WESTLAKE : Success Blooms at Community Garden
The organizers of the Burlington Avenue Community Garden, a green space created out of an abandoned lot, will hold an open house today to showcase the fruits of their labor.
Since last fall, neighbors, community groups and volunteers have worked to procure donated materials with which to transform the lot at 415 S. Burlington Ave.--once a litter-strewn haven for crack dealers and their transient clientele--into 11 vegetable beds with fruit trees, flowers, murals and a patio area with benches.
Business owners and other community members donated fencing, plumbing, topsoil, wood, plants, trees and seedlings, and the city donated used bricks from structures damaged by the January, 1994, earthquake. A local merchant recently provided a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which will be placed in a shrine near the front of the garden.
“It’s amazing what we’ve scrounged up and put together to make this happen,” said Nola Marie Mott, a neighborhood resident and member of More Advocates for Safer Homes, a Westlake-area community improvement group that helped organize the garden.
Mott, who works for the state Department of Corrections, brought in a group of inmates from the Central City Community Center, a nearby halfway house for former convicts, to help set up the garden for community service credit.
The garden will be open to the public between 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and there will be live music and refreshments.
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