It’s been nearly a year since the Charleston Parks Conservancy first opened the 3.7-acre Magnolia Park and Community Garden at the corner of Magnolia Road and Sycamore Drive.
It’s a warm spring afternoon as horticulturist Leslie Wade is hard at work in the garden. While many horticulturists have green thumbs, Wade has two yellow fingernails, thanks to her 3-year-old daughter’s fascination with fingernail polish.
Wade stacks plastic containers filled with 38 pounds of peppermint chard, Russian red lacinato kale, various lettuces, and escarole before she delivers them to the Lowcountry Food Bank.
The fresh bounty would likely cost close to $200 retail at nearby grocery stores. Quite a bit has sprung up since national hardware giant Lowe’s donated $20,000 in seed money to help start the park and garden.
The park, since deeded to the city, has generated more than 1,100 pounds of fresh vegetables to local food banks, homeless shelters, and children’s group homes. It has grown from 40 raised planting beds to 50, and then 60 beds.
Fourteen “community” beds sit alongside leased ones, churning out food and growing experiences for locals.
A work shed complete with rebar trellises and community tools rests on a concrete patio slab, and the skeleton of a greenhouse awaits a less windy day for its polyethylene panels to be installed.
Most of the trellises’ lengths are barer than they were last year when rattlesnake pole beans snaked their way up to the shed’s pergola. Herbs flourish in the concrete boxes that anchor the trellises, like parsley, sage, and yes, thyme, but not rosemary (apologies to Paul Simon).
A blackboard on the shed lays out the times when classes in gardening are offered free to the community. The shed was designed and built by students at Clemson’s architecture center downtown.
Ornamental fences ring the planting portion of the park in the shadow of the former Albemarle Elementary. Soon, blueberries and ornamental roses will begin to climb the fence’s square mesh.
Volunteer Harry Noisette arrives with dogs Sunshine and Max, and begins to work the compost piles, turning and churning, as worms in the park’s “vermiculture” do their jobs silently.
Noisette comes two, three times a week, tending to the box of a friend who has been stricken with cancer when he’s not weeding, doing shovel work, or watering plants.
Sometimes, the former merchant marine walks the three miles from his home in Wagener Terrace to help out. The friend Noisette tends the box for has worked to combat hunger in South Carolina, as well as having worked as a midwife at MUSC.
He breaks from being interviewed when he spies some seedlings that need watering on a mesh table.
“He’s a worker,” says Wade, a former prison kitchen employee who found her way to her garden post via an avoided career in computers and time spent managing restaurants. “He helped build our compost system.”
Also buzzing is a handful of bees near the broccoli, turnip, and mustard greens, which Wade has allowed to flower. A series of raised beds along the rear fences will further attract bees, which scientists warn are becoming far too scant the world over.
A farmer’s market “has been discussed,” but hasn’t come to fruition. Theft happens, but isn’t a big problem. Wade says people generally respect others’ efforts, space, and belongings.
Wade can’t keep out critters, and doesn’t really try to. The fence, with its multiple gaps, was never intended to help.
The public beds have a sign that reads, “Pull a weed, take a plant.” Other cute signs abound, like the one that says, “Free weeds, pick your own.”
Some days, the garden is filled with local gardeners, some coming to work, some coming to socialize, some to use the park’s free WiFi.
This day it’s just Wade, Noisette, Max, Sunshine, a few bees, and a whole lot growing.

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