PARKS: Where Nature Meets Community

March 29, 2022

Green Spring Valley Garden Club Plants at Baltimore’s Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park

On October 12, 2021, members of the Green Spring Valley Garden Club (GSVGC) gathered at Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park in Baltimore to plant a garden of trees, shrubs, and perennials at the park’s new entrance and to attend a lecture on the Olmsted Brothers’ involvement in the modern park system in Baltimore. Undertaken with the Friends of Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park, the development and completion of the garden entrance is the club’s contribution to the The Garden Club of America’s PARKS: Where Nature Meets Community initiative. Ten shrubs and seventy perennials were planted in record time by GSVGC’s extremely experienced gardeners

Baltimore's Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park was first developed as two separate parks as part of a park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who with his brother focused on the protection of the scenic beauty of local watersheds in several major cities from overdevelopment. The Olmsted firm recommended securing this property along Baltimore's Gwynns Falls as a stream valley park, which had, they said, "the character of a wooded gorge, [where] the scenery is remarkably beautiful, of a picturesque and sylvan sort seldom possible to retain so near a great city.” Today, touching twenty separate neighborhoods in the Baltimore community and comprising more than one thousand acres, the park is the second largest woodland park in the US.

The Garden Club of America (GCA) is a proud founding partner of the Olmsted 200 bicentennial campaign. The GCA's contribution to the celebration is the unprecedented opportunity for all 199 GCA clubs to connect the needs of their communities with Olmsted’s revolutionary vision for parks and public landscapes by participating in the GCA’s initiative, PARKS: Where Nature Meets Community. Each club project helps their local community public spaces while collectively celebrating Olmsted’s genius for public access to nature across the country.

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