Garden replaces church lot

A lot owned by Little Rock’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral is being turned into a community garden, with help from a Texas-based spirits maker and the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance.

Despite inclement weather, roughly 70 volunteers showed up last week for a workday at the Broadway Community Garden.

For the cathedral’s dean and rector, Amy Dafler Meaux, the turnout was a thing of beauty.

“It’s amazing to watch it happen,” she said. “The folks who showed up on Friday [Oct. 27] and worked through the pouring rain were there because of the possibility of a garden — just the potential.”

Meaux, who recently joined the alliance’s board of directors, finds joy in seeing a vacant, quarter-acre lot slowly transformed into a tiny slice of Eden.

“There’s so much going on in our world … that’s devastatingly hard,” she said. “We all want to do something, right? And this is a way for us to at least try, at least try, to love our neighbors and to love God.”

Meaux, who came to Little Rock in 2020, reached out to alliance executive director Kathy Webb two years ago and asked if the plot could be utilized.

It took generous donors, eager volunteers, a landscape plan and a zoning change to turn the dream into reality, she said.

Tito’s Handmade Vodka, based in Austin, made a sizeable donation, she said.

Scores of people, including a dozen or so from the cathedral, signed up to volunteer.

It’s a two-phase project. “This first phase [is] build the [planting] beds, irrigate the property. It’s considered new construction so we even had to get a new water meter on the property,” she said.

A fence has already been erected. A vertical planting system also will be installed.

“We are also getting prefab — so already built — a pavilion, a greenhouse and a shed that will go on the back part of the lot,” she said. Phase two will begin in the spring. “We’ll have to put a crop plan together,” she said. “We’ll seed all the beds in April.”

Samantha Grobaski, a field sales manager at Tito’s, said her company was pleased to work again with the alliance; they collaborated last year on the Oak Forest Community Garden on South Monroe Street.

“When we partner with Arkansas Hunger Relief [Alliance], we’re able to increase the access to these healthy foods and help reconnect the communities and do that one block at a time,” she said. “I’m …looking forward to see phase two and what we can do down the road.”

Webb says another work session will be held in the spring, with plants popping up soon thereafter.

“By early summer, we should start seeing the results of the work,” she said.

Webb sees potential not only for sowing and reaping but for cross-pollination as well.

“This project is going to mean a lot for the [broader] community, not only for the people in the immediate area,” she said. “We’re going to be able to have people from other neighborhoods come and look at this project and take back ideas for their own neighborhood.”

“It’ll be a teaching garden as well as a resource for downtown area,” she added.