HARLEM GREEN, A Tour of Harlem Community Gardens
Saturday, August 9th, 2008 10am-3pm
The NYC Community Gardens Coalition and Harlem Urban [community] Gardeners (HUG) will host “Harlem Green,” The Third Annual Tour of Harlem Community Gardens, on Saturday, August 9th, 2008, from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. A trolley is being provided by the NYC Parks Department to take tourists on this trip. While it is possible to tour only a few of Harlem’s many green jewels, tourists will be provided with a map which includes gardens not on the scheduled tour. This event will give tourists an opportunity to talk with gardeners, and to learn the history of the gardens and the community garden movement in NYC. The Tour, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 10:00 AM at the Joseph Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden @ 219 West 122nd Street between Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass Blvds., where breakfast will be served. The last garden on the tour will be the William A. Harris Garden @ 153rd Street & St. Nicholas Avenue at 3:00PM. Tourists will be treated to a good old-fashioned barbeque here with everything homemade and delicious!
Along the way tourists will discover everything from cooling shade trees to tomatoes, beans, corn and more unusual crops, such as stevia (a non-sugar herb sweetener) & cotton, growing in these urban oases. There are grapevines, herbs & flowers of all varieties, fruit trees, composting projects, and solar-powered ponds which host a world of water plants and water creatures.
Vistors are welcome to join the tour at any point along the way according to Tour Coordinators, who emphasize that the gardeners “…are grassroots developers who have worked long and hard to improve and protect our environment not only, but to keep our city—which consistently ranks worst in the nation for airborne pollutants—from becoming a concrete desert.”
For further information, please call 212. 662. 2878
Sponsors for this event include The NYC Community Gardens Coalition (NYCCGC); Harlem Urban Gardeners (HUG); The City of New York Parks and Recreation Department and Greenthumb; The William A. Harris Garden; Project Harmony, Inc.
