Gardening projects at a historic landmark

Friends Hospital needs a little help from friends

Reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer
My Backyard / Denise Cowie

March 17, 2000

The witch hazel had just about done blooming, but the forsythia and the star magnolia at the front of Friends Hospital soon took over during the warm spell in Philadelphia last week, covering their branches in a haze of yellow and pink.
It all augured well for another splendid spring on the grounds of this Northeast Philadelphia institution, which is famous for the variety and brilliant color of its azaleas. As always, they will be the star attractions when the hospital opens its gates to the public on May 7 and May 14 for Garden Days, an annual event that draws hundreds of visitors to this tranquil spot. There are more than 150 different varieties of azaleas here – maybe 20,000 shrubs massed on 15 or more acres that, come late April and May, bloom in every color of red, white, flame, purple and pink you could imagine.
It's not only the azaleas that make these grounds a 100-acre oasis along the sprawl of Roosevelt Boulevard, however. They share space with 275 types of shrubs and 245 kinds of trees – among them native dogwoods, flowering cherries, ginkgo, bald cypress, beech, paperbark maple, Japanese maple, and a historic elm – as well as a collection of hosta and several thousand varieties of perennials.
Since the hospital was founded by Quakers in 1813, these grounds have been part of the therapy for the people who come here for treatment of mental illness. Just last year, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt designated the site a national historic landmark.
But today, if you looked closely at the gardens behind the hospital where the azaleas crowd the slopes and push into the woods, you'd see that something is amiss. Weeds and vines are encroaching on some of the prized plantings, and in the wooded areas Virginia creeper is growing up over the azaleas.
Friends Hospital is in need of a few friends itself – volunteers who will help restore these healing gardens.
Over the last five or six years, says plant operations director David Liddle, the staff that tends all these plants has essentially been cut in half. Chalk it up to the dramatic changes in funding within the health-care industry. Today there are just three groundskeepers to take care of everything, from all those trees and shrubs and the plantings around the 18 buildings to the man-made pond and the 30 acres of lawn.
They can't do it all.
Because of the density of the planting, says Liddle, each groundskeeper can tend about 10 acres effectively. Without help, the grounds will suffer a slow disintegration. "It's like being strangled," he says.
That's where you come in.
On April 8, Friends Hospital will hold its first volunteer gardening effort, which staffers are calling "Gardening With Friends."
From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. that day, they hope that scores of people from the community will lend a hand with raking, weeding and mulching – generally cleaning up the beds after winter, says chief operating officer Joseph Pyle. Master gardeners and hospital groundskeepers will supervise all the work, and those with more sophisticated gardening skills may be asked to divide perennials and transplant them. Volunteers should wear comfortable clothing, including gardening gloves.
If you can bring your own equipment for the day – tools such as rakes, shovels and wheelbarrows – so much the better. The hospital would also like to hear from anyone who can donate or lend equipment for the cleanup.
As a thank-you, Friends will provide a light lunch for all the volunteers, as well as giving everyone a T-shirt to commemorate the effort. To keep track of numbers for this, hospital staffers would like volunteers to register before March 31. Call 215-831-7803 to sign up. (If the weather is bad that Saturday morning, call the same number after 7 a.m. to find out if the cleanup is still on. If not, the rain date is the following day, April 9.)
Pyle hopes that the community will reach out to the hospital as the hospital has reached out to the community over the years.
"With reimbursement for behavioral health decreasing," he says, volunteer help is essential "in order to keep up the grounds – which are such an important part of what we do here."
Pyle would like to see a big volunteer cleanup become a regular event each spring and fall. In addition, he hopes smaller organized groups will "adopt a garden" – such as the geriatric garden that was especially designed for Alzheimer's patients – in which they would volunteer on a regular basis. And perhaps in June another band of skilled workers might help with pruning and the revitalization of the azaleas in areas such as Purple Hill.
"An hour here and an hour there would really go a long way toward keeping things looking good," Pyle says.
Why is all this necessary?
The hospital "has seen a precipitous drop in reimbursements from both private insurance and government insurance in the last several years," says Pyle.
The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 resulted in a loss of $4 billion over five years in all Medicare reimbursements in Pennsylvania, he points out. At the same time, behavioral health services have been devalued. A 10-year study by the Hay Group, commissioned by the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems and released last year, showed that behavioral health care as a percentage of total health-care spending dropped 50 percent in a decade.
"We're treating more patients than ever, with less reimbursement," Pyle says. "Reimbursement has to go to direct-care patient activities," forcing cutbacks in other areas, such as maintenance.
Cutting back on anything to do with the gardens must be particularly painful for Friends. The hospital – the nation's first private, nonprofit psychiatric institution – has used horticulture as a healing tool since its founding nearly 200 years ago, and it has been a pioneer in horticultural therapy in this century. Originally, the hospital was designed to be self-sufficient, and the grounds supported a dairy herd and produced corn, potatoes, wheat, vegetables, and medicinal herbs for the patients and staff.
In the late 1890s, business manager Henry Hall began to transform the farm into a park and botanical garden. According to the book Restorative Gardens, Hall probably began planting specimen trees before the turn of the century, and continued until his retirement in 1941. It was Hall, too, who began the renowned azalea collection. In the '20s, so the story goes, a patient discarded an azalea, but at Hall's direction the plant was rescued, and cuttings were taken from it and planted on the grounds.
Hundreds of azaleas were purchased and planted during this period, and by 1938 the board decided to open the grounds to the public in spring – the first Garden Days. The azalea collection has been expanding ever since.
"When I came here, we had 11 varieties of azaleas," says Liddle, who joined the hospital staff 35 years ago. "Now we have more than 150."
To enhance the garden's potential for therapy, he and grounds supervisor Dale Nemec try to have something blooming every month of the year. With the winter-blooming witch hazel and the early crocus, "we've gotten close to that," he says. "We've even had roses blooming in December, depending on the year."
Friends Hospital is part of the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta, he says, although it doesn't qualify as an arboretum because, except for a couple of days a year, it isn't open to the public, and it doesn't have its plants identified on the grounds.
"But as far as plant material is concerned, we do [qualify]," he adds.
An American elm that Liddle figures probably germinated around the time the hospital was founded has been designated as historic by the Elm Research Institute. When the Tuke Building was about to be erected in the mid-1970s, it was moved 40 feet to protect the massive tree, which is about 11 feet in circumference at chest height, says Liddle. But it's not only remarkable trees that get such treatment – a few years later, the Bonsall Building was moved four feet to save an ordinary white-flowering American dogwood.
In 1973, the hospital began a tradition of handing out an azalea grown from cuttings of Friends' shrubs to every carload of visitors that paid a nominal fee to attend Garden Days. It was a big hit.
"I'd like to think we've contributed to all the azaleas growing in Northeast Philadelphia," says Liddle. "You can see them everywhere."

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