OUR GARDEN

Most people know the Spruce Hill Garden Club through its garden at 44th and Locust Streets. Originally a vacant lot, the garden was begun in April l96l, with Olive Frambes and Virginia Johnson among the main movers behind it. This garden was one of several the club developed in its early years, but it is the only one to survive today.

Club members have nurtured many plants on the lot over the years, including a spruce and a birch tree (now gone), each of which were planted as saplings. Floral features include wonderful collections of irises, daffodils, tulips and daylilies, developed by W. Stanley Woodward. The lot holds more than 20 rose bushes; three crape myrtle shrubs; a flowering magnolia and a flowering cherry tree. In the past ten years, scores of perennials have been planted by Adam Levine, the Head Gardener for most of the 1990's.

Since l986, the garden has won numerous first and second prizes in the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Gardens Contest, in the “large community sitting garden” category. Garden club members, in 1986, endowed the Eugene E. Smith Memorial Prize for the best first-year garden in the contest.

The garden has been designated an “Urban Wildlife Sanctuary” by the National Institute for Urban Wildlife in Columbia, Maryland (now in 2002 it is called the XXXX). Besides providing pleasure for countless passersby, the garden also provides a welcome respite from the concrete city for birds, squirrels and other animals, as well as numerous beneficial insects, such as honeybees, ladybugs and praying mantises.

Any member who wants a guided tour of the garden, or has plants or time to donate, please contact Nancy Khahn. During the gardening season we meet every Friday night at 44th and Locust for "Happy Hour Gardening" from about 6 or 7 till dusk depending on the weather - you are always welcome to join in this activity.