The Pocket Park is an ongoing project, and one of eighteen garden sites UCCGC oversees. It was started by a volunteer in 2015, and with the help of family, friends and Special Olympic athletes, she turned an empty lot into a community garden!
Volunteer artist, Theresa Steele, painted scenes on one wall. Once she gets scaffolding, she’ll continue painting other beautiful images!
On the other wall, Alexandra Guyer and family and friends, along with Special Olympic athletes painted a storybook-like mural
Planting at the Pocket Park:
Alexandra and athletes planted lettuce, kale, beets, radishes, tomatoes, green beans, and a variety of peppers. They also planted vinca, geraniums, poppies, petunias, salvia and bleeding hearts. Most of the plants were bought from Union County Highschool, but some were started by seed and transplanted. We encourage anyone to water, weed, or pick.
Painting at the Pocket Park:
There are two walls that surround the Pocket Park. One, the ‘yellow wall’, is a mural that is in the midst of being touched up and added upon. This mural was painted by volunteers, many athletes from a local Special Olympics delegation. It has a storybook, childish feel that brightens the mood of anyone that sees it. The other, the ‘white wall’, is a mural being created by Theresa Steele (a volunteer artist who also teaches an art class for the athletes) and Alexandra Guyer. It depicts, among other things, an unfinished road map of Kentucky.
The Pocket Park is the result of a community working together to make something so unaesthetic as an overgrown lot into a bright, lush garden. It encompasses the heart and feeling behind the Union County Community Garden Coalition, and encourages people to work together for the common good.
“A garden requires patient labor and attention.
Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions.
They thrive because someone expended effort on them.”
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
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