Gardening doesn’t sound like a practicable pastime when you live in an apartment, where the only available dirt appears to be a couple of layers of dust on top of the TV. Even so, each spring many apartment dwellers get an almost irresistible urge to do some sort of garden. It comes with the season and, if you’re one of those who is longing to exercise your green thumb, you may feel a bit frustrated this time of year.
You needn’t be. For dedicated gardeners, there are a number of highly attractive alternatives to the suburban back yard and many of them can be just as rewarding with a lot less work. You have to use your imagination, though, and realize that bigger is not necessarily better. You can get a lot of ideas if you just look around to see what other city gardeners are doing.
Walk down any Chicago alley after May 30 and you will see dozens of back porches celebrating the summer in a profusion of colorful flowers and greenery. The plants are growing in a variety of pots, tubs, hanging baskets and window boxes, which are attached to porch railings. Many balconies are similarly abloom each summer as are patios at ground level.
All of these lovely mini-gardens are the products of a technique known as container gardening. By planting in containers, gardeners with limited space can often achieve truly sensational results.
Pat Provenzano lives in Woodfield Gardens, an apartment community near Rolling Meadows. She has lived there 15 years and has never allowed the fact that she lives on an upper level suppress her gardening instinct.
“You don’t have to live in a house to have a garden,” Provenzano declares. “My husband built window boxes for our balcony and I fill them with colorful flowers each season. I also make macrame hangers and plant hanging baskets.”
She fills her baskets and boxes with such plants as trailing petunias, chrysanthemums, ivy and geraniums, trying for new combinations and effects each year. Her husband has made a window box for the bedroom window this year, so she’ll have an additional container to plant. She’s looking forward to it.
“I love working with plants,” she says. “It’s so much fun planting them and watching them grow and the flowers are so bright and colorful, it makes the place look so pretty.”
Peter MacBride of Fertile Delta, a garden shop in the Lincoln Park area, has some further suggestions on container gardens.
“Almost all annuals grow well in containers,” he says. “Hibiscus is a wonderful plant for a pot and I really think Cannas often do better in a container than they do in a yard.”
He says pansies are also commonly used as are moss roses and marigolds. He named alysium, asparagus fern and the many ivy varieties as trailing plants, along with trailing varieties of geraniums, petunias and gloriosa lilies, which he described as vining lilies with reddish orange gradations.
For shaded locations, he recommends impatiens, coleus and wax begonias and two flowering plants, tuberous begonias and fuschias, which he says must grow in the shade in order to thrive.
MacBride says that many of his customers grow vegetables in containers and that containers of herbs are quite common. “You can even tuck some vegetables, such as lettuce or spinach, and a few herbs in among your flowering plants,” he says.
If your gardening ambitions go beyond containers, or if you have no place to put containers and still long for a garden, your best bet would be to find an understanding landlord or management firm, who will allow you to develop a garden on your building’s grounds. A number of landlords and managers will.
Mario Glelis owns a big old graystone on Roscoe Street in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood. The front yard and parkway are filled with a glorious array of flowering plants each summer, thanks to the efforts of one tenant, Diane Bohnsack.
“Diane came to me about 10 years ago and asked if she could start a garden out front,” Glelis says. “I told her to go ahead. She did and it just keeps getting prettier and prettier every year.”
Glelis says that most of the planning as well as the planting and the yardwork is done by Bohnsack, though other tenants do contribute plants from time to time, if they come across something they feel will be a pleasing addition to the garden. He says he was totally receptive to the idea of leaving his tenants in charge of the gardening project.
“I just let them do what they want,” he says. “I think it works out better without my close supervision.”
Bohnsack takes her gardening very seriously. She works in the garden, often with the assistance of her son, at least an hour or so almost every day throughout the season and she loves doing it.
“I enjoy it so much,” she says. “I like to get out there early in the spring and see what’s coming up and I love adding things every year. I think it’s therapeutic.” The garden features flowering shrubs, spring bulbs, lilies, chrysanthemums, peonies, a clematis and about 20 roses, the newest of which were brought back by Glelis from Ohio last year.
In the suburbs, many management firms also permit their tenants to do a bit of gardening in the areas around their units or in designated areas elsewhere.
Two examples are Woodfield Gardens, where gardener Pat Provenzano lives, and Hinsdale Lake Terrace, both managed by Citadel Management Inc. Mary Herrold, leasing and marketing director for Citadel, says that the company encourages tenants to create their own space because it makes the apartment communities more home-like.
“We have a lot of long-term residents and many of them love to garden,” Herrold says. “They have container gardens on their balconies and patios and they plant the areas around their patios with colorful flowers each season. They love to do it and we think it makes the property more appealing and cheerful.”
She says that some of the senior residents at Woodfield Gardens have taken charge of the area in front of their building and plant and tend flower gardens there every summer.
“They do it all themselves and they’re very proud of the results,” she says, “and they have every right to be proud. It’s beautiful.” Apparently, a lot of landlords are receptive to tenant gardens and, if yours isn’t, it may be because he or she has never been asked. So, ask. Explain what you’d like to do and why, where and how you’d like to do it. When you make your pitch, you’ll probably have to convince the landlord that you are willing to handle the project and are capable of doing so without involving any of his maintenance people. Maybe you can find other building tenants who would like to help. It’s worth a try.
Another, and very frequent, approach to gardening in the city is taken by those who become involved in community gardens. According to Ken Davis, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Environment, there are hundreds of these throughout the city. Many of them are sponsored by church groups, block clubs and other neighborhood non-profit organizations. Some feature vegetables, others focus on flowers, flowering shrubs and attractive landscaping.
Green Core, a special division of the Department of Environment, was created to assist these cooperative gardeners. Green Core furnishes seeds, bulbs, plants, advice and supervision for groups who elect to cultivate and beautify vacant lots and other neglected areas throughout the city.
As one of the larger and more outstanding Green Core projects, Davis cites the North Park Village Nature Center on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
“Hundreds of gardeners work with us every year to plant, help restore and maintain the wildflowers, wetlands, savannas and other natural areas, he says.
If you’d like to get involved with the North Park project or another community garden or, if you’d like some suggestions on how to start one, you can get information and help by calling the Green Core hotline at 312-744-8691. That number will get you on the Green Core mailing list, too, so you can receive the group’s bulletins and progress reports as well as advice.
If, on the other hand, you don’t have too much time and would just like to get down and dirty an hour or so each week, you can become involved in some of the biggest and most elaborate gardens in Chicago, the ones located in the Chicago Parks. Joe McCord, director of community outreach for the Chicago Park District, says he “enthusiastically” welcomes volunteers. He can be reached at 312-747-2174.
