Community-powered Garden Refresh at Brooklyn Meeting

This spring, members of Brooklyn Meeting’s Property and Flower Committees, students at Brooklyn Frontiers, New York Quarterly Meeting staff, and representatives from the Audubon Society met together to plan a new landscaping layout for Brooklyn’s front garden. The Audubon Society advised the students on native plants that would do well in the garden’s location. On the morning of June 4, 2026, an Audubon rep brought a minivan loaded with plants and flowers to Brooklyn Meeting. Frontiers students and Brooklyn Meeting Friends removed weeds and installed the new plants in the garden bed closest to the school. 

Here's a before (pre-gardening, June 4) and after (June 16) photo:

The students planned to use the remaining plants to spruce up the other garden bed but ran out of time, as often happens at the end of a school year.

Brooklyn Friends stepped in. Former Brooklyn Botanic Garden staff person and crafty facilitator Madison Fletcher agreed to dedicate an upcoming Mending and Making Night to the remaining gardening tasks. A request for help was posted on the Young Adult Friends Whats App group on Monday. On Tuesday, June 16, eleven Friends with differing levels of gardening experience but similar levels of enthusiasm gathered at the meetinghouse. The garden already had some quickly-growing plants taking up space, particularly in the central part of the garden behind the white meetinghouse sign. 

Some decisions were made:

• Tall stalks of fireweed and Jerusalem artichoke were removed
• A native holly plant and a witch hazel plant were left

Then new flowering and ground-cover plants were added, including: 

• Golden alexanders
• Creeping phlox
• Foam flowers
• Violets
• Two blueberry bushes (!)

Friends also pruned some broken branches (and plucked a berry) from the serviceberry bush/tree that overhangs the entryway. Friends crowded into the garden to get the work done:

After weeding and planting the garden was watered thoroughly and the pathways were swept. The garden will continue to fill in over the next few months, though we will have to wait a couple of years for a full crop of blueberries.