Dear Friends,

The Friends House gardens enrich our lives with their variety and beauty. We love the friendly connections we share as we cultivate a wide variety of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. I write to you as the head of the garden committee of the Friends House Seniors Association to report on some of our life-enriching work. Our mission is to maintain the gardens for the benefit of all in the community, providing fresh vegetables, herbs, and fruit for the use of all our residents. Everything is organically gardened, and we are very proud of our state-of the art composting system. We have two fenced acres, so our plants are safe from hungry deer. (The groundhogs and rabbits are another story!)

A particular joy last year was that the seven hives of our garden apiary produced an unprecedented 120 pounds of honey. Our bees are thriving! Resident volunteers participated in the harvesting and sale of honey, with proceeds going to support the garden.

Individual residents tend personal garden plots, raised beds, and handicapped accessible table beds for their own use and pleasure. Hard-working volunteers look after community crops: we deliver tomatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, berries, okra, and more to a central location, and residents can help themselves to whatever they can use. Our garden is also full of blossoms. The cutting gardens tended by volunteers provide fresh flowers for all to enjoy. Common areas of the main building and all of healthcare always have artful arrangements in place.

I could say a lot about our butterfly garden, rose garden, Shakespeare garden, berry patches, and fruit trees – peach, apple, fig, and pawpaw. There’s also our state-of-the-art greenhouse, where seeds are started under lights in spring and houseplants are propagated year round. We are so grateful for the connections our garden cultivates – connections between those of us who live here and between us and the earth of our beautiful campus. Sometimes, I’m not sure that a gardening project will work, only to be especially gratified when a resident new to gardening discovers her new creative powers. Emmy, for example, who, as a novice gardener, took on a large plot and started a wildly diverse collection of seeds. In her first year, some plants thrived and others languished, but with Emmy’s tender loving care, her garden has become one of our favorite examples of how gardening enriches everyone’s lives.

Lucille Ridlon, For the Garden Committee