Gardening Culture Flourishes In The Hill

There’s an unusual orange milkweed growing in the pollinator garden on Daggett Street. 

There’s a new magnolia out front, a majestic palm thriving in the entryway, and lilies and other green plants bloom inside not far from the gardening bookshelves that stand beside a venerable wooden card catalogue.

There hyssop, Echinacea, and a bounty of other new seeds, both flower and vegetable, are waiting for the free taking.

But what’s really growing at the Wilson Branch Library in the Hill is community spirit through gardening. That was apparent Thursday afternoon as library staffer Jeffrey Panettiere, himself an avid gardener, presided over the branch’s weekly ​“Ask a Gardener” session.

Also on hand for the sessions are certified master gardeners Giulia Gambale and Faith Bailey, who, like Panettiere, not only help inquiring gardeners out with specific questions but connect them to some of the 11 community gardens in the Hill and to other resources.

For Panettiere, who grew up wrapping his Italian uncle’s fig trees to get them through winter and who worked in the landscaping business before shifting to the library world, the gardening programs at Wilson are a genuine labor of love.

“I get paid to be here,” he said, as Isabel Senes, a TESOL teacher at nearby Career High, dropped by the seed library, ​“but gardening and music are two of my passions.”

A regular user of the Wilson Branch seed library, Senes said she takes out books like The Serviceberry and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer — both for her Career classes and for herself.

This recent warm sunny Thursday after school, she was there looking for seeds to plant in the garden of her home in West Haven.

“What flowers do you have?”

“Echinacea,” advised Panettiere, ​“is good for pollinators and us [boosts the immune system], and for the soul, and the seeds come back every year.”

Senes concurred and took the pack of seeds from the drawer of the old wooden catalogue, preserved from the major renovation of the branch done in 2007, and then she spotted in an adjacent drawer some hyssop seeds.

“This didn’t come back last year,” she said. And as all gardeners must be optimists, she added, ​“I’ll take this,” and try again.

All Senes had to do record-wise was write down her name on a piece of paper adjacent to the card — er, seed catalogue — and write what she took and also what she’s looking for if it’s not there.

Throughout the years Panettiere has gathered seeds from sources that include Common Ground High School, the UConn Agricultural Extension, grants from groups like the Greater New Haven Green Fund, and individual donations of neighborhood gardeners.

Panettiere established the seed library and its attendant public programs in 2022 at Wilson. And then, with ongoing contributions of seeds and some grant money, he ​“seeded“ similar seed libraries that now thrive at the Mitchell and Fair Haven branches.

In addition to ​“Ask a Gardener,” Panettiere coordinates a kind of milkweed festival promoting the planting of that important native plant both on the grounds of Wilson and in the various community gardens in the Hill because it’s a favorite landing spot and food source for the endangered Monarch butterfly.

“There’s a perception,” he said, that people who live in neighborhoods like the Hill need only the basics, like job and food help. But they also are very interested in beauty and joy, in gardening and birding.

“We started [the seed library] with vegetables, but very soon people were saying, ​‘Where are the flowers?’”

But home ownership is not high in the Hill and many of the traditional gardening books, Panettiere said, assume people have large spaces of land.

Wilson’s collection features ​“books more applicable for the Hill, for small plots.”

On the other hand, there is also a huge amount of gardening know-how among Hill residents, he added, many of whom hail from rural backgrounds like the American South.

“And many come from other countries with [gardening] skills, but don’t have the means or space to fully engage with them. We provide the means — seeds , books, programs, and space [often through linking folks to the many community gardens]. We make it as easy as possible to be involved in gardening,” he said.

Case in point was 78-year-old Victor Smith who now came up the steps, past the majesty palm in the library vestibule and who sat talking soil and plantings in the music room of the library with another staffer.

A regular user of the seed library and the advice of the master gardeners, Smith said he grew up in Jamaica on a sugar cane plantation that his father supervised.

He came to New Haven in 1973 and after a long career both in the diagnostic imaging department at the Yale New Haven Hospital and with the Liberty Christian Center on Truman Street, where he pastors, he’s retired.

That means Smith has more time for planting and caring for — count ​‘em — three gardens, one at his own home and two at the church. Not to mention the community garden at 64 Truman St., which Smith helped to establish

Every season for many years, said Smith, he received soil, mulch, fertilizer, and plants from Gather, the successor to New Haven Farms. But not this season so far, and Smith had laid out the money to purchase those fundamentals for the community gardens. He reported he was having trouble reaching the staff at Gather. Could the Wilson branch gardeners help?

Panettiere said he would.

Asked how he got started gardening in New Haven, Smith began to recall not only the year but also the specific moment, which was back in 1977.

“One Saturday morning,” he said, ​“I was angry at someone.” 

He could no longer recall angry at whom, but to shake it off he remembered walking down Ella Grasso Boulevard, where the flea market was open.

“I saw a package of six beefsteak tomatoes,” he recalled, and he bought them.

Roll the clock ahead many years, and he said he has harvested 296 tomatoes from that first six pack.

And over the years since has raised about 27 varieties.

In addition to continuing to spread the seeds far and wide in the Hill and beyond, Panettiere said future programs he’s considering include one in nature observation at the library. 

That is, working with community members to check out the birds and the insects availing themselves of the growing plant life around Wilson.

No surprise, Panettiere has an entomologist in his life and has been documenting the bugs and the beauty around the branch via the online iNaturalist app, which will be part of it.

Click here for the list of gardening and other programs at the Wilson Branch Library.