Learning Gardens

To the individual, gardens area link to the natural world, offering solace, refuge, inspiration, and purpose. To a low-income neighborhood, where often the only greenery sprouts from between cracks in concrete, their impact can be monumental, signaling sustainability, beautifying, attesting to value and worth—even prompting civic change. A 2000 survey by Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture showed that gardens in low-income neighborhoods were four times as likely as those in non-low-income neighborhoods to redirect focus onto other issues in the community.

Beautiful library gardens already abound across the nation, such as the reading garden of the Greene County Library in Charlottesville, VA, and the rooftop garden of Salt Lake City's new main library. The Horticultural Society of New York (HSNY), with its GreenBranches program, is taking the concept of a library garden beyond that of a secluded spot for summer reading, making it an opportunity for real cultivation and use that enables learning outside a library's static walls. With programming that puts users face to face with the plants themselves, GreenBranches helps free libraries from the confines of the buildings they inhabit.

In 1992, a Chicago landscape architect with an idea and several local garden clubs willing to back it landscaped the Barrington Area Library, IL, with nine gardens containing plantings and sculptures. “So many library visitors asked about specific plants,” said Executive Director Barbara Sugden in a 2005 interview with the Daily Herald, “that we realized we had an opportunity to take the library mission outdoors.”

This kind of vision is being fully realized in and around New York City at libraries that have partnered with HSNY. For the past decade, the society and its GreenTeam, a transitional and vocational horticulture and landscaping program, have been designing, installing, maintaining, and helping to fund and create programming for “learning gardens” at 13 Carnegie branches of the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) and four Carnegie branches of the New York Public Library (NYPL). More are on the way.

When a library system expresses ample interest in having a garden—“we really can't sustain a garden unless enough people are dedicated to keeping it,” cautions HSNY vice president/COO Kate Chura—HSNY considers the existing conditions as well as any financial constraints and maintenance issues. It then partners with other nonprofits and community groups to help get the project into full bloom. Designing the gardens are architects who already have relationships with libraries and so can together work to create gardens the GreenTeam can realistically help actualize, sometimes with the aid of hired contractors.

Designed with sustainability in mind, the gardens incorporate drought-resistant and low-maintenance plant material and include a moisture-sensitive irrigation system calibrated to conserve water usage, which relieves the branch of the task of watering (the move from water conservation to water harvesting is not far off). As a side benefit, shrubs and turf remove smoke, dust, and other pollutants from the air.

Every winter, the Department of Corrections sends an 18-wheeler to pick up end-of-season plant material HSNY has solicited from local nurseries, material that might otherwise have been discarded. Just think: By Raya KuzykBPL's Brownsville Branch, housed in a section of town notorious for having the city's highest crime rates and the country's largest concentration of public housing, is today nurturing a Japanese falsecypress from Rockefeller Center's Channel Gardens.

GreenBranches interns then dig the material into the ground at Rikers for planting the following year. During this time, the GreenBranches staff work with library personnel to plan new or tweak existing gardens. Throughout the year, they continue to work together, along with any participating community members, to design workshops. They discuss the library's target audience and its patrons' areas of interest, scheduling workshops convenient to both organizations. The libraries can also organize their own programming, but the society's workshops are ongoing.

The range of programming is endless. “Everyone has some connection to plants,” says Chura. “They eat them, they see them every day. As vehicles for education, they're ideal.” Indeed, gardens offer a profusion of lessons in science, history, mythology, nutrition, literature, art, and mathematics, and that study can easily be continued in the library.

Because by their very nature gardens are as transitory as the neighborhoods they inhabit—everything from the severity of a season to the introduction of a new patch of shade has an impact—maintenance and understanding of the garden are essential.

Ongoing maintenance beyond the first year—handled by the GreenBranches horticulturists, the GreenTeam, volunteers, and library patrons—includes weeding, mulching, pruning, and upkeep of the irrigation system. Because the HSNY-led workshops, conducted biweekly by a GreenBranches horticulturist, combine education with garden maintenance, they enable a long-term and reciprocal commitment between the community and the garden; moreover, the hard work a garden requires engenders in the community a real sense of accomplishment and ownership.

Though the garden at NYPL's Aguilar Branch in East Harlem is open to everyone, its remote placement—you have to enter through the library's main doors, travel down a narrow flight of stairs and through a hallway before reaching the outside—means it's almost exclusively used by the branch's Learning Center, which conducts ESOL classes downstairs.

In late August, LJ sat in on a workshop at the three-year-old Aguilar Branch garden that had kicked off last winter and was being conducted for the first time outdoors (indoors, the class studied botany and learned how to pot). Ecuadorian immigrant Luz Quinones was the first student to arrive. “Everything—I want to learn everything,” she said, claiming a bench in the shade 20 minutes before class was to start. Of the six other adult students who followed, three, according to Elaine Sohn, the center's site advisor for the last two years, were native Spanish speakers. The total group hailed from, among other places, Honduras, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Four tutors and one teacher's assistant were on hand to help with individual instruction.

GreenBranches director Melissa Fisher opened the class by pointing out new growth on a cactus plant from last winter. Whenever an unfamiliar gardening term arose (e.g., “horticulture”), Daniel Talstra, a GreenBranches intern from Terrace, BC, who came to New York via a Mennonite Volunteer Service program, broke it down into lay terms. With Talstra's distribution of pH tests (for the students to determine the soil's acidity levels), however, the class grew quiet. “Remember that commercial, 'pH-balanced for a woman'?” Fisher asked after a pause, and suddenly all heads were nodding.

“As we develop these workshops, we learn,” Fisher later says. “With the language barrier, we try as much as possible to pass out things you can feel and smell and taste, and that helps a lot.”

The discussion revolved around garden preparation, installation, and maintenance and culminated with Talstra's suggestion that “maybe we should mulch together.” Within minutes, sleeves were rolled up, gardening gloves donned, and, trowels in hand, the students headed off to all corners of the garden.

Aguilar children's librarian Valerie Garcia remembers that before the garden was installed, the staff “would drag three metal chairs out onto the concrete during lunch: one to use as a table and two to sit on.” She further recalls having often said, “someone's really got to fix this place up.” When Garcia returned from maternity leave one summer to find that HSNY had done just that, she rejoined a reenergized staff. “Our whole mood just shifted,” she says. “We would periodically go into the garden just to see what it looked like.”

In most of the HSNY gardens LJ surveyed, both children and adults use the space for programming, but the practice is slower to develop with adults. Chura remembers a library patron telling her she remapped her daily route to ensure she passed the garden each morning. But passing the library garden and playing a role in cultivating it are two different things.

In her 18 months as GreenBranches director, Fisher has conducted ten to 15 adult workshops (ranging from the study of plant identification to Christmas craftmaking) at the library gardens. Hands down, she says, adults are the hardest group to reach, and she has found that “the best way to do it is as an organized thing, through some structure already in place.” Indeed, the Aguilar and St. Agnes branches—with their on-site adult learning centers—see around 35 adults for garden programming, but the average showing, according to Fisher, is more likely to top out in the teens.

The difficulty mainly involves publicity, making the garden seem accessible, and coordinating scheduling. Fisher says her staff have “talked about needing to make sure we schedule programs early enough to make it into the public library programs.” Programming or no programming, the gardens belong to everyone in the community, and usage is essential in helping them thrive.

Where the gardens are heavily used, the outcome is promising. Angela Barnes, assistant manager of library services at BPL's Flatbush Branch, wrote in a recent letter of thanks to HSNY that before a garden emerged at Flatbush, “our facility lacked the amenities to keep our youth stimulated and engaged in positive outdoor activities.” Today, the garden provides them with those amenities and then some. “It is more than just a garden,” she wrote on behalf of the library and community. “It's a quiet space, a beautiful space, a place of our own.”

BPL executive director Dionne Mack-Harvin received a similar letter from New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) coordinator of community operations Howard Hemmings attesting to the difference the Brownsville Branch garden has made to the residents of the adjacent public housing buildings. The garden, he wrote, “has helped reduce vandalism around the community center,” and many of the children and young adults living in those buildings “have gotten involved in the garden workshops and activities.”

This type of involvement, Chura believes, helps forge connections with the community at large. “The more individuals are involved in shaping or changing their own environment,” she says, “the more connected they are to that environment...[and] the more powerfully their experience resonates.”

When controversy started roiling in 2002 over IKEA's plans to build its first New York City store in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the Swedish megaretailer was desperate to prove to critics that it would positively impact the beleaguered waterfront community. Chura saw this as an opportunity to benefit directly BPL's Red Hook Branch garden, dedicated that year. “IKEA's [financial] contribution to the library garden itself wasn't huge,” says Chura, “but it was good for leveraging with other donations.” NYCHA lay the garden's concrete pathways, while AmeriCorps built the trellis, today covered in creeping hydrangea, trumpet vine, and ivy.

Even for communities with horticulture societies not as active as HSNY, however, the reality of a garden is attainable through partnership with a city's parks and recreation department or local garden clubs. Other organizations that have worked to create garden programs have included a daycare center, a battered women's shelter, and a rehabilitation program for the developmentally challenged.

Though the meetings upon meetings that potentially lead to such partnerships may seem daunting, in the end, says Chura, “it's a more sustainable and better environment when the garden goes in slowly; all these meetings really mean more investment in the neighborhood.”

Certainly, this investment comes at a price. The installation of the garden at the Brooklyn Heights Branch cost $30,000 (thanks to an active Friends group, without which it would have cost three times as much). The front garden at the Saratoga Branch, meanwhile, cost $24,000 (covered by a Manhattan donor and his wife, an HSNY board member), while a reading garden at the rear of the library cost an additional $25,000 (courtesy of the Kaplan Fund). Chura calls these amounts typical, though design and installation can run as high as $175,000. HSNY requires $4000 per year from each library for programming and maintenance, and it raises the funds for the additional expenses itself. The ultimate goal is for these libraries to carry out programming without the society's assistance.

Probably the most important step a library interested in housing a garden can take is to look to neighboring community gardens for guidance and inspiration. As Chura says, “it can happen in any city—with help.”

There remain, however, significant hurdles even for libraries that can already claim gardens. How, for example, do you open the gardens up so that they can be used outside of library business hours? They are, after all, built with community use in mind. Chura suggests entrusting a few people as garden gatekeepers. But this hardly seems possible when at some libraries, like Aguilar, not even the patrons can necessarily always use the garden during open hours. “We want them to use it,” says children's librarian Garcia. “But we're so short-staffed, we can't have anyone supervising it except during programming hours, so it's not safe.”

This, says Fisher, is the greatest difficulty GreenBranches faces in making these gardens usable. She believes the solution is “to set up a model for use that ensures library staff will feel comfortable with these outdoor spaces being used without supervision, to focus on these gardens as outdoor classrooms, as extensions of the library.”

A likely environment to engender this kind of thinking is the garden currently being installed at the Whitestone Branch of the Queens Library, the society's most detailed and integrated garden project to date. The design entails cutting into one of the building's walls to create a glass storefront, veritably a transparent interface between the library and the garden. This would allow staff to keep an eye on the garden from indoors, give patrons inside similar access to the garden's beauty as is enjoyed by those outside, and draw people out. Even more important, it has the potential to draw people in, nullifying, at last, the divide between the library and the street.