By Doug Draper
If you are into historic neighbourhoods and beautifully landscaped lawns and gardens, then you have got to try to be in Buffalo, New York for one of the greatest garden walk experiences in North America.
This classic Victorian home on West Delavan Avenue is a popular stop during Garden Walk Buffalo. It’s front and backyard gardens, along with a fish pond and brick paths leading to a ‘hidden garden’, has been featured in internationally circulated gardening magazines. File Photo by Doug Draper
Garden Walk Buffalo, scheduled for Saturday, July 28 and Sunday, July 29, is also the largest event of its kind on the continent, featuring more than 340 private and publicly owned gardens.
And the whole event, complete with a detailed garden-walk map and shuttle buses from neighbhourood to neighborhood where gardens are located, is absolutely free!
As someone who has joined family and friends and visiting more than 10 of these garden walks now, organized by a dedicated group of neighbourhood volunteers, this event is not just about gardening. It is also about an opportunity to immerse yourself in historic neighbourhoods and the people who take pride in living in what truly are walkable, livable communities.
Featured on the walk are some of the oldest neighbourhood streets, like North Pearl with its Civil War-era homes shaded by tall trees, and the ‘Cottage District’ a few blocks north of Kleinhan’s Music Hall off Richmond Street, where the servants employed in the rich estates on and around Delaware Avenue used to live, and which now has a colourful, bohemian character. And there are so many other neighbourhoods further north off Delaware and Elmwood Avenues, featuring some of the finest architecture that has gone into homes and other buildings in the past 150 years.
There is also the fabulous urban parks and streetscape, the best of it designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who was one of the lead creators of New York City’s Central Park.
Garden Walk Buffalo has possibly done more than any other single event to introduce tens-of-thousands of visitors each year to the best of one of America’s oldest and once one of the country’s richest cities. Organizers of the event have a number of awards for their neighbourhood beautification projects and for drawing people to the city’s restaurants and other attractions.
You can obtain detailed information about this summer’s July 28/29 Garden Walk event, along with an online map and instructions on where the headquarters are located that you can visit before and during the two days, and information about shuttle transportation between the neighbourhoods by visiting http://www.gardenwalkbuffalo.com/ .
(Feel free to share your views on this post below. If you have attended this event in the past, it would be interested to receive your thoughts on its value to Buffalo and the greater Niagara region.)
Niagara At Large 