Visiting Garden Walk Buffalo, where gardens are a ‘social and cultural change agent’
America’s largest garden walk is as much about community connection as it is about plants, writes Anne Bokma.
Updated July 24, 2024 at 3:44 p.m.
Walter Myles isn’t the usual kind of person you expect to see on a garden tour, stereotypically the purview of older white women — and his garden isn’t typical either.
A retired “railroad man,” Myles, 73, has turned his expansive front lawn on the Humboldt Parkway on Buffalo’s east side into a civil rights monument.
Along with overflowing baskets of petunias and impatiens, beds of Black-eyed Susan, and hydrangeas with blooms as big as bread loaves, there are dozens of blown-up images, encased in plastic and affixed to garden stakes, of people who played a key role in the civil rights movement, from Nelson Mandela to Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks to Sidney Poitier.
There are also images of fallen police, firefighters and veterans, including his brother who left medical school when he was drafted to Vietnam and spent the rest of his life suffering from exposure to Agent Orange. His garden is also a memorial to those murdered simply for being Black, most notably the 10 Black people who were shot and killed in a racially motivated mass shooting at a supermarket in the city two years ago.
Myles is full of fascinating stories. He was the paper boy for Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress who was known for taking a stand against economic, social, and political injustices. (“She made me the man I am today,” he says). He’ll show you a photo of his grandmother, Mary Rena Williams Myles. Born into slavery, she raised 20 children, lived to 100 and was a midwife who cultivated plants to help heal people. She’s the one who inspired him to become a gardener. He designed his unique plot “to uplift people,” he says.
Buffalo is a city that, much like Myles’ garden, shows its politics on its front porches with an abundance of Pride flags, Black Lives Matter flags and Stand with Ukraine flags — messages that wave in the wind and let you know what kind of people live inside.
It’s a city also famous for its gardens. Myles’ garden is part of the East Side Walk, happening this weekend (July 20 and 21), which is helping to bridge the racial divide that segregates the city (the majority of Black residents live on the east side and the garden walk is designed to attract residents from other parts of the city).
Dawn Martin Berry-Walker, who runs a jazz festival in Buffalo, initiated the East Side Walk. “Garden tours are traditionally white. You think Black people don’t have gardens?” she asks. “We wanted to change that perception.”
Adds Laurie Ousley, president of Gardens Buffalo Niagara: “In one of the most racially segregated cities in America, gardens are bringing people together. They are acting as a social and cultural change agent.”
While the East Side Walk began six years ago, the city’s largest garden event is Garden Walk Buffalo, now in its 30th year. It takes place July 27 and 28, includes more than 300 gardens and attracts some 80,000 visitors. It’s entirely democratic in that it’s free and anyone can take part. (An additional third tour is Open Gardens, a curated selection of 100 gardens open for viewing on Thursdays and Fridays in July.)
We were fortunate to get a sneak preview of the Garden Walk last weekend and began with Ellie Dorritie’s 19th-century cottage in the popular Summer Lane neighbourhood. Dorritie, 82, has been part of the walk almost since its inception. She spends her early evenings on her front porch where she’s surrounded by clematis, phlox and baskets of pink petunias. (“They’re a pedestrian flower but they smell great,” she says.)
A ”red diaper baby,” (her parents were Communists), Dorritie says gardens bring people together in meaningful ways. “People get outside and talk to each other. They share cuttings. The trouble with the suburbs is everyone stays in their backyard.”
Across the street, Kitty Herrick, 70, owns a cottage with a front garden lined with Endless Summer and Lacecap hydrangeas, while the meandering back garden is filled with artwork, garden ornaments and mirrors she’s salvaged over the years. As she joins us on our walk she eyes a large colourful piece of artwork on the curb awaiting garbage pickup. There’s a gleam in her eye. “I’m gonna get that,” she says and disappears up the street with the large canvas under her arm.
We take a break with a light lunch on the outdoor patio of Remedy House coffee bar before checking out more gardens: Joe Lindelow’s urban forest with a small woodland of 30 trees he planted when he moved in 15 years ago, Joe Hopkins and Scott Dunlop’s backyard oasis that attracted the interest of Martha Stewart, thanks to its playful touches such as colourful plaster flower heads with various types of greenery bursting from their crowns, and a fountain sculpture of a dog “peeing” in a pond.
Jim Charlier’s storybook Harry Potter garden is a must-stop on the walk, thanks to its many magical references to the famous wizard, including his potting shed with the address 215 ¾ (his house number plus a reference to Platform 9 ¾ where Harry takes the train to his wizard world) and its odd-looking plants named after, and inspired by, Harry Potter herbology: scurvy grass, venomous tentacula, gurdyroot and puffapod.
At the end of each of two long days of touring on foot, we find ourselves exhausted and gratefully crawl into the comfy king-size beds at the InnBuffalo, an elegantly restored 1898 mansion, for a long nap before waking to determine which restaurants to try in town (we settled on a delicious sampling of small plates at The Dapper Goose and Cucina, an Italian restaurant in the Richardson Hotel).
Buffalo has plenty of attractions on offer. Check out the newly renovated AKG Art Museum, the Buffalo and Erie Botanical Gardens, and the Frank Lloyd Wright—designed Martin House, which has recently undergone a magnificent restoration of its historic gardens.
For the rest of July, its gardens are the main attraction, not just for their beauty but for the remarkable way they connect people and neighbourhoods in the city.
“Gardens are a great connector because they help you know your neighbours,” says Ousley of Gardens Buffalo Niagara. “I think they can be seen as a huge experiment in changing the world for the better.”