In Community Gardens, Kids' Play and Plant Life Are a Bad Mix
Gardeners say that kids get so caught up in their fun that they are not aware of the garden plots they are running through. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
One morning last month, Susan Henderson cut the ribbon on a new sign at the entrance to the community gardens in Tribeca’s Washington Market Park. It was a small ceremony, quietly celebrating the gardens’ three decades and, more important, the posting of a serious message to parents and caregivers.
Watch where those small feet tread.
Henderson, 70, who has been working a plot since the gardens began, is one of a number of community gardeners in the park who have complained about unsupervised children trampling the beds or helping themselves to the gardens’ carefully tended plants. Now they have the long-requested sign that officially forbids such behavior.
The text is deftly worded, welcoming and finger-wagging at the same time.
“Please enjoy our garden and avoid walking in the plots or picking the flowers,” it reads. “Children accompanied by caregivers are always welcome.”
“Caregivers aren’t alerting children to the difference between the rest of the park and this area,” Henderson said. “A garden takes care and nobody’s showing them that.”
Washington Market Park is best known as a popular play space for small children, with wide-open lawn and an array of play equipment for different ages. It is only in the northern end, among the marigolds, cosmos and hostas, where you mostly find adults, planting, pruning and watering.
“There are a lot of spaces and activities in the park for children, but this is an area that also acknowledges the older generation,” said Monica Forestall, the community garden director for Friends of Washington Market Park. “It’s also the quietest, most peaceful part of the park.”
Peaceful, that is, when it is not a playground for squirt gun fights and spirited races through—not always around—some of the 49 garden plots
“After school this is one of the funnest places for older boys and girls to run,” Forestall said. “Just jumping to plot to plot to plot and not even aware that they’re stepping into things. Really, just kind of crushing plants.”
Henderson says she stopped growing annuals and started planting perennials because the showier, brighter and larger flowers were too tempting for kids to pick. Rebecca Solomon chooses not to grow flowers at all.
“I do herbs. Kids don’t know what to do with the herbs. They like flowers,” Soloman said. “And you can’t grow tomatoes because vegetables are so cute.”
“You don’t want to have the kids not come in here,” added Solomon, who has been gardening in the park for 10 years, “but they’re often in here so unsupervised and it is an issue.”
One recent afternoon last month, three children about nine years old repeatedly walked into the gardens, and with occasional glances to see if the coast was clear, picked unripened blueberries from two gardens and popped them in their mouths as they lefts. Older boys chased each other in and out of the community gardens, mostly running between the plots but sometimes stepping squarely into them.
But on another occasion, when a small child bent down to pick a flower, her mother quickly stopped her.
“No, no,” she said. “Those are very special flowers.”
Sarah Aronson, the Parks Department gardener at Washington Market Park, was among those who requested the sign. With caregivers on the other side of the park, she said, children “mutilated” the hose, rendering it unusable, and are oblivious of where they run.
“They do need supervising,” Aronson said. “I remind them about how footsteps can kill plants.”
For the most part, Forestall said, the kids don’t intend to hurt the plants.
“They’re so caught up with their fun,” she said, “they’re not really aware of what their bodies are doing.”