* The Rogers Park Garden Group

By Pamela van Giessen

When the snow was still blowing in January a couple of RP residents got together over coffee and a yummy pear tart and talked about forming a neighborhood garden group. Seems that almost every other Chicago ‘hood has one, how come not RP? Many meetings and six stalwarts (and not a few bottles of wine) later, the Rogers Park Garden Group was born to promote gardening in the community through education and by assisting in the growth and development of green spaces.

The first public meeting was hosted at Charmers on April 24 to a standing room only crowd and a terrific presentation by John Eskandari of Gethsemane Garden Center on preparing your garden for spring the organic way. John shared great info and handouts and attendees pitched in with their creative ideas for mulch and soil amendments. We have so much talent and knowledge in RP and it was terrific to see so many come out and share.

The RPGG (everyone needs an acronym!) founding team had big dreams from the get-go (of course, the dreams were even more ambitious when the wine was flowing). First and foremost, the founding team quickly agreed on the mission statement – the power of gardens to build communities through beauty, camaraderie, and involvement.

From plant sales to bulb exchanges to community projects to a website, we wanted to do it all. But we were just a few people with day demanding jobs gathered around a dining room table. Perhaps our ambitions were bigger than the day. Might it be wiser to first get the group going, have regular meetings, conscript lots of members, and then have a substantive volunteer group that could take on big projects?

But, Karen McCarthy, one of the Garden Group founding members, met Bob McSorely on her strolls at the beach with her dog, Buster. Bob, a Farwell resident, had grown weary of looking at the decrepit state of the grand planters and once lovely park at the end of Morse and the beach. He and a few residents banded together to form the Loyola Park Keepers. They submitted a grant request to Friends of the Park and got a $500 grant. Definitely on the right track but this well-intentioned group of residents didn’t know the first thing about gardening. Could Karen help?

Karen made a pitch to the Garden Group founding team and we agreed that the project was ambitious, particularly at our young stage (actually, at this point we weren’t even born). But fortified by wine, we decided that surely we could help – what a better way to launch the Rogers Park Garden Group than to kick it off with a community project that would engage residents. RP’s fine parks have too long been abandoned by the city. Perhaps such a project would help turn things around.

McSorely and his fellow Loyola Park Keepers have done the heavy lifting in terms of soliciting donations, the RPGG has helped bring in additional volunteers and spread the word, but, sadly, our attempts to obtain trees and shrubbery from Natural Resources failed and the plants we thought we would get for the project aren’t coming through – which also means that the original plans we’d created for the site may not work now. The Loyola Park Keepers are busy fundraising, the Rogers Park Garden Group is busy helping to draw up plans and conscript more volunteers. The plan (!) is to get enough funding so that a planting can be done in conjunction with the Artist of the Wall festival, the theme of which this year is “The Secret Garden.” Karen has taken seeds and potting soil to Christopher House to engage the children in the project. They pot the seeds and then on June 16 we will show them how to plant them.

On May 29 at 7 p.m., the Garden Group will meet at Rogers Park Presbyterian Church at 7059 N. Greenview, Fellowship Room. Christy Webber of Christy Webber Landscapes will give a presentation on container gardening and we’ll discuss the Loyola Park Keepers Circle Park project. Please join us for this mutually beneficial event where Christy, who has done a lot of city landscape projects (and who is otherwise awesome), will give you great ideas for your own container garden. In exchange, we’d love to have you join (only $10/year gets you free meeting attendance). This will be our last free meeting before we have to start charging admission (the founding members of the Garden Group have self-financed this start up and we’re running out of cash!). Most importantly, the Circle Park project needs volunteers – your labor, your money, your time. Come out and play in the dirt and help revitalize our lovely park! We’d like to see this first community garden project be a smash success and take your ideas for future projects.

See you May 29th!