Add meaning to downtown growth: Garden

One of the nicest things about summer in Cincinnati is that you usually get out of town for a while. And when you come back, you see things in a different way.

I recently moseyed down south to Savannah, Ga., a city that now tops my list for the loveliest in the United States.

There is no doubt that, in the sisterhood of American cities, Cincinnati and Savannah got vastly different dippers of the gene pool. Cincinnati is all work ethic and industry. Savannah is good looks and good times.

At first, one credits Savannah's charm to some of the most graceful domestic architecture in the world. Then one realizes there is another piece to it, something Cincinnati could borrow from her older, wiser southern sister.

Gardens.

Savannah is a city of gardens and green spaces.

On the drive home, I thought about re-entering downtown Cincinnati. Where were the pockets of green? Where do small lots of flowers surprise tourists and soften concrete edges? There are examples of botanical excellence in Cincinnati, but most are tucked away in corners of the city - Eden Park or Spring Grove Cemetery. When Cincinnatians think downtown, nobody thinks green.

Just what downtown needs

Which wouldn't hurt downtown a bit.

Ben Long knows this better than anyone. As director of the Civic Garden Center's neighborhood garden program, he's not only been preaching the virtues of urban gardening for a long time, he's been demonstrating them.

On 33 plots, neighborhood gardens have taken root across the city. Black raspberries tumble across the fence at the Walnut Hills Community Garden. Behind it lie neat rows thick with cabbage, mustard greens and beets.

Old-fashioned hollyhocks shade the entrance to the Mount Auburn Garden Club, a terraced little surprise of a garden behind God's Bible School and College. Plots of flowers are interspersed with small vegetable gardens, each tended and ''owned'' by individual families.

At the Green Street Children's Garden in Over-The-Rhine, tiny raised beds bloom with geraniums, herbs and vegetables.

Each of these beds is an unexpected delight in the urban landscape. It is also an environmental and community development tool.

It puts to good use an overlooked lot once given to trash, rats and worse. It becomes a source of community pride, and often a community meeting place. Generations work together here, elderly residents sharing their garden expertise with neighborhood children. And it is one of those rare and precious places where suburban and urban dwellers come together as volunteers.

What if it moved out of the neighborhoods and into downtown proper?

''Maybe inner-city communities could teach downtown what could happen,'' Mr. Long says with a grin that could be mistaken for a challenge. ''Maybe they could provide the example.''

Suitable sites abound

The very thought of it makes me want to get out my trowel and head downtown.

Unlike most downtown development plans, a full-blown gardening thrust would be a project that people could own. It is work they could do with their own hands. And chances are, no one would have to pass a sales tax to pay for it.

Cincinnati is a city brimming with more life, creativity and community pride than our stuffed-shirt downtown shows. City leaders can plan the bricks-and-mortar stuff, but let's find a way to let the people of Cincinnati plant the charm.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

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Published July 6, 1996.