In its eighth year, the West Salem Garden Tour will be held Saturday.
The neighborhood constantly moves into new territory while honoring its deep historical roots. Fueled by an influx of young professionals, West Salem’s tour remains the area’s most creative and handmade garden tour. You won’t find landscapers spreading mulch before the tour in this neighborhood. The gardens are a product of their owners’ fertile imaginations and creative responses to the land they live on.
The end product is a tour full of ideas. You’re sure to go home with your creative fuels fired.
Diversity is king in West Salem, and the tour encompasses everything from community gardens to permaculture and edible landscaping with a healthy helping of what the area is best known for: cottage gardens.
Eighteen gardens are on the tour, according to Apryl Roland, who served as my unofficial, pre-tour guide. Roland’s garden is on the tour. Five of the gardens are community gardens. Old Salem is opening the historic Miksch Garden in an attempt to cover the wide expanse of gardening history in the community.
We visited Judith Ruff’s extensive backyard garden filled with heirloom plants and classic garden ornaments. Ruff said there was essentially a blank slate when she started. Ruff’s garden hit on some of the themes that reverberate throughout the neighborhood, a common one being recycling and repurposing. Bricks in Ruff’s garden came from the resurfacing of West Street, Ruff said. Roland said her bricks came from the demolition of the Coke bottling plant.
We cruised past Jeff Ayers’ extensive and beautiful vegetable garden, one you may have noticed if you travel Broad Street. It will be open for the tour.
So will the West Salem Community Garden. That’s where we met Greg Levoniuk, the garden’s coordinator, and Del Perry, who started it all. They were among the squash, beans and tomatoes.
This garden has been on the tour several times, but this year it has expanded to neat, terraced beds and rows of orderly staked plants. The garden is divided into plots cared for by individuals and those tended by a team of about 15.
The wonderful thing about this garden is that the food is bundled into bags and placed at the top of the garden, free for the taking.
Last year, according to Perry, they gave away 696 bags of mixed vegetables, a wonderful resource for those in need. In addition, 95 percent of the food raised in the personal plots is given away, too. Seeds and supplies for the community garden are paid for by the West Salem Garden Club and the West Salem Neighborhood Association. This year, they are hoping to top 1,000 bags since the garden has expanded from 1,600 square feet to 5,700. The odds are good that they’ll hit their goal.
On to the edible landscape of Josh Sutter. He rented a sod cutter a few years back and took out his front yard. He replaced it with strawberries and mixed-seasonal vegetables.
“Originally, there were a lot of wild strawberries and wild onions so I planted strawberries and onions,” Sutter said. “I figured they’d do well here.”
He figured right. Sutter picked 17 gallons of berries from his front yard this spring, and plenty more went to others who asked if they could join in the bounty.
Sutter has 95 percent of his landscape dedicated to edibles and herbs, using companion planting and permaculture principles. He will be setting up a hydroponic system in his backyard to demonstrate the efficiency of growing plants without soil. Sutter will also be giving away strawberry plants while they last.
As the evening darkened, we visited the home and garden of Mary Margaret and Jack Smith. This garden sprang from personal crisis and has served as an oasis to these transplants from the West End. Mary Margaret broke both her legs after falling down a set of porch stairs. She had just recovered from hip surgery when this happened. She spent three and a half months in a wheelchair and was then diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer.
As she recovered, she designed a garden and Jack made it happen. It is a restful spot full of shade and cool-blue hydrangeas and plants that have been gathered and passed on, divided and shared with friends. It is punctuated with very fine statuary and bird baths and serves as a sanctuary and respite, a place to nurture and heal a battered, but not broken spirit.
West Salem Neighborhood Association won the 2012 Community Appearance Commission Award for its collaborative effort to enhance the community through a tree-planting event. Called the West Salem Tree Project, the effort covered two plantings in October, a collaborative effort between the city and the neighborhood association. The association raised $10,000 to help fund the planting, including a $2,500 contribution from the West Salem Garden Club.
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