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Photos by Sydney Cromwell.
Edgewood Garden Club members work on planting in the former stone pool at Woodland Nature Park.
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Boy Scout Troop 97 creates new stone paths for park benches.
Jan Lawler lives across the street from Woodland Nature Park on Woodland Drive. It’s where she walks her dog every day and where neighborhood kids come to play. It was also in need of a little love.
Lawler is a three-year Homewood resident and joined the Edgewood Garden Club about a year ago. When they discussed potential new projects at a monthly meeting, Lawler suggested beautification of her neighborhood park.
With some help from the city and Boy Scout Troop 97, the Edgewood Garden Club got to work in October and November. The old stone pool in the park, built by a former Woodland Drive resident decades ago, was cleared of overgrown and invasive plants, to make room for new soil, a stone path and species that are built to thrive in Alabama’s climate.
“We need to plant native plants here so that they don’t get diseases; they thrive in this climate,” Lawler said.
Fellow garden club member Suzanne Clisby, who was raised in Homewood and returned to the city 20 years ago, said the plants in the pool include sassafras, Alabama snow wreath, Alabama croton, Solomon seal, woodland phlox, beautyberry, bloodroot and dwarf crested iris. Some plants were bought at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, while others were donated by garden club members or even dug up from their own backyards.
Planting native Alabama species, Clisby said, helps the entire local ecosystem much more than species brought from other states or around the world.
“[It’s] something to support native fauna as well, like birds and pollinators,” Clisby said.
Aside from the native plant bed, members of Troop 97 washed and painted benches around the park and re-laid the stonework around them. Clisby said the garden club also is working on tagging the trees around the park with species information and will post a sign on the pool to let people know what they can do in a garden and why it’s important to plant native species.
Though the initial work was completed in November, the garden club will have to continue to maintain the work they’ve done. One hiccup in this plan is the ongoing drought in the county, which restricts their water use. Clisby brought her own rain barrel and set up a way to draw water from the creek running through the park as a temporary measure until water levels rise. She said she is somewhat concerned about the trees in the park, but thinks most of them will survive.
“The drought has put a kink in the whole thing because we can’t water it,” Lawler said.
Woodland Nature Park is different from most other city parks because it’s meant to be kept as close to natural forest as possible. Clisby said leaves are left on the ground to create compost rather than being swept up and thrown away. The club is also working on developing trees to replant areas of the park that were damaged by a tornado in the past.
Aside from the ongoing care of Woodland Nature Park, the Edgewood Garden Club also works on the Green Skies and Centennial Tree projects in Homewood, hosts monthly educational meetings and yearly junior gardener meetings and takes on other planting and improvement projects throughout the city.
