Jumping the Fence

These fresh fields are especially sweet.

by Bruce Schimmel

As I gobbled up fresh-picked strawberries at a harvest festival in East Fairmount Park recently, I couldn't recall the last time I ate any fruit quite so sweet. Eating a strawberry still warm from the sun is like tasting one for the very first time. Its essence goes straight to your head.

Around me, a gaggle of neighborhood kids chowed down, splattering themselves with the juice of the berries they'd cared for.

Some fields of dreams do flower and bear fruit. In late 2007, I donated $2,500 for a new community orchard, on the site of Woodford Mansion's historic orchard that had disappeared centuries ago (bit.ly/aQ9Qfi). And to date, my seed money has returned a harvest of more than $25,000 in additional corporate and city funds. More importantly, a historic Fairmount Park mansion and its surrounding community now enjoy a warm, working relationship. As neighbors feasted on barbecue and berries outside, adults ventured inside the historic mansion, some for the first time.

Long ago, the nearby Strawberry Mansion manor once served homegrown berries and sweet cream to its visitors. But the strawberry fields of the eponymous estate disappeared long ago.

Now at Woodford, the neighborhood has a field of fruit once again, and it's not just strawberries. The community orchard has raspberries, elderberries, red currants and blueberries, plus apple, cherry, peach and pear trees. In all, more than 70 species of fruit, nuts and berries, many native, grow here.

These fresh fields are especially sweet because they represent a growing coalition among Fairmount Park, the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), Woodford Mansion and the people of the East Park Revitalization Alliance (EPRA).

To make this orchard into a reality, Tatiana Garcia-Granados, EPRA's co-founder, and Woodford's Martha Moffat asked the Fairmount Park bureaucrats to let them use history to inspire the future. Moffat discovered that, in 1769, Ben Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette lavishly praised the mansion's orchard as "a handsome Garden, a thriving Orchard of good Apple Trees, and other Fruit." Armed by Ben's recommendation, the two women persuaded the Fairmount Park Commission to allow them to remake and update the old orchard. The commission agreed, but limited the community orchard to the 30-by-200-foot area inside the mansion's white picket fence.

Elections change things, and relationships hasten that change. With Mike DeBerardinis now running a combined city Parks and Recreation Department, and his wife, Joan Reilly, continuing as the garden guru at the Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS), these two huge green groups are now in better sync.

From the city, through PHS, came $18,000 for more berry bushes, fruit trees, an irrigation system and a kitchen garden. From the Gardenburger corporation came $7,000 for plants, mulch and harvest fests.

So that day, with Fairmount Park's blessing, kids squished berries into their cheeks as a slew of POP volunteers helped Woodford's orchard jump the fence and spread into the park itself — where, with any luck, there'll be strawberry fields for, well, ever.

(bruce@schimmel.com)

The Woodford Orchard will host a peach festival later this summer; for more information, visit woodfordmansion.org.