Aspen Farm Community Garden and the blocks of homes around it are
a well-cared for island surrounded by vacant lots, deteriorating
buildings, and poorly-maintained public housing. The garden
takes up half a block, and it seems like one or more of the
forty-odd gardeners are always there doing something: digging,
planting, or harvesting; cleaning, weeding, or building; talking,
resting, or watching.
The gardeners range in age from 12-14 (students from the nearby
Sulzberger Middle School) to Mr. Brown who turned 100 years old in 1994. Most of the gardeners are over sixty. "It's an outlet
for us senior citizens. It's real therapy--you don't have to
take medicine when you're gardening," says Charles Clark. Other
gardeners agree: "This is magic therapy," says Joenelle Drayton,
"it would hurt if I didn't do anything." "I've gardened from a
youngster. My father was a landscape gardener, and I loved
helping him," remarked Rebecca Melvin.
Aspen Farm is a testament to the talent, knowledge, and energy
that exists within the Mill Creek community. Esther Williams got
some neighbors together in 1975 to clean up a vacant lot across
the street from her front door. That was the start of Aspen
Farm. Year by year, the garden has changed.
"If you can't improve each year, why be here?" This statement by
President Hayward Ford sums up the gardeners' actions within the
garden and the neighborhood. The list of improvements is
impressive: a large mural of a red barn with cows grazing and
horses playing in a pasture, an irrigation system, a greenhouse,
a new fence.
The gardeners reach out to youth of the neighborhood: they
host field trips to the garden for schools in West Philadelphia
and give a scholarship each year to a student at a local school.
They also give away much of their harvest of fruits and
vegetables.
The redesign and reconstruction of Aspen Farm in 1988-89 was a
collaboration between the gardeners, students and faculty from
the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Landscape
Architecture and Regional Planning, and staff of Philadelphia
Green, as part of the West Philadelphia Plan and Greening
Project.
The gardeners gave the students a tour of Aspen Farm, told them
about what they had done and hoped to do, and welcomed them into
their homes for a weekend stay. The next week, back at Penn,
each student set to work on a design for the garden.
At first glance, the students' task seemed simple. The gardeners
had asked for a meeting place for themselves and for the tours
from local schools. Several constraints emerged,
however: the small budget and the gardeners' reluctance to
change quickly. In formulating their designs, the students had to decide
whether to concentrate improvements in a small area or to spread
them around. Concentrating the resources seemed a good idea, but
then not all the gardeners would benefit equally. The students
soon realized how strongly the gardeners felt about their
own plots where they had improved the soil over time and formed
friendships with neighboring gardeners. Relocation or the loss
of even a small portion of their territory was a traumatic
prospect. The strategies chosen by individual students diverged,
and the gardeners were presented with a wide range of alternative
designs from which to choose.
The gardeners chose a design that created a "main street" meeting
place by widening the central path, thereby changing the
boundaries of individual plots as little as possible. The
designer, student John Widrick, returned to the garden again and
again. As he got to know the gardeners better, he realized that
what at first seemed one big community, was actually composed of
many individuals and several smaller groups, each with its own
territory. As Hayward Ford told him, "It isn't all fifty beds of
roses. There are fifty different people with fifty different
ways of seeing things and fifty different ways of doing things.
And everybody, of course, is always right."
Widrick proposed that the central path become the meeting place
so that each group's territory would border that space and so
that the common area was created from taking a sliver off many
plots. The central path is now like a small street with benches
where people can come out of their garden to sit, rest, watch,
and chat. Benches form a boundary between the common path and
more private, adjacent garden plots and the raised flowerbeds
alongside are a place for individuals to show off their skills.
The design provided only a minimal framework, permitting the
gardeners to embellish it.
Aspen Farms is a successful community. Conflict and
competition are inevitable, as they are in every community. When
turned into a positive force, however, the entire community
benefits, and this is what the design for Aspen Farm's "main
street" did.