Gardeners breathe a ‘sigh of relief’ over Summer Winter Community Garden preservation

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For Joe Revlock, the Summer Winter Community Garden in Philadelphia’s Powelton Village section is full of stories.

There’s the persimmon tree that took eight years to bear fruit. There’s the cornerstone, marked with the year 1872, that Revlock said he salvaged from a North Philly church that was struck by lightning. There’s the pond full of koi fish, where Revlock once raised crayfish.

“They were a fun little crop,” he said. “You could come out here, scoop up some, get a beer and have crawdads.”

Revlock has lived beside and grown food in the garden for nearly 50 years. For much of that time, he worried the garden land, owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority since the 1960s and located on the northern edge of Drexel University’s campus, could be sold to a developer. He worried the winding paths, leafy raised beds and orchard full of apples and pawpaws would be replaced by buildings.

“We never knew what was going to happen,” he said. “It’s a very valuable piece of property.”

But now, Revlock and the more than 60 other gardeners who tend the Summer Winter Community Garden are feeling much more secure.

Last month, City Council authorized the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to transfer the Summer Winter Community Garden’s parcels to Neighborhood Gardens Trust. The nonprofit land trust plans to preserve the lots for the foreseeable future.

“It means we have a sigh of relief,” Revlock said.

During a tour of the nearly 1-acre garden Wednesday, District 3 City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said there’s much more work still to be done to protect community gardens across the city. Often, gardeners do not own the land they tend, so their gardens are at risk of being lost to development.

“Convincing the city that we should do this with a hugely valuable piece of land was no easy feat,” Gauthier said. “I hope that this can be a model for how we secure more gardens, particularly gardens that exist in areas where there’s a lot of displacement, where there’s a lot of development.”

Fewer than half of Philly’s community gardens are considered secure, meaning their land is owned entirely by gardeners or a separate entity the gardeners trust to preserve the land, according to a 2023 city plan.

Meanwhile, roughly one-third of Philly’s active gardens and farms are located in areas like the Summer Winter Community Garden’s section of West Philly, which are seeing the “highest intensity of new construction,” according to the report. Most of Philly’s active gardens and farms are located in neighborhoods with high poverty rates where a majority of residents are Black, Indigenous and people of color.

Neighborhood Gardens Trust agreed to take on a 30-year mortgage, which automatically reduces to zero by the end of its term, in order to acquire the property. The land bank has characterized such mortgages as tools to prevent land recipients from flipping properties for a profit.

Jenny Greenberg, executive director of Neighborhood Gardens Trust, said the process for transferring city-owned land to community gardeners or organizations that can preserve it needs to be streamlined, and the Philadelphia Land Bank needs sufficient resources to purchase privately owned garden land. Neighborhood Gardens Trust is currently working to acquire the land under the more than two dozen active gardens in its preservation pipeline from the city or private owners, Greenberg said.

“We are incredibly proud to be the permanent land protector of the Summer Winter garden,” she said. “This is a precious space that has been cultivated for decades through the hard work and vision of community members.”

Crishana Manigan and her fiancé, Luke Dougan, joined the Summer Winter Community Garden this spring. Now their raised bed is overflowing with green peppers, Thai basil, collard greens, cucumbers, rosemary, carrots and four different types of tomato plants.

Manigan, who works at Drexel University nearby, described the garden as a place where people come together.

“You have older adults here who’ve been in the neighborhood forever, but you also have students, you have people in the medical profession,” she said. “It’s a wide range of gardeners that are here.”

Dougan said it’s important to preserve green spaces like the Summer Winter Community Garden.

“You can look at a plot of land as a resource,” he said. “Some people are going to use it for development, and other people have better ideas, I think, for community use, where we’re growing food, we’re having green spaces where people can come, take a reprieve from being in the city. I just think it’s really important to have those in the urban environment.”