BY ALICIA GREEN | Held on Saturday, July 18 as a rain or shine event, this year’s edition of the annual Chelsea Garden Club Pit Tour had plenty of both — when local gardeners and their guests met at 9:30 a.m. to admire Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Avenue traffic lane tree pits that have been adopted and beautified by neighborhood volunteers. By the time they finished a few hours later, umbrellas deployed by the group as their tour began were eventually replaced with hands cupped over foreheads to block the sun.
“It’s really about the gardening,” said Missy Adams, a Garden Club member who led the tour. “It seemed like a nice way for everybody to get together and look at each other’s work, encourage one another and talk about the flowers. You learn a lot, and the people are very nice,” Adams said, adding, “It’s a happy event.”
As the tour began, five gardeners — Adams, Phyllis Waisman, Kent Wang, Michael Victor Ruggiero and Martha Seymour — met at W. 23rd St. and Seventh Ave. to look at the first two tree pits. As the day went on, however, more people showed up, eventually bringing the total to about 20.
Wang used to be responsible for both pits at the first location, until one of them was taken over by someone new.
“It’s a tough plot to reach,” Adams said, warning everyone to be careful of the traffic and noting that a tree was once there until a car hit it.
Wang’s other tree pit has also had some problems, including homeless people sleeping near it and other damages, which is why he obtained a permit from the city and took money out of his own pocket to purchase $1,000 worth of fencing to protect the area.
“I started because I was gardening on my fire escape and my landlord found out and asked me to remove the plants immediately,” Wang told Chelsea Now. “So I was looking for a place for them to go.”
He added, “It’s just too heartbreaking to see people step on your plants, so I decided to make the investment.” He said since putting up the fences, people have started to respect his pits.
Seymour said Wang has made “quite a contribution” to the neighborhood with his pits. He also has two more on W. 23rd St. between Seventh and Eighth Aves.
Seymour — who refers to herself as an “armchair gardener” because she enjoys reading about the topic, but doesn’t actually come out and dig in the dirt — noted of her first time attending the tour, “It’s great to learn more about the individuals who do the gardening and the range of different people who live in the neighborhood who help.”
As the tour moved to W. 23rd St. and Eighth Ave., more individuals showed up with umbrellas, ready to go.
Ariana Arancibia from the NYC Compost Project, which is hosted by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, came to talk with the group about what the center does. “We do composting initiatives, which includes collecting compost, giving compost and mulch to community gardens and people who take care of the trees,” she said.
Arancibia added that the Compost Project has a food scrap drop-off site on the southwest corner of Eight Ave. and W. 23rd St. every Tuesday and Thursday from 8–11 a.m. People can leave fruit and vegetable scraps, breads and grains, cut or dried flowers and other scraps to be turned into compost (for more info, visit lesecologycenter.org).
By the time the group reached W. 24th St. and Eighth Ave., the sun had finally emerged from behind the clouds — and many of the gardeners became passionate about one tree pit that was filled with weeds. They began to pull them, but Adams stopped the group, telling them she would talk to the gardener responsible about it.
At another pit, a woman examined the area, asking about whether or not it had weeds — to which Waisman replied, “Very much so.” This left the woman with the realization that her pit, too, had weeds.
“They’ll stand around a weed and talk about it for a half an hour,” Adams said. “It’s enjoyable.”
Although the group was critical of some pits, they also offered advice about each other’s work. They often praised pits, like the ones maintained by Luis Lujan, for the variety of flowers and plants.
“Everybody has their own fans,” Adams noted. “Everybody has their favorites. It’s nice that they’re all different. It’s very interesting. It’s fun.”
Altogether, Lujan takes care of four pits.
In his pit at W. 25th St. and Ninth Ave., he plants sunflowers, safflowers, flowering tobacco, purple hibiscuses and coneflowers, among other things. Then there is his pit at W. 27th St. and Ninth Ave., which he shares with newcomer Milt Verstandig, who moved to Chelsea two years ago.
“I cleaned it up originally,” Lujan said. “Then [Milt] planted it. We kind of water together, weed together [and] clean it together. This is kind of our nursery where we incubate seedlings, and then we transplant them or give them to people.”
While Adams says Lujan is taking over Ninth Ave., she wishes more people would adopt tree pits on Eighth Ave. She said she would be happy if the Chelsea Garden Club could get the rest of Eighth Ave. planted.
“We get volunteers or people who volunteer and think of this image of gardening as gardening in the suburbs, which is really a very different thing,” she said. “And that it’s going to be not as hard as it is. There are some real challenges here. We’ll have a rush of volunteers and then people just walk away because they realize they’re standing in the middle of the road and people are stealing their stuff or throwing garbage in it, or living in it. That gets discouraging.”
Ayla Daley expressed interest in adopting a pit at W. 28th St. and Eighth Ave.
“I have a five-year-old daughter,” she said. “We thought that would be so great.”
Daley continued, “Having a little green patch in the city sounds kind of nice. And just to help beautify my neighborhood, to take ownership and responsibility.”
Like many others, Daley thought the city was responsible for the beautification of the tree pits. She said, “I didn’t realize it was the Garden Club that handles them. People are making these things beautiful.”
Tree pits can be found on Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Aves. from 17th to 30th Streets. Visit chelseagardenclub.blogspot.com for more info on how to adopt a tree pit.
