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Gardens Flourish at Mississippi Market
by Georgiana Podulke, Garden Coordinator

If you love gardens, come and be a part of the flower gardens at Mississippi Market! Whether you are a rookie or a seasoned gardener, you are a welcome presence. You need not commit yourself to regular times, and there is always someone to work with you. At Selby, you can drop in any Saturday morning 7-10 or Wednesday afternoon 4-6. At Randolph, work sessions are arranged; ask the co-op to have a gardener call you back.

The sunny boulevard garden at the Randolph store, with its bright poppies and cornflowers, zinnias and moss roses, has been thriving since the early nineties. The long border garden, with its climbing roses and perennials, was added a few years later. "This is why I come to the co-op" is a frequent comment made by passing shoppers to gardeners working among the flowers. Monarchs flutter in the tall verbenas, small children detour to examine ants on the flat rocks. A small bounteous place of life, flowering and blooming on the edge of a city sidewalk.

At the Selby store, a high-spirited group of gardeners materialized from the neighborhood and co-op community to create, out of a waste of rubble, last summer's garden of colorful annual flowers on the west side of the parking lot. Home to crickets and visited by an array of butterflies, the garden is increasingly a place to come to for neighbors and shoppers. Benches and rocks are now in place, and perennials such as roses and peonies, purple coneflower and silver sage, delphiniums and false dragon-head provide some structure among the annuals. Oak-savannah community plants have been established, including meadow rose and wild juniper, plus a shrubby area including kinnikinick, chokecherries and hazelnuts for wildlife. Shade trees are getting a start along Dale, and roses now border the Hague sidewalk. Next year we hope to have an irrigation system, for which funding would be helpful if there are any people out there with either money or good ideas for raising it, and we dream of a fountain.

A shady woodland wildflower garden is getting started under the bur oak, which will include many native plants we don't yet have. If you have any of them in your garden and are willing to share divisions, these include solomon's seal, wild ginger, jack-in-the-pulpit, lady slipper, trillium, bloodroot, ferns and columbine. We have also laid in limestone rocks for a terraced garden west of the building for prairie plants including echinacea purpurea, ratibida pinnata, tall silver sage, blue asters, shooting-star, indigo, false white dragons-head, asclepias tuberosa, blue gentian and Indian paint-brush. If you have any of these and would be willing to give us divisions, it would be wonderful.

At both sites, the hope is to create a place to be, a place to satisfy the soul, a place where people can gather to work and share and create community, which is an ever-renewing wellspring of vision and purpose.

We hope you will join us. For the creativity and beauty of it, we love every minute. Kneeling among flowers, we think, is one of life's sublime activities.

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