Mt. Auburn Garden Club, has seen the same impact. "What we’ve developed is a sense of community," Ebner says. "The beautification that it brings to that inner city neighborhood, it’s just a breath of fresh air. Before we really got swinging with it, the level of bottles and trash of all kinds was pretty high. We don’t see that anymore."

Dorothy Darden of the OTR People’s Garden adds that you don’t have to possess a green thumb to benefit from the community spirit of the gardens. "We don’t have to just let our neighborhood go and let the drug dealers take over," she says. "We can have something beautiful there, and grow food, and you can share good healthy vegetables and fruit."

For Mary Ann Westendorf, there’s always room for another Neighborhood Garden. "We want to target people that don’t have access to fresh, organic produce," she says. "We do concentrate on the inner city, because we feel that those folks need it the most."

While it’s clear that the gardens provide more than sustenance to their proponents, the Civic Garden Center points out that in 2003, local neighborhood garden participants grew more than $90,000 worth of fruit and vegetables in places like the West End, Price Hill, Evanston, North Fairmount and Walnut Hills.

In addition to the satisfaction of growing, harvesting and preparing fresh, healthy foods, community gardening provides a safe place for generations to connect. While children learn self-reliance and a healthy work ethic, older gardeners can share their heritage and neighborhood knowledge. Friendships blossom as youth come to truly understand that food comes from someplace other than a box. One case in point Westendorf cites sits in the same neighborhood where the program began. The ECO Garden in Over-the-Rhine is a youth urban market garden, where neighborhood children aged 11-16 grow tomatoes, chard, lettuces, kale, collards, mustard greens, onions, corn, squash, beans and herbs, all of which they sell at their market every Saturday at Findlay Market.

Seeing their success, and the success of the Neighborhood Gardens Program, keeps Westendorf motivated to support existing gardens and nurture new ones. "I have an acre garden at home, so I’m the last person in the world that needs a 4x10 plot in a community garden." Now she realizes, as does Dorothy Darden of Over-the-Rhine, that the harvest encompasses more than just fruits and vegetables.

"There’s love in the garden, there’s friendship in the garden, says Darden. "It’s not only the food that you grow; you meet new friends, you share knowledge and wisdom, and you communicate. It represents a lot of things."

Sandy Stephens wholeheartedly agrees.

"After about six months into my association with [the Neighborhood Gardens Program], a couple of very dear friends that I’ve known for 30 years plus, within the same week both said to me, ‘You know, you’ve got a lot more zip in your step than you’ve had in the last couple of years,’" he says. "I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got something that I’m really, really excited about doing for the community.’ I truly think that the outreach of the garden will be here long after I’m gone."