Among so many learning moments, my most valuable learning – the aha! – was seeing how gardens are more than collections of pretty plants.
A beautiful flower can move a person, a beautiful garden can move a neighborhood, but a garden tour can re-define a city! (To hear more about garden tourism, and how it may be transformative in your own town: Chapter 12.)
So the Garden Walk made me a gardener. My wife and I have the perfect garden (for us) that we love to share, I’ve written a garden blog since 2009, visited gardens large and small around the world, headed up the country’s largest garden tour, and I get to speak about the value of gardening (from tourism dollars to civic pride). Now I’m a partner in this gardening book!
Gardening changed me. I like to think Grandad would be proud.
Challenges (aka problems) Sparked Change
While Jim was spurred into ingenious gardening projects by admiring visitors, other Buffalo city gardeners made transformations out of necessity. Several faced looming factors beyond soil and pest management, including neighbors and their own quirks.
Hiding behind the cottage
Ellie Dorritie is one of the most memorable gardeners in Buffalo, and a main reason that the Cottage District is crammed with crowds during Garden Walk Buffalo. She is no shy kitten – a lifelong activist in fact – and she greets motor coach tours and neighborhood passersby with equal humor and aplomb. There was a moment she needed to retreat, however…
“When I moved in years ago, I found I had a neighbor who could look directly down into my yard from his apartment windows. I quickly realized that he had mental health issues and was “set off” into angry shouting by seeing me moving about outside. I needed a screen for my back/side yard that blocked his sight line. That’s what got me going on creating a place with trees and shrubs even though there was clearly no place for them. The neighbor moved away in time, but that sad episode was what spurred me to start my new garden.”
Ellie’s home is about 1100 square feet on a lot that is 25 feet wide and 75 feet deep. These cottages were all built around 1870, the neighborhood designed to meet the housing need of skilled laborers in the ironworks, breweries, shipbuilding, and other factories along the Erie Canal and downtown Buffalo. They are architecturally darling, and the entire neighborhood feels like a land of dollhouses – but one thing the cottages don’t offer is good soil and enough of it for gardening. As Ellie tells it:
“The second thing that helped form my garden: There was a huge tumble-down garage that filled my teeny back/side yard when I moved in, but with no way to get a car to it. The garage became the destination for hiding everything that I couldn’t make myself get rid of – ensuring that my poor orphaned children would speak my name unkindly as they spent day after day cleaning it out years from then.
“So I ripped down the garage, and then had all that concrete emptiness to fill. And the third thing, which I NEVER admit, is that the space, once garageless, was SO ugly and SO impossible, that I was hopelessly, irretrievably challenged: I just had to do the very hardest, most unlikely and far-fetched thing with it that I could possibly do – create the complete opposite of its original state.”
Ellie built up from cement, grew trees in huge containers, and struggled with compacted, polluted and dead soil. She calls it a “balcony garden” solution, although there is no balcony. Design-wise, it’s done the same way a balcony or terrace garden would be planted and planned, with nothing planted in the soil.
And now look at it! Part of that garden is still hiding behind the cottage, and every summer thousands of people go single file back there to peek – all because a few problems needed solving.
Ellie Dorritie’s cottage on Buffalo’s Little Summer Street.
Problem? The gardener is colorblind
The dramatic and colorful garden of Joe Hopkins and Scott Dunlap on Sixteenth Street draws as many as 2000 visitors each day of Garden Walk Buffalo. Scott explains the benefits of what many would call a problem for most gardeners: “I think the real story is that Joe has such a bad color deficiency. It makes him a bit fearless when it comes to his color combinations. So Joe sees and weighs textures, values and hues more than most people. He creates what looks appealing to him.”
As a result, the garden is like none other, as magazine covers and garden blogs attest. One of its lessons: There’s more to plant pairings than their flower and leaf colors. Pattern and texture can be at least as effective for dramatic planters and garden combinations. And trust your own senses, however imperfect they might be. (Nobody sees colors the same anyway.) Anybody can follow traditions and put blues and yellows together – but it took a different vision to create pots like these!
Joe Hopkins’ colorful garden in Buffalo’s Cottage District.
And another lesson: Especially when it comes to coleus, more is better.
After the trees came down
In 2006 a major ice and wind storm (called The October Surprise Storm) took down one-third of the tree canopy of Buffalo, many of them planted by Frederick Law Olmsted well over a century ago. Trees fell, landscapes changed, and some people despaired. Some saved their trees with the help of professional arborists. Others found sunlight in their yards for the first time so that certain plants flourished like never before, and gardeners were free to reimagine their design palette.
Two maples trees, planted around 1900, had long graced and dominated a charming back yard on Norwood Avenue, home of Arlan Peters and Dominic DiFillippo. Arlan wrote, “This changed in 2006 when half of one of the trees came down in the storm. Suddenly there was more light and we could use so many more plants than before. The little bird house in the tree survived the storm, and the squirrels use it regularly.”
The storm’s aftermath set Arlan and Dom on a serious DIY streak. They turned a cross section of the biggest fallen limb into a porch coffee table in their elegant 1890 home. It’s a table that tells a story.
Arlan added: “We learned that it’s wise to let Nature help make decisions for us, rather than try to impose our will on Nature. We also feel that your garden is home to many birds and other animals, too. They don’t regard you as the sole owner of the property.”