By Andrew Bunting, PHS Vice President of Horticulture
After finishing a successful PHS tour of the gardens of the Chicagoland area, I headed to the south side of Chicago to meet up with Chris Fehlhaber, who had been a gardener at Chanticleer for 10 years before moving with his wife and son to the mid-west.
Like Philadelphia, Chicago has thousands of vacant lots. On these vacant lots there are many provocative “green” interventions being executed by several organizations and individuals to beautify the city. One of the leaders in this movement is Annamaria Leon, co-owner of Homan Grown, a gardening social enterprise which is working with neighbors in the west and south-side of Chicago. Working with her business partner, Pastor Reshorna Fitzpatrick and garden designer and activist, Chris Abraham they introduced gravel gardens as a low maintenance greening approach.
To transform the vacant lots, they worked with Greencorps Chicago, an environmentally focused workforce training program to help transform the vacant lots. Additionally, the city started Adopt A Lot program to help to revitalize city-owned vacant lots.
The gravel gardens allowed them to create beautiful spaces that would require less maintenance than a traditional garden. To design and install the gardens they brought together a team which included Chris Abraham, Leo Boler and horticulture advisers Jens Jensen, Roy Diblik and Jeff Epping. They developed urban tough palettes of plants with a mix of prairie-inspired plants, including asters, little blue stem, coneflowers, wild quinine, purple prairie clover, meadow blazing star and yarrow that would bloom from April to October. By the end of the summer in 2023 the team had completed nine gravel gardens spanning 35 lots in the Humboldt Park and Englewood Neighborhoods. Work has continued today with additional partners including Grow Greater Englewood and the Englewood Arts Collective.
