Upstate Gardener
Planting a Seed in the City of Buffalo
Urban Roots – a Community Owned Garden Center
There are many reasons why a nursery may become your favorite spot to look for plants and gardening material. Usually it is the selection, the ability of the staff to create attractive displays, or the architecture of the building. Sometimes it is the knowledgeable staff, and other times it is location, as it just happens to be on your way home from work, or on the way home from your favorite beach. Rarely for a hobbyist gardener, such as myself, is it because you are the owner. Even more unusual is it for a garden center to have been the project that connected you to your neighbors and filled your free time with inspired conversations and hard work for four years.
Read More
Founding Member-Owner, Cynnie Gaasch wrote this article about the development of Urban Roots for Upstate Gardener Magazine in March 2008.
Buffalo Rising
A nice story on Buffalo Rising in April 2008 by Elizabeth Spavento talks about our new lots and our new General Manager, Michael Murphy. Read more here.
Newell Nussbaumer and Elena Cala Buscarino of Buffalo Rising spoke about shopping local on November 26, 2007 on their new weekly appearance on WBFO in the morning. The full conversation can be found at their post here.
Following that post, Newell made a post you can read here, featuring Urban Roots about businesses that forge new ground off the beaten path of districts like Elmwood and Hertel.
Buffalo Rising gave us some nice coverage on our Fall Festival, and our new neighbor, Gelato G’s during Fall 2007.
Urban Roots Takes Hold of a Community by John Carocci
This Corner is Starting to Cook by Newell Nusbaumer
West Side Gelateria to Open Soon by Christa Glennie Seychew
A Mini-Garden by Cynnie Gaasch
Urban Roots Board Members Cynnie Gaasch and Claire Schneider prepared the following video and article for Buffalo Rising in June of 2007:
Unusual Flowers at Urban Roots
Elena Buscarino came by and shot video of Founding Board Member, Monique Watts on Memorial Day Weekend
Buffalo Rising Co-Founder, Newell Nussbaumer wrote Rooting for Urban Roots in May
This article ran on our Seed Saving Techniques workshop offered by Richard Price of Faerie Seeds
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Anna Miller wrote an article about Urban Roots which appeared in the January 2007 print edition of Buffalo Rising. Click here to download a PDF of this article (322kb). |
Just one note – many people ask us if you have to be a member-owner to shop at Urban Roots. The answer is, certainly not! We’re open to the entire community.
We encourage membership because it’s the most direct way to support our effort. Urban Roots is a cooperative business; it’s owned by its members. Becoming a member-owner is a direct investment in our business and in our community, and you only need to become a member once, because it is a lifetime membership. You certainly don’t need to be a member-owner to support Urban Roots though, you can do that just by buying our products.
Beginning in 2005 and 2006 we started receiving lots of good press from our friends at Buffalo Rising Online:
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Building Business and Gardens West of Richmond |
| Neighbors Invest In West Side Community – 12/18/06 |  |
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More on Urban Roots Garden Center |
| Heirloom Tomatoes for Sale! |  |
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What are you doing Saturday? |
| Plant Swap in October |  |
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West Side Gardeners Support Urban Roots |
| Tomato Jewels of Goodness |  |
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Bringing Buffalo Back, One Flower at a Time |
| Public Forum for Park Design |  |
Images courtesy Buffalo Rising
Press Releases 2008
Urban Roots Press Releases
Click to download pdf
Urban Roots hires Michael Murphy for General Manager
Urban Roots Celebrates One Year of Service
Press Releases 2007
First Annual Fall Festival and Third Annual Fall Plant Swap
Seed Saving Workshop with Richard Price 9/29/07
Neighborhood in San Francisco Chronicle
When Member-Owner #19 Elizabeth Licata brought her colleague at Garden Rant, and author of the New York Times Best Seller, Flower Confidential, Amy Stewart by to check out our neighborhood and Urban Roots, we had no idea what to expect.
What a nice surprise to see the gardens of our neighbors Le and An Ly on Brayton Street, and Urban Roots Board Member-Owner #11, Cynnie Gaasch on Massachusetts Avenue in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 15.
And a great article at that, comparing Buffalo’s Garden Walk to walks in Chicago and Seattle, and more or less bringing us out on top for our noncompetitiveness, inclusivity, size, and our book and dvd. Hat’s off to Elizabeth, Urban Roots Advisory Council Member-Owner #16, Jim Charlier, and the rest of the Garden Walk committee, for all you have made happen for Garden Walk in recent years.
Read the article below, or at this link
Garden walks a world apart: Buffalo, N.Y.
Amy Stewart, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Imagine a neighborhood garden tour where every house on the block is on the tour.
So many people want to see the gardens – thousands, actually – that parking spaces are in demand and the sidewalks are filled.
Imagine low-income gardeners on the tour who speak not a word of English but who gesture excitedly at the outrageous tropical shrub they smuggled in from Vietnam, and who employ a kind of universal gardener’s sign language that says, “Would you like a cutting?” to their well-heeled suburban visitors.
Imagine a garden tour that charges no fees or ticket prices, runs on a modest budget and still has money left over to give beautification grants to community groups to help further its mission. Oh, and it’s so popular that it sells a slick coffee-table book and a DVD documenting its success.
One more thing. This garden tour is not actually a tour. It’s a garden walk. Co-chair Jim Charlier explains the difference: “There’s no criteria for entry other than to be in the defined area of the walk and to agree to not sell things during the event (no garage sales, art sales, plants sales, flea markets and the like). There’s nary a person with professional training on the walk – no master gardeners, no landscapers, nursery professionals or horticulturists. It’s just people that enjoy gardening.”
GardenWalk Buffalo ( www.gardenwalkbuffalo.com) began in 1995, after a couple visited Chicago’s Sheffield Garden Walk and were inspired. They saw it as a way to help revitalize neighborhoods and inspire other gardeners. From the beginning, it was important that GardenWalk be noncompetitive and nonjuried. Anyone can participate, and there is no prize for the best garden.
Gardener Ellie Dorritie is adamantly anti-elitist when it comes to her participation in the tour. “This is not a tea party for the leisure class that includes little tours of lovely estates,” she said. “Rather, it’s a smorgasbord, for everyone, of the most imaginative and creative gardening being done anywhere, proving that anyone can do it.” Dorritie’s tiny but exuberant garden has been on the tour since 1996. On a recent visit, she proudly pointed out that she’d even painted flowers on her city-issued garbage can. “Why should that be ugly?” she asked me.
I arrived in Buffalo on a Friday night and planned to spend the weekend touring gardens with a group of friends from the East Coast.
I was promised gorgeous gardens during the day and backyard cocktail parties at night. In fact, it was a weekend of pure horticultural debauchery. At one point, my friend Elizabeth, whose garden was on the walk, dug up a hosta for a complete stranger who expressed an interest in it.
The woman offered to pay Elizabeth, but she refused to take any money for the plant. Before she knew what was happening, the woman had stuffed a $20 bill into Elizabeth’s bra. “How often is that going to happen?” Elizabeth said, laughing. “Especially for a hosta!”
It may be a slight exaggeration to suggest that no professionals are involved with the tour. Martin Kemp and his partner, Terry Williams, take their participation in GardenWalk seriously; an oversize wooden letter “B” in the front yard makes a statement about their pride in Buffalo, and in their small backyard, they’ve installed no fewer than nine water features. But what really draws visitors every year is the ever-changing table setting on the patio. Kemp, an event and floral designer, experiments with moss tablecloths and floral topiaries.
While it may seem a little overkill for the average gardener, Kemp told me that he’s gratified to learn that people have been inspired to try his designs at home. His “wall of water,” made by drilling holes in a copper pipe and suspending it horizontally from 6-foot-high posts, has been replicated around town.
Mostly, though, the gardens are created by ordinary gardeners using plants that work in their neighborhood. I saw more hosta, echinacea, lilies and rudbeckia in one place than I had ever seen in my life.
But there’s a reason for that, as Charlier explained. “Many gardeners now gear their gardens for the walk, padding their gardens with flowers that bloom in late July.” I also saw experienced gardeners dishing out the single most useful piece of information anyone can give to a beginning gardener: Plant what works.
Some gardeners even printed up plant lists to hand out to the uninitiated. It was easy to see how inexperienced gardeners, armed with a short list of tried-and-true plants, could be just a growing season or two away from putting their own gardens on the walk.
GardenWalk Buffalo takes place on the last weekend of July, and this year more than 260 gardens participated. The walk has expanded to several neighborhoods around Buffalo, making it impossible to see everything in one weekend. Instead, most visitors choose to concentrate on one or two neighborhoods each year. It’s a good thing that the crowds disperse themselves: Based on the number of maps distributed, organizers estimate that more than 40,000 people descend on GardenWalk every year.
This may be the largest such walk in the country, but it’s not the only one. Chicago’s Sheffield Garden Walk ( www.sheffieldgardenwalk.com) is in its 39th year. More than 100 gardens in the historic Lincoln Park neighborhood participate in the walk, which is held on the second to last weekend in July. Laury Lewis, co-chair of the walk, described what the Lincoln Park neighborhood was like in 1968, when the walk began.
“There were a lot more rentals in those days,” he said, “and parts of the neighborhood were unsafe. The high school was considered the worst in the city. This garden walk was seen as a way to improve the neighborhood.”
The neighborhood has certainly turned around – Lincoln Park is one of Chicago’s most upscale neighborhoods – but Lewis acknowledges that the garden walk can’t take all the credit. DePaul University has expanded significantly over the decades, which made a difference in the surrounding neighborhood. The university now hosts a kids’ area and bandstand in conjunction with the walk.
“The bands are our biggest expense,” Lewis said, “but that’s where we sell beer, too.” He said that more than 20,000 people show up on campus to hear music, and about 4,000 to 5,000 of those people actually wander into the four-by-eight-block neighborhood to see the gardens.
They request a $6 donation for the guidebooks, and they solicit corporate sponsors. Income from the garden walk helps fund a neighborhood newspaper, beautification projects and donations to schools and charities.
The gardens on the Sheffield Garden Walk make the most of what might be considered difficult conditions. “We have mature street trees, so there’s lots of shade,” Lewis said. “And the typical lot size is small. People might only have a 12-by-12-foot space in the front and a backyard that measures about 20 by 15 feet. You see very few lawns and lots of roof decks and container plants.” For visitors who are there to learn, local master gardeners lead educational tours of selected gardens.
While both the Buffalo and Sheffield garden walks make extensive use of volunteers, solicit donations and operate on a budget somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000, there is another approach.
The Georgetown Garden Walk, 5 miles south of downtown Seattle, is also a nonjuried and completely free walk. But this one is operated by just one person: Jon Dove, a professional gardener who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life. He watched Georgetown go from a working-class to a mostly industrial district, and when he saw artists start to move into the warehouses more than a decade ago, he decided it was time to do something to help revitalize the area.
On the second Sunday in July, about 25 gardens open for the day, along with artists’ studios. “The artists that do best are the ones who have some kind of garden art to offer,” he said. “We also have some restaurants in the neighborhood who will put on an art show or do something special the day of the walk.” About 4,000 people attend every year, which seems about right to Dove. “It’s a steady stream,” he said, “but not a mob.”
The walk operates with no volunteers and no budget. “I’m a kindly dictator,” Dove admitted. He solicits gardeners and artists to participate in the walk, and a friend who is a graphic designer puts the maps and posters together. Sometimes he gets the printing donated, but usually he just runs out and makes the copies himself.
The walk does not have its own Web site (but see the event listings at www.georgetownneighborhood.com), and he gives his home phone number as a contact. “This is my way of giving back,” he said. He believes that the event has helped rejuvenate his neighborhood, and he’s seen people buy homes after going on the walk. “It’s actually a great time to put your house on the market,” he said, laughing.
Like other walk organizers, Dove described the euphoria that gardeners experience after they’ve put their garden on the walk. “It’s such a great high,” he said. “They are walking on air afterwards. They just love showing off their gardens. People come from as far away as California, if you can believe that.”
Buffalo, New York
It’s more than a tour, it’s a must-see event. Hundreds of local gardeners show off their plantings, highlighting what plants work in their area.
Amy Stewart is the author of “Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers.” She toured GardenWalk Buffalo with a crew of highly opinionated gardeners from www.gardenrant.com.
Spree Blog by Ron Ehmke
Ron Ehmke came in to check out the store a couple months after his article Buffalo Spree article (written in the dead of winter. He provided an update and a visitor experience post on the BuffaloSpreeBlog.
Artvoice Article by Peter Koch
Peter Koch tells the story of how Urban Roots came to be in his article, Lion’s Tooth in late June. He focuses primarily on Blair Woods’ role. Blair brought us the idea, and he is still taking the lead in making sure we’re successful.
Garden Rant in June
Buffalo’s own, Eilzabeth Licata, Editor of Buffalo Spree and Urban Roots Member-Owner #19, writes every week for the national gardening online publication/blog Garden Rant.
This week she posted about Urban Roots and the East Side Queen City Farm. Check out her article, The Architecture of Gardening.
Buffalo News Article by Michelle Kearns
Urban Roots garden center is latest co-op founded in city
Idea germinated from news article
By Michelle Kearns, News Business Reporter
Updated: 05/15/07 6:30 AM
Charles Lewis/Buffalo News
Members of the board of the new Urban Roots garden co-operative are, from left, Carolyn Gullo, Harvey Garrett, Monique Watts, Blair Woods, Anthony Armstrong and Kristen Smith-Armstrong.
The idea for the Urban Roots garden center, a new Buffalo co-operative business that has been selling out of petunias and mulch, came to Blair Woods one piece at a time, like the flower gardens he insisted on planting in his neighbors’ yards.
The venture began with a tidbit he read a few years ago in a newspaper story about how city gardeners tip each other off when there are good gardening sales in the suburbs. “I said, ‘I think we should have a garden center on the West Side,’ ” he said. “Why are we driving one hour each way to buy plants?”
Urban Roots, which opened at 428 Rhode Island St. in April in a neighborhood where boarded up houses are near well-tended homes with flower beds, is a mix of thoughtful business planning and community- building ideals.
“Among me, and a lot of my friends, I’d much rather spend my money in the city,” said Woods, 43.
Charles Lewis/Buffalo News
Anthony Armstrong, president of the Urban Roots garden co-operative, holds a flat of flowers ready for planting.
Mother’s Day weekend turned out to be a big, gratifying success, the culmination of about three years of work and a $200,000 investment with loans, the $100 contributions of 175 members and the purchase of the store building with apartments and a side lot for $95,000.
“We had to make four trips to our suppliers to pick up more stuff, in three days,” said Woods, of the gerbera daisies and topsoil they kept needing more of. “We always thought we had a solid plan and we always thought that it was needed.”
The new co-op store has a neat, garden-savvy, urban look. The woodrail fenced yard has a patio made of salvaged bricks and things a gardener might need: tall $200 cherry and $170 birch trees ready for planting, red dahlias on trays for $6, and 40- pound bags of topsoil for about $4. Rakes and hoes, from $15 and up, leaned against a clapboard side wall.
Woods, who manages rock bands for a living, thinks gardens can change neighborhoods, which is why he developed the plan for the co-op at about the same time that he realized there were five boarded up houses on his block of Rhode Island. To stop the decay, he planted hostas and lilies in the yards around his house and wrote out his garden store idea in an e-mail.
He forwarded it to about 50 people on a list for a network of neighborhood groups he is a member of called the West Side Community Collaborative. The idea collected its collaborators as his e-mail note went from person to person until a copy finally wound up in Wood’s wife’s work e-mail box.
By the fall of 2004, there were about a dozen people meeting monthly at a neighborhood church. Their plans for a garden co-op grew.
To write a business plan and gauge prospective sales, they surveyed about 300 people out walking in the Elmwood Avenue district last summer and found people spend routinely on their gardens: from $200 to $2,000 a year. Another market study found only 3 percent of the demand for gardening supplies in the Western part of the city was being met in the city.
Finally in February, the group began signing up members for $100 a share. Their $20,000 is part of the money being used to buy supplies of mulch, cherry trees, hedge clippers, compost bins now for sale in the fenced-in yard and small store. To finance the rest and buy the building, the group collected another $40,000 in member loans and $140,000 with a mortgage and bank and community development loans.
The National Co-operative Business Association claims there are about 21,000 cooperative businesses nationwide with 155 million members, about half the U.S. population.
As a basic model, it was famously used for food co-ops in the 1970s when people wanted bulk and organic foods they couldn’t find in regular stores. Elmwood Avenue’s Lexington Co-op started then and continues now with that same focus. Its success was an inspiration to the Urban Roots founders who consulted with the grocery in their planning.
“There are new ones opening every month,” said Art Jaeger, communications director for the NCBA based in Washington, D.C. “They form co-ops when the marketplace isn’t serving them.”
Co-op varieties include credit unions, which account for 9,000 of the 21,000 estimate. Other categories factored in are utility co-ops founded by rural communities to buy electric and phone service. The Ace and True Value hardware store chains are also co-ops owned by independent hardware stores.
Gardening centers seem to be a unique, but perhaps emerging, sub-category. Last October the Urban Earth garden center and florist opened in a neighborhood south of downtown Minneapolis. When a greenhouse and store for a long-time neighborhood florist stood empty, the neighbors organized. “We were afraid of losing the business,” said Mary Ann Knox, a founder and one of the 150 members who paid $95 to buy a share.
Her neighborhood of Victorian houses of the kind featured on garden tours has responded so well to the new co-op that the business has been running on its revenues. So far it hasn’t needed any loans beyond the member-contribution start-up cash of $15,000. “We’re crazy busy,” said Knox.
The founders of Urban Roots hope to draw the same, consistent crowds from Buffalo’s gardeners even though the store’s neighborhood is different. Residents have low and moderate incomes and a side street had a nickname of “Crack Alley.” But the new co-op garden center is a few blocks in from Richmond Avenue, the western border of the tonier Elmwood Avenue “village” district.
“The fact is, the purchasing power in a dense community is really extraordinary,” said Anthony Armstrong, a board member and program officer for the community development nonprofit Local Initiative Supportive Corporation.
While some Urban Roots prices are higher than those at big-box garden centers, Woods and Armstrong say the co-op will add value and draw customers because it is conveniently located, has plants from local growers and will hold occasional classes with gardening tips, such as how to save seeds for future planting and build a brick patio.
The store is open to anyone, but members will be eligible for special discounts, such as packages of four unusual, orange and mottled “heirloom” tomato seedlings that can be ordered for $6 instead of the regular $7.50. Any eventual profits will be shared.
“I think you will make your money back many times over. In dividends, when the business starts to make money,” said Woods. “You’re buying a share of stock in a company.”
The good sales of the past weekend seemed to bode well. It was particularly fun, he said, to see boys on bikes making one trip after another to buy $1.99 six-packs of petunias to give for Mother’s Day. “When I left on Saturday, we were all just ecstatic,” he said.
Buffalo Spree - April 2007
Ron Ehmke wrote a nice article in April’s Buffalo Spree (click for link).
Here’s a great quote from Board Chairman Anthony Armstrong:
“Once people see the on-the-ground results of projects like Urban Roots—and many others throughout the city—they get excited. They start to think about what else we can do together. They start believing in the city and in themselves. We’re starting a garden center, but I think much more, this store is the tip of an iceberg of all of the good happening throughout the neighborhood. From the overwhelming response we’ve gotten so far, I think our member-owners feel the same way. Urban Roots is not the end-all be-all, but it is symptomatic of a community on the rise.”
Thanks to Ron and Spree Editor Elizabeth Licata for the mention!
In Artvoice
Gabe Armstrong wrote a nice article about Urban Roots’ opening this spring.
Planting Roots on the West Side