New Haven Independent

They and other volunteers came to the Pardee Rose Garden greenhouse Tuesday to push hundreds of seeds into individualized minicells to make sure that marigolds and zinnias will bloom in community gardens, on street corners and along greenways throughout town this spring and summer.

Call it a story for our times — a tale of planting hope amid all the rotten debris of a recession.

The city in past years spent $10,000 to buy tens of thousands of “plugs,” beginnings of plants that are then grown and transplanted around town. This year, there was no money.

So the call went out to seed companies and to the volunteers who already maintain community gardens and greenspaces. As of Tuesday, some 17,000 donated seeds had arrived, according city Horticulturist Matthew Naab. Then, volunteers like Thompson and Lehtonen arrived at the greenhouse to begin planting them.

Naab will raise them. In late May and early June, Sound School students and other volunteers will transplant the flowers around town, as in past years. Anyone interested in volunteering for the effort should contact the city’s Doreen Larson-Oboyski at 946-2203.

The parks department decided to find a new way to make the planting happen this year rather than bury the program in the recession trash pile.

“No one was willing to say, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore.’ We’re not going to let money stop us from doing everything,” said deputy parks chief Christy Hass (pictured).

Betty Thompson (at left in the photo at the top of this story, beside Westville’s Lehtonen) has planted flowers for years in her neighborhood, Cedar Hill, on the northeastern edge of East Rock Park. She and neighbors plant flowers on a traffic island leading to the park, as well as in a rock garden they created at Rock and Grace streets.

Tuesday, Thompson was maneuvering miniscule marigold seeds into trays divided into 388 dirt-filled cells. It took concentration and dexterity.

Dwight’s Pat Wallace (pictured) was filling her trays with coleus seeds. Those flowers do well in shady spaces like Rainbow Park, the play area Wallace and neighbors built on Edgewood Avenue between Dwight and Howe streets. This year, economic downturn be damned, fresh colors will fill the Rainbow once more.