HELPING HANDS: Volunteers at Morven’s historic garden, among the local sites where assistance is welcome in planting, maintaining, and keeping local gardens healthy.
By Anne Levin
As anyone who tends a home garden knows, maintenance is ongoing. The green spaces at municipal sites are no different, and Sustainable Princeton is debuting Green Thumb Thursdays, a new program linking volunteers with four locations — Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad (PFARS), 400 Witherspoon Street, Monument Park, and the Carnahan/Guyot path.
The program is just one of the opportunities to assist with planting and maintaining gardens and parks in and around town. There is Garden Volunteers at Morven, active at the historic gardens from early spring to Thanksgiving, also on Thursday mornings. Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) has an extensive Land Stewardship Volunteer program, focused on the riparian restoration project at Mountain Lakes Park and active from July 8 through August 19. And, at the Mapleton Preserve on Sunday, June 28, from 9:30-11 a.m., volunteers are invited to have coffee with the Friends of Princeton Nursery Lands to learn about helping out on such projects as trail-clearing, removal of invasive plants, weeding, and developing a butterfly garden.
Sustainable Princeton’s Green Thumb Thursdays starts at 9 a.m. on June 25 at the PFARS rain garden next to the charging station, 2 Mount Lucas Road. Sustainable Princeton Executive Director Christine Symington said the program is a natural outgrowth of work with which the nonprofit is already involved.
“One of our focus areas is protecting the local ecosystem, and we have been involved in a project to maintain some spaces in town like Monument Park, raising funds to replant the garden beds with native plants,” she said. “And through our work agreement with the Municipality, we’re assisting them with maintaining some rain gardens. There are a number of these projects in maintenance mode, and we wanted to use this as an opportunity to engage the community, and also teach people the role that native plants and rain gardens play. So it’s a bit of teaching as well as working.”
Establishing the two-hour sessions on a specific day of the week “makes it more efficient and more engaging,” Symington said. “And ‘on Thursdays’ had a nice ring to it.”
Volunteers on previous gardening projects have run the gamut, Symington said, ranging from passionate participants with lots of experience to those who are new. No experience is necessary for Green Thumb Thursdays, and gloves, tools, and guidance are provided.
In the event of thunderstorms in the forecast or temperatures above 90 degrees, the gatherings are canceled. Visit sustainableprinceton.org for more information.
Morven Museum and Garden has been welcoming volunteer gardeners to the site for several years. From about 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m., they plant, deadhead, prune, and become friends. All levels are welcome. Parts of the garden are historic.
“Garden reconstruction is complicated,” said Louise Senior, Morven’s horticulturist. “Parts reflect gardens that were there, and other parts are demonstration gardens, which is where we grow vegetables and flowers. Different parts of the property interpret different time periods. A tiny patch represents Annis [Boudinot Stockton], from the 1770s. Another represents Harriett, the wife of the man known as the Commodore [Robert Field Stockton], and is more of the Victorian period. The formal one is the Colonial Revival garden, and we’re gradually getting more plants in to represent the period when the governors lived here. Volunteers work on all of this, depending on what needs to be done. We try not to do the same thing over and over.”
Senior is also planning to open weekend volunteering slots in July through the rest of the growing season, to accommodate those who work during the week. People to water the containers and gardens are also needed. Vegetable harvesting volunteers through the Greater Princeton Alliance of Youth Leaders (GPA) will start next week. Those aspiring gardeners have been coming on Monday and Tuesday mornings since 2021, and Morven has donated over two tons of fresh organic produce to the Arm In Arm Food Pantry since June 2020. For more information, contact Senior at LSenior@Morven.org.
The upcoming volunteer sessions run by FOPOS are focused on a 25-acre riparian restoration project that buffers Mountain Lake and portions of its feeder streams. “Riparian areas play an important role in protecting water quality by slowing down stormwater and filtering out pollutants before they enter the water system,” reads a release about the program. “Water that flows through Mountain Lakes Park ultimately finds its way into the Raritan River, an important drinking water source for central New Jersey. Riparian areas also provide critical habitat for birds, insects, and aquatic life.”
Those taking part will help identify and remove invasive plants and assist with native tree plantings and the installations of deer enclosures. Sessions generally run for two hours; 10 are planned through the summer. Visit fopos.org for more information.