Norristown Gardens - A Contest and a Non-Contest

My pink roses last year. 

I've said before that N-town in summer is a garden place. Ride down certain streets, and you'll see flowers in front of every house. Even many of our row houses that have no front yards have window boxes or container plantings. A peek into a lot of side and back yards reveals thriving vegetable beds and more flowers. And we've got a whole slew of gardeners tending community plots.

I think we take our gardens for granted, but as I've said many times before, they're an asset to the look of our town. We should all express appreciation to the residents who make them happen each year.

At the Arts Hill Fest last Saturday, I stopped and talked to the ladies at the Norristown Garden Club booth. What attracted me to their table was a display of photos of Marshall Street School kids learning about and doing gardening. I'm a firm believer that one of the best ways to teach kids biology is to get them outside working in a garden early in life--they not only learn botany with the plants, but also about bees and earthworms and eco-systems.

Anyway, the Garden Club told me about this year's contest they're running for Norristown gardens. CASH prizes, folks. 1st prize in each category is $100, 2nd is $50, 3rd is $25, and Honorable Mention is $20. The categories you can enter are Front Yard Garden, Rear Yard Flower Garden, Vegetable Garden, Window Box, Container Garden, and Public Places (Churches, Schools, City Lots, etc.). Any garden within Norristown's limits is eligible. The deadline to enter is June 6th. They'll come to judge your garden on July 9. So you all have plenty of time to get your gardens in tip-top shape.

The Garden Club has a form to fill out for contest entry, but it's not available on their website or facebook page. I have a pdf of it, though no way to pass it on through this blog. Still, if you want to enter, send me an email at this address and I'll send you the pdf. If you don't garden, but see a plot in your neighborhood that you think could win, email me for the form and give it to your neighbor. It's a bilingual form, so we can get the whole community involved.

That said, I have to admit that where any art is concerned (and gardening is most definitely an art), I have an aversion to contests. Art shouldn't be about competition. There's a reason we all can identify with the phrase "Dance like nobody is watching." We don't want to be judged on self-expression. When we aren't judged, we're free to delight in the joy that comes from being creative. And when we all share our creativity with each other without fear of judgment, we all have way more fun.

My day lilies in 2013 

So, I've decided that the Norristown Diary will sponsor a Norristown Gardens Non-Contest this year. Like the rules above, all gardens within town limits are eligible. Simply send me a photo or two of your garden  (jpg, png or gif format) in any or all of the categories above (or add new categories: side yard garden, for instance) to the same email address as above. Tell me where in town the garden is. I'll post the photos I receive on the Diary every now and then. If I get enough photos, I'll even start a Facebook page to show how great our gardens look. Send the photos anytime you've got something pretty or interesting blooming in your garden. Tell me in the email if you want your name mentioned or if you'd just prefer something generic like "a front yard garden on Arch Street."

Please, though, if you send pictures of people, I need permission from each to publish their image or I'll crop them out. And I won't publish photos of children on the internet with any hint of where they live, so keep that in mind.

Let's start being proud of our gardens, Norristown. We're a beautiful place during the growing season.

Norristown's Gardens

People who know me will tell you I like to garden. It's good exercise, I can take a lot of frustrations out on weeds, and I get nice flowers to look at, plus fresh vegetables and herbs, better than any produce I could buy in a store.

In the last couple months, I've met other Norristown gardeners and, as I've driven around town , I've become more conscious of the many, many gardens we have in town. Some are small, maybe no more than a 3x5 grouping of flowers in a front yard, or even just some window boxes and potted plants. Some gardens fill side and/or back yards. Most are nothing fancy--not professionally landscaped, but it's clear that Norristonians love flowers. And quite a few houses also boast  veggie patches in their yards.

I was thinking the other day that Norristown's gardens this year remind me of those in Charleston, SC. If you walk around that city, you see flowers everywhere. Even in the poorest sections, you see window boxes and tiny side gardens that are just beautiful. It's a pleasure to walk around that city.

Many of us descend from immigrants who brought from their native lands a love of gardening and, in many cases, a hands-on knowledge of growing food. My grandfather was a farmer. If you go to Fornance and Tremont Sts, the land between there and Regina Nursing Home was the Salvatore Santangelo farm in the first decades of the 20th century. Even after they moved to East Main, they had a large plot for vegetables and trees with figs and other fruit. I can't take credit for most of my perennial flowers and bushes. My dad planted them, many before I was born. One pink azalea in front of my house is at least 60 years old. (Come to think of it, today's my dad's birthday--he would have been 94--so this is an appropriate blog.)

For a long time, as neighbors moved in on my block, they tore out the old gardens and trees in favor of green grass and nothing else. Now, I'm glad to say, new neighbors are replanting flowers and putting in veggie patches. And have you seen all the sunflowers around town this year? Must be the rain, because they all seem over 12 foot high.

My point is that, if Norristown continues to develop its gardens then, like Charleston, this could be a drawing point for us. We could become the garden spot of Montgomery County. Maybe people would visit just to see our flowers. And maybe we could solve a lot of our poverty-related nutritional issues if we teach our people how to grow their own food.

But it's not going to happen if we keep encouraging developers to build places like Arbor Heights and the proposed development at 1202 Dekalb, where there's no un-paved land--no yards--for each homeowner. "Oh, there ARE gardens," they say. "Rain gardens to help with run-off, and landscaping on the Dekalb side. And a homeowner's association to take care of it."

Sorry, no. Having a homeowner's association do your gardening for you is like having someone else raise your kids. Even if it's well-kept up, it'll look like the boring plantings around a business. No one will come to Norristown to see that. And honestly, I see no guarantee that the landscaping WILL be kept up, or that the rain gardens won't become choked with weeds and fail to stop runoff.

So let's start a movement to promote gardens in Norristown. Maybe we could start with a gardeners' forum, to trade ideas, not to mention cuttings and seeds. How about some workshops around town, beginning in January or February, so residents can start seeds indoors? House calls by experienced gardeners to help homeowners get a garden started? List your ideas below, or tell them to me and I'll add them.

And start saying NO to development without yards, not only for gardens, but where our kids can play.