Facelift for Gateway Park

A team of volunteers sprucing up Gateway Park. Photo: Corey Ullman

People often remark that turning from the frenzied, traffic-laden retail strip of Baltimore Pike onto Route 320 in Swarthmore is like suddenly entering a sylvan retreat. Half-century-old trees stretch their leafy branches across the road, enveloping the traveler in a hushed green calm.

The triangular patch of land situated at the intersection of those two roads is Gateway Park. 

With its towering evergreens and drifts of ornamental grasses swaying above brightly colored perennials, the park has for almost two decades served as a striking entryway to the borough. Recently, weeds and overgrown thistle have slowly strangled the flowers. Their thick tangle has obscured the “Welcome to Swarthmore” stone marker, dark at night due to a broken floodlight.

Finding a volunteer garden manager willing to oversee the park has been a recurring thorn in the side of the Swarthmore Horticultural Society (SHS). Baltimore Pike can be hot and noisy, and gardeners have to pull off the road onto the grass to unload plants and materials. Keeping Gateway spruced up requires more physical work than SHS’s other public gardens.

But now, it appears, the right gardener for the job has come along.

Dave Augustine, best known for the annual holiday light extravaganza in his yard on Park Avenue, agreed last month to take it over. 

Board member Judy Penney doggedly pursued Augustine for the job for more than a year. She got the idea from walking through his summer garden, where a koi pond, shrubs, and flowers take the place of winter’s thousands of holiday lights. She was struck not only by the garden’s beauty, but also by the gardener’s enthusiasm.

“His passion for plants, his energy, and his wanting to make a difference all seemed to be the answer to an ongoing problem of what to do about Gateway,” Penney said.

Augustine, who said he hated the sad state of Gateway Park, jumped right in and spent almost two weeks during his off hours in late June removing weeds, thistles, dried-out bulb foliage and trash. He filled almost an entire borough dump truck.

Although summer heat isn’t the best time to plant, Augustine was determined to beautify the space immediately. He and SHS vice president Andrew Bunting drew up a plant list, emphasizing Augustine’s favorite shrubs, Purple Leaf Sand Cherry and Red Twig Dogwood. While waiting for the order to arrive, they hired a plumber to fix a water hydrant broken for the past year.

Dave Augustine is Gateway Park’s new volunteer garden manager. Photo: Andrew Bunting

Then, on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, Augustine and several SHS board members and other volunteers met up at Gateway to dig in more than 200 plants, most of them annuals such as bananas, cannas, and salvia, creating a purple, blue, and orange colorscape.

Now, the SHS board hopes fervently that Augustine will embrace his new role as designer and caretaker.

“It’s a huge undertaking. Logistics are hard, and, honestly, it’s a 40-mph garden,” Augustine said. “No one can get up close and notice the hard work as much as [in] the downtown gardens. But it is the centerpiece, or entry, into town, and it has to look good.”

Earlier garden managers prized Gateway Park for its prominence, particularly former Swarthmore residents Mimi and John LeBourgeois, who lived around the corner and made a point of creating unusual displays. 

Before the Centennial Foundation purchased the 1/3 acre for the borough in 2002, the parcel was choked by weeds and straggly shrubs. The borough, along with the Swarthmore Environmental Advisory Council and the Scott Arboretum, organized an effort to create the park. A Scott Arboretum intern drafted the initial design plan, and SHS volunteered to provide changing flower displays for the beds.

But by 2011, the larger plantings were becoming overcrowded, and invasive species were flourishing. The Centennial Foundation donated $10,000 toward pruning and thinning the trees and reconfiguring the garden beds to include hardier plants needing less water.

The garden was managed by three different volunteers in ensuing years. They created masterful displays featuring a hardy, flowering meadow.

Since 2018, the SHS has struggled to find a gardener willing to take on the strenuous work in somewhat inhospitable conditions.

Augustine is not fazed by it, according to SHS board member Charles Cresson.

“I’ll accomplish what I need to,” Augustine said. “I like to have a vision and see people enjoy my vision.”

The icing on the cake? Augustine is an electrician. So that “Welcome to Swarthmore” sign is illuminated once again.