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The 5 senses Garden and community gardens in general relate directly to what we have been talking about in class the past couple weeks. In class, we have talked a lot about the gardens and Earth as something we are allowed to take from but we also must give back to. In a community garden we see that we can take fruit and vegetables and it aids us in building a community within Kalamazoo, but in return we must give our time, patience and love to the garden. This idea is seen very clearly in the Selu story as well as Gardens in the Dunes. In the Selu story, the boys must give back to the Earth after they disrespect the corn. This is much different than Grandma Fleet's approach in which  she displays  giving and nurturing the Earth and then honoring what you receive in return. We see this in the way she appreciates and uses every part of the plants that she takes. What I appreciate most about community gardens is that they not only give food, they also provide an outdoor space and community. I really like that the garden also includes a bench because nature is a spiritual place for a lot of people.

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The aspect of the 5 Senses Garden being used as a sanctuary for students and visitors to escape the troubles of daily life reminded me of the readings we have done for class. There have been a couple of readings such as The Garden of Eden and Gardens as a Metaphor that discussed this exact phenomenon. I found it fascinating that there is a lot of history in this garden, such as the connection that it had to disabled students in 1965. The history of the garden makes me very excited to work here! I would like to ask Paul about the history of the land before the garden existed.

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Throughout the three articles, it is clear that the 5 Senses Garden is an integral part of the Kalamazoo and greater community. It has a rich and important history, and it has played an important role in the lives of many individuals. This garden can be largely connected back to one of our first readings called "The Garden as Idea, Place, and Action." This garden was originally designed for children with disabilities, and it has continued to evolve from its original mission. The 5 Senses Garden can be connected to all three of the main ideas in the aforementioned article. For example, in regard to "idea", the Garden was created as a gathering place for different groups. of individuals. Also, in regard to "place," the garden is a physical place and was physically designed to accommodate and encourage gatherings. Finally, in regard to "action," community members are encouraged to work together to care for the garden.

After reading the articles, I am excited to work in the garden mainly because of its history. I had no idea that the garden had begun 50 years ago, and clearly, it has gone through a number of transformations during this time, particularly as a result of the work that is done by the caretakers of the garden. I am excited to bring change to this garden and help improve it for the community.

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One fact about this garden is that the original purpose of this garden was to help people with disabilities use all five of their senses in a way that encompasses giving back to nature.  It is exciting to me that I get to be an active part in keeping this garden alive and am able to show my appreciation for the people and nature of the Kalamazoo area through working in the Five Senses Garden.  This garden is something that anyone is able to enjoy, relating to the book Gardens in the Dunes.  The pleasure that people get from becoming involved with plants and gardens is very widespread.  Similar to the novel where we see two different perspectives on gardening from Edward and Indigo’s family, the Five Senses Garden is very inclusive to any person who wants to enjoy the nature and plants here, including the students in the Kalamazoo Public School system and anyone else in the community knowing of the garden.

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One way that this garden connects to some other readings is how the 5 senses garden was actually neglected for a few years but it has obviously has come back to life now better than ever. This reminds me of the two girls in ‘Gardens in the dunes” when the grandmother mentions that even though some gardens looks run down now, they will be there long after us and they always have a change to come back.

One reason I am excited to start gardening at the five senses garden is to hear of all the ways the garden has changed and transformed after the 50 years it has been open!

One question I have is how can I get the full experience of the garden as fast as possible? The articles talk about how wonderful this garden is for all five senses and I would love to experience this right away

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Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Vine Neighborhood series.

Oak Street Community Garden founder Martha Gonzalez didn't set out to start a community garden, she set out to make her neighborhood safer.

Her first visit to the Cedar Street house that would become her and her daughter's home was in the middle of the morning almost 10 years ago. The street was quiet and peaceful. She approached a young woman sitting on a step eating a bowl of cereal to ask what the neighborhood was like. She remembers the woman said it was "great, really great."

Later she learned that great by day was not necessarily great by night.

"Of course at that time I first visited, everybody was sleeping," says Gonzalez, laughing. "The Millennials were under the blankets."

After the sale on the house went through, Gonzalez returned in the evening to assess what she would need to start fixing up the house.

"I could see that the neighborhood I saw in the morning was very different than the neighborhood that I saw at night," says Gonzalez. There was loud music, vagrants on corners, and what looked to be prostitutes on the street. "I was really frightened. I thought I had moved into a nice neighborhood, but I had moved into a really scary, dark neighborhood."

Gonzalez had chosen the neighborhood because it was close to Western Michigan University, where her daughter, Stephanie Ceron, would be a freshman, but now she was afraid for her daughter to return late at night from studying.

She was also alarmed by what she saw as she was watching young students from out of town move into the neighborhood with their name brand clothes and fresh haircuts, then be baited by drug dealers who offered them free samples at parties. Months later, those same students would drop out of school, Gonzalez says. A year later, she would see them homeless, and as often as not, she would end up offering them food.

"I love my daughter and youth are the future of this country and of the world," says Gonzalez. "I felt the urgent need to do something about it. But I didn't know what to do."

For almost 10 years, Martha Gonzalez has been working tirelessly to make her part of the neighborhood both beautiful and safe. At the hub of some of the trouble was a reputed crack house, a meth house combined with what Gonzalez suspects was also a prostitute ring, and a liquor store, the Oak Street Market, all within a block of each other.

"The Oak Street Market was an eyesore," says Gonzalez. "It was tremendously ugly. Homeless people would hang out at the door asking for money. And sometimes they would follow the kids and mug them. Everything nasty you could see there."

When you want to live in the kind of neighborhood you desire it to be, sometimes you have to be not just friendly, but fierce. Gonzalez was up to the task, even after being threatened with a knife by a man who ran the meth lab, and also being stalked by a former sex offender.

"For a while, I was scared to do the gardening and scared to walk the dog," says Gonzalez. "But I come from Columbia, which has been in a civil war for so many years. I have seen people fall in front of me. The guy came at me with a little knife. It takes more than a little knife to scare me."

So Gonzalez began making calls. She perched herself at the corner of her yard, where now a wheelbarrow planted with flowers sits, and gathered 150 signatures for a petition to the city commission to request the closure of the Oak Street Market. As the store had violations for serving to minors, the market's liquor license was revoked. And shortly after, the owner stopped paying his taxes. "They auctioned his place and the neighborhood association bought it for a dollar," she says.

"I walked on my eyelashes after that I was so happy," says Gonzalez.

The building was demolished, and with the help of many entities and people, including Assistant City Manager Laura Lam, Building Blocks, and the Vine Neighborhood Association, the site was cleared to make way for a neighborhood garden.

Five years ago, the Oak Street Community Garden began with a few neighbors who wanted to grow flowers and vegetables. Gonzalez herself planted the corners with flowers and plants she "dumpster dived" for at local greenhouses. She has had more than 50 people helping to clear brush and weed the garden of raised beds.

Both Fruit of the Vine and the Oak Street Community Garden sponsor a Little Free Library, a perfect pairing.

Nowadays, the neighborhood that Gonzalez lives in is "really great," just as she was told it was when she first arrived. She credits a "cocktail of factors," including the condemning of the former meth house, the departure of the crack dealers, and the arrival of more and more families.

"She's very passionate about gardening and flowers and about the neighborhood as a whole. Seriously, it's like her full-time job," says daughter, Stephanie, about her mother's tireless efforts. "She would do whatever she could to help this neighborhood."

Gonzalez is known as the "Neighborhood Watch Woman." Her garden is also the mother of many gardens on the block, where her plant babies have found second homes.

Community gardens not only beautify a neighborhood, they also let people know that residents care about their community. For Steve Walsh, VNA Director, community gardens also serve as a space for "nontraditional community outreach.

"There are folks that won't necessarily go to the neighborhood association, but will go to a garden. That's really helpful to me as far in terms of having meaningful contact. The garden offers a neutral spot to connect in a different capacity."

Gonzalez says she took her own inspiration from Building Blocks, particularly founder Kim Cummings, with its model of working together to beautify a neighborhood and create community.

"I care for this neighborhood because it's my neighborhood," says Gonzalez. "Kim cares for this neighborhood because he loves humans and he's good and it's his service to God. He doesn't live here. But he pours his heart into this community."

Fruit of the Vine celebrated its fifth anniversary this spring with a neighborhood gathering and visit from the banana car.

She says when she feels tired or discouraged, she thinks of Cummings, who throws himself into the work, despite back trouble and dealing with cancer.

"I strived to be a part of the community and not just stay in my nest. For a while I was in my nest like the rest of the gringos here," she says, laughing, "looking at the bullfights from the distance. But I realized, in this neighborhood, we are going to have to be united. We're going to have to know who lives here to protect ourselves."

As Gonzalez looks across her own vibrant, blooming yard, she can see the Oak Street Community Garden, with its tall milkweed, a whimsically painted shed, and the Little Free Library out front, and says she feels proud.

"I know my neighborhood. I know everyone around here," says Gonzalez, who also credits her "biggest ally," her beloved Lhasa Apso, Romeo. "I'm always out here walking my dog, but out of the corner of my eye, I'm looking to see what's going on.

"Right now I can walk at 3 o'clock in the morning with my dog," says Gonzalez, reaching down and tucking Romeo into her lap. "And I have no fear."

Fruit of the Vine: Nibbles for nothing and looks for free

Around the same time the Oak Street Community Garden formed five years ago, another structure was being demolished on the southeast side of the neighborhood, and another intrepid gardener was hatching a plan.

The house at 1017 S. Park Street had been vacant for eight years and had fallen into serious disrepair. When the city demolished the property, nextdoor neighbor Sally Reynolds leapt into action.

"I went up and down the street and knocked on doors to see if anyone wanted to create a community fruit garden," says Reynolds, who had already planted a Monarch Waystation in the back of the property since the two houses shared a driveway. Her own home has no grass in the yard and is lush with Victorian gardens filled with lilies and roses and plentiful artwork. "There was a positive response so we started planning it out."

Reynolds, who believes in acting first and asking later, began guerilla gardening on the newly vacant property, which she explains as "gardening like it's yours even if you don't own it," a term that was coined by the Green Guerilla group in 1973 in New York City's the Bowery Houston area. It's a form of eco-activism.

"Within a couple of weeks, I put a big banner out on stakes that said, 'Fruit Garden Coming,'" says Reynolds, a Decorating Consultant at Douglas & Son, Inc., which also regularly supplies food for garden gatherings. "We didn't want a parking lot and we didn't want a garbage dump."

"She lived next door to a really dodgy house," says Walsh. "Rather than sit around and wait for something to happen, she went out there and made it happen."

Before Sally Reynolds launched Fruit on the Vine, she grew her own raspberries, which she invited neighborhood children to pick.

Reynolds, who has an eye for beauty and potential, salvaged stones from the original home's foundation, which were then transformed into a beautiful stone garden wall. Cinder blocks were used as garden boundaries. With the help of many volunteers, including several directed her way by Walsh and the VNA, the once "big and ugly house" lot morphed into a charming and verdant fruit garden. It grows pear, peach and apple trees, currants, gooseberries, and goji berries, thimbleberries, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, rhubarb and ample strawberries, wild, June bearing and everbearing. One of the apple trees is espaliered, which means pruned for ornamental and safe-saving purposes.

Why fruit? "For one thing, there were no fruit gardens in Kalamazoo that I could find," says Reynolds, laughing. "For another, you only have to plant it once."

The garden was dubbed Fruit of the Vine, and now even has an official garden artist, Kendra Leep, who will be creating a tree mural on the fence in the coming year. Like Rodriguez, Reynolds credits Building Blocks as being an example for creating community through collaborative beautification.

"We spent a long time reconditioning the soil," says Reynolds, using peat moss and a special brand of fertilizer she calls "llamalizer," thanks to a friend of hers who owns llamas.

The charming garden garners a lot of interest, both from people and from creatures, especially birds, and Reynolds likes it that way.

"This garden is not only for people who live here, it's geared for anyone who is walking by," she says. "Many times those people may be food insecure. This is for anyone who would like some nibbles."

The only guideline, Reynolds says, is "please don't eat all of something because others would like a little, as well."

Reynolds laughs when she considers that she originally planned only a small garden in her "tiny, little yard" and "now I'm like, what have I done?"

But she says she can't imagine not having Fruit of the Vine. Three years after the building was demolished, the property went into foreclosure and the city sold it to Reynolds through a Good Neighbor Grant.
Flowers in bloom in the Vine.
Through the garden, she's met neighbors and worked with children, some who hadn't realized how the fruit they eat grows. Each year, she hosts a Fruit of the Vine gathering. This year, on the garden's fifth anniversary, she invited the banana car and was surprised to have 85 neighbors arrive instead of the usual 35. She makes jam from a handful of Fruit of the Vine strawberries that she adds to quarts she purchases from the Farmer's Market and gives them away to neighbors each Christmas.

"If you don't have a reason to gather, you don't gather," says Reynolds. "This has pretty much forced me to meet people and invite them here."

When she's gardening, she talks to those who walk by, and in this way, keeps up with what's happening around the neighborhood.

"The most gratifying part of having the garden is just seeing people feel comfortable coming up and wandering through it," says Reynolds. "Every now and then when I get up early in the morning, I open up the shade and someone will be sitting there, nibbling on strawberries. So I just quietly put the shade back down and let them be."

Photos by Taylor Scamehorn, unless otherwise indicated. See more of her work here.

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Stewards of community gardens tend plants and people in Kalamazoo's Vine

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Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Vine Neighborhood series . Oak Street Community Garden founder Martha Gonzalez didn't set out to start a community garden, she set out to make her neighborhood safer.

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Location:

1411 Oakland Drive, Kalamazoo
map

Contact:

Name: Michael McDonnell
email: Michael.mcdonnell@wmich.edu

Description:

The Five Senses Garden is a small public garden located on the grounds of the Kennedy Center, part of the Kalamazoo Public Schools system. The garden was designed to support the programs of Center by engaging students in a setting that appeals to all five of the senses. The Five Senses Garden serves clients of the Center for Disability Studies, but is also a wonderful place for anyone to spend some time walking through the plantings, or sitting and enjoying the views throughout the year.

The garden is located at 1411 Oakland Drive in Kalamazoo,across Oakland Drive from both the Kalamazoo Center for Medical Studies (KCMS) and Western Michigan University's College of Health and Human Services and its Center for Disability Services. There is a parking lot close to the entrance and the garden is totally accessible.

History of the Five Senses Garden:

The Kennedy Center was completed in 1965 to house a program of instruction for developmentally disabled students in the Kalamazoo school system. Soon after it opened, a number of members of the Kalamazoo Garden Council were on a tour of the Kennedy Center and noticed the lack of landscaping on the property and decided to do something about it. As part of the overall plan, the Five Senses Garden was designed to support the programs of the Center by engaging students in a setting that appeals to all five of the senses.

The heart of the garden is a series of three circular "rooms" connected by a winding path that leads the visitor through the five senses from smell to touch, on to hearing, taste and finally sight when you leave the constraint of the walled rooms. Sculptures add interest and benches allow for rest and contemplation.

The garden was completed in 1969. The garden was one of the first designed to engage the developmentally disabled and won a special citation from the American Association of School Administrators in 1970 and was included in the 1969 report of the President's Commission on Mental Health.

Over the ensuing years the students of the Kennedy Center were mainstreamed into the general school population. The facility went through a number of uses and the Five Senses Garden sat neglected and ignored for a number of years. In 2000 Dr Dennis (Denny) Lyne rediscovered the garden and was instrumental in reviving it for Kalamazoo Public Schools' Early Childhood program that was then stationed at the Kennedy Center. The garden has been maintained through the generosity of many community organizations and volunteers over the years.

Because of generous donations, the garden was expanded in 2006 by adding a raised bed making it easier for clients of the Center for Disability Studies to work the soil, tend the plants and experience the pleasure of plants they helped grow.

The garden has come full circle back to its original purpose of engaging special people with the wonders of plants and gardening.

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1411 Oakland Drive, Kalamazoo map Name: Michael McDonnell email: Michael.mcdonnell@wmich.edu The Five Senses Garden is a small public garden located on the grounds of the Kennedy Center, part of the Kalamazoo Public Schools system. The garden was designed to support the programs of Center by engaging students in a setting that appeals to all five of the senses.

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Local garden that stimulates senses celebrates 50th anniversary

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A local garden with a twist is celebrating their 50th year in the West Michigan community with a gathering that arouses the senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell.The 5 Senses Garden at Phoenix High School on 1411 Oakland Drive celebrated their go

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I have provided 2 links to articles discussing the 5 senses garden and its history, as well as a link to an article that interviews the founder of the Vine Garden for you all to read this week. To prepare you for orientation next week, and get you excited about the work you will be doing this quarter, please read the articles and write a short (1-2 paragraph) response on one or more of the following response questions:

1) Are there any aspects of the 5 Senses Garden that relate to some of the readings you've done in class so far?
2) What is one fact about the garden you learned that makes you excited to get to help develop it this quarter?
3) Do you have any questions, after reading these articles, that you would like to ask Paul at the orientation?

I know you all will not be working in the Vine garden, however the Second Wave article is really interesting so feel free to write about it! Your classmates in the Vine group will be working alongside Martha, who still lives right across the street from the Oak St. Garden in the Vine neighborhood.