RENWALD: BEAUTY ON BARTON
At 5 a.m. the foot traffic starts on Barton Street, nurses passing by on their way to work at the Hamilton General Hospital, bakers starting a shift, people getting on the bus to pick mushrooms, and people who have been up all night leading their desperate lives.
Lisa Walker sees it all from her remarkable front yard garden.
“I’m always out here; there’s a backyard, but I like being in the front. It sounds weird, Barton Street’s not all that desirable, but it’s like a big-screen TV.”
When Walker moved into the house, the front yard was dirt, and people would park their bikes in front of her stairs. “It drove me bonkers,” she says.
Right away the landlady paved the front, put up a fence, and Lisa got to work on a garden. Now pots of flowers frame the front door, window boxes decorate the fence, sunflowers are about to bloom, and morning glories will soon cover a trellis.
Next door in the side-by-side Victorian house, Walker’s neighbour Lynn Lickers has picked up the same garden theme.
“She’s the best,” Walker says. “We go on flower runs together.”
Most remarkable is a full up gazebo that cozies up to the sidewalk. With its lovely furniture, night lighting and hanging baskets of flowers, it might just be the nicest place to sit for blocks around.
“I see people from all walks of life, some stop and take pictures, some give the thumbs-up, some say there should be more people like you in Hamilton,” Walker says.
And people always ask if she worries things will get stolen. She’s not, but she’s got camera surveillance as a backup.
Before Barton, Walker lived on Main Street with her daughters Alyssa and Daisy and nephew Tyler. Before that, life was not good. “I had a troubled past,” she says. But after 15 years of troubles, she turned things around while caring for her dying mother.
“My mother would be proud of this,” she says, looking around at her cocoon of Barton beauty. “This garden is Mom-worthy.”
As we talk, the three kids join Walker on the front steps. They love it here.
Alyssa, 15, a charming honour student at Cathedral High School, remembers coming home from camp last summer to her mother’s “jungle.”
“Everything changed while I was away; the gazebo went up, the flowers were growing, it was amazing,” she says.
Walker is beautifying a bit of Barton that itself is turning around. Across the street, a crumbling house has been knocked down and a small apartment building is going up. One block west, the new Motel Restaurant opened two weeks ago with a funky retro vibe, and fine dining spot The Heather established itself last year. It’s a section where the new mixes with the old, where streetfront missions still serve the homeless and the addicted.
Walker describes gardening as her addiction. Before I arrived, she had pulled weeds from the sidewalk and gutter and planted begonias under the parking meters in front of her house. It’s therapy for To see more of Lisa Walker’s sidewalk garden, visit thespec.com her: the watering, the weeding and watching plants grow. She’s grateful her brother Russell taught her how to garden. It’s been a salvation.
“Even when I was in a bad way and I walked by someone’s house and they had flowers planted, it kind of changed the whole direction my day was going. It sounds trivial but it’s the truth and I can’t explain it, but it’s true.”