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Children's Garden at St. Nicholas Park

Help Friends of St. Nicholas Park transform an overgrown plant bed into a beautiful garden

Leader

Dan Fishman

Location

129th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue New York, NY 10030

About the project

Friends of St. Nicholas Park will clear and replant an overgrown area adjacent to the playground at 129th and St. Nicholas Terrace to create a Children’s Garden. The garden will be designed by NYC Parks employee Kim Wickers using "Hens and Chicks" (sempervivum) as well as yuccas. Sempervivum are succulent perennials that form mats composed of tufted leaves in rosettes. In favorable conditions, they spread rapidly via offsets or chicks, making for a spectacular ground cover. Once planted, the garden is designed to need very little maintenance.

With your support, FOSNP will purchase the remaining plant materials needed to make the garden possible. In addition, FOSNP will use the funds to pay a small honorarium to a local expert horticulturist to come to the park biweekly to teach children about plants. Kids will learn gardening first-hand, and every time they come to the playground, they will remember the work they did to help tend to our communal park.

The Steps

With the money in hand, our team will prepare the garden bed, purchase the plant materials, and install the garden this spring. By late spring or early summer the garden will be ready for a small ribbon-cutting. Educational programming will begin in the summer. Any surplus funds would go to purchasing additional plants and gardening supplies for future projects.

Why we‘re doing it

St. Nicholas Park -- the primary green space for much of West Harlem -- has only one seasonal gardener responsible for twenty-three acres of parkland. It's an impossible task even for the most dedicated gardener, and unfortunately it shows. Many areas of the park are overgrown, and existing the few flower beds are rarely maintained. Weeds grow and their roots create fissures in staircases.

To combat these conditions, last year Friends of St. Nicholas Park launched a volunteer gardening initiative called Harlem Hort. Every week neighbors planted flowers, removed brush and debris, and maintained horticulture. Working with NYC Parks, volunteers put in thousands of hours to restore five large beds; plant thousands of bulbs; and weed the park’s many staircases. While it’s not enough, the results are noticeable.

The Children's Garden continues the effort of Harlem Hort to beautify the park and expands the initiative to including positive, free educational programming for our West Harlem community.

$5,285.00 / $5,000.00