Thirty years ago, a landscape company donated their services to landscape around the Stiles Center with a new ‘miracle’ weed cloth. How could Grace refuse? Years later, and two additional layers of the disruptive, plastic material laid down, it became clear that weed cloth allows only the most terrible weeds through and disrupts the soil ecology, effectively killing the ground. Our approach to restoring this space is to remove the layers of plastic and let the ground rest over the winter. We saved the railroad ties to utilize as sign posts once a path emerged through the garden. A slow walk around the gardens revealed a number of interesting and significant plants already growing in the interior gardens, restored by Nancy & Georganne the previous year.
Upon researching the historical associations, we found the Periwinkle Initiative, who is tracing ancestral burial grounds through the southeast by re-cognizing the plant as a marker for deceased loved ones planted during the slave era.
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