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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: She Helps Gardens Bloom
"Flower Lady" proves volunteers come from all ages, walks of life
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Mary Haith Savage, 79, turns vacant lots into colorful oases |
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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
She Helps Gardens Bloom
"Flower Lady" proves volunteers come from all ages, walks of life
by Diana Nelson Jones
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
August 8, 2010
When 79-year-old Mary Haith Savage leaves her house in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh with her bucket of tools and her gardening gloves, she might walk west to Dallas and Bennett. She might go north to Monticello Street. Wherever she turns, she has a garden to tend.
Under her hand over the last 40 years, a dozen plots of land have blossomed here among vacant lots and big, sturdy houses with boarded-up windows.
Back in 1950 when Pittsburgh was a prosperous steel town twice the size it is today, Homewood was solidly middle-class and a vacant lot was as abnormal as divorce. Now, nearly 80% of households in this predominantly African-American community earn less than $35,000 a year, and Savage stands out as “the flower lady.” She does the equivalent of full-time work as a volunteer. |
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At Homewood's western gateway, four lots once strewn with empty bottles, candy wrappers, and plastic bags are now an orderly garden. Flower beds, a plum tree, a river birch, and black walnuts grow in a ribbon through its center. Irises of several hues bunch at the sunny corner. Hostas and hydrangeas fill the cool swath along a house that provides a backdrop.
Savage was out one recent morning yanking weeds. She does not like the term “flower lady.” It sounds cute, as if the gardens are little, and lightweight. “It may offend some people to say this,” she asserts, “but there was a lot of blight. I said, ‘I'm going to do what I have to do to make this area more livable.' I don't have the patience to keep putting things off. I like to get it done.” Savage planted her first garden across from Homewood's Carnegie Library branch when she was its community relations specialist in 1969.
“With Mary, it's not just flowers ,” says Olivia Jones, executive director of the YMCA's Homewood-Brushton branch. “She believes the image of a community is important. In her world, it is a beautiful community, and if everyone would participate, we would be in a better place.”
A Mobile, Ala., native, Savage moved to Pittsburgh at age 5 to live with her aunt and uncle. She studied fashion design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and worked as a freelance designer. Savage was married twice and had two sons, one of whom died in 2006 of multiple sclerosis .
City Councilman Rev. Ricky Burgess calls her “a jewel in our community,” adding that her efforts to beautify Homewood “are a spectacular labor of love.”
Neither financing nor bureaucratic hurdles will come between Savage and her vision. “If I see a site I want to garden and if the city owns it, I go down to the City-County Building and get a garden waiver,” she says matter-of-factly. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has donated plants. After school, children help, as do block groups, garden clubs, and friends. Yet when you spot Savage, she is usually on her own.
“I like to have help, but I love to weed alone, too,” she says. “I find it so peaceful.” Savage is local committeewoman, a founding member of several neighborhood organizations, and the environmental chair of the Homewood-Brushton Coalition of Community Organizations .
In the fall and winter, she goes to board meetings, but in the spring, she says, “I tell them, ‘I don't do meetings. It's garden season.'” |
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