Men’s garden club to bring burst of color to Youngstown neighborhoods, gateways

YOUNGSTOWN

The Men’s Garden Club of Youngstown is launching a program this fall to give the city some “curb appeal.”

With the cooperation of Mill Creek MetroParks’ Fellows Riverside Gardens, club members and city residents will be planting spring flowering bulbs along two of the city’s border streets, Gypsy Lane and Midlothian Boulevard, and at its gateways. Residents have been asked to plant the bulbs this fall on the devil strip near the streets.

The club also is working with neighborhood groups on Midlothian to beautify entrances to their neighborhoods at Sheridan Road, and Euclid and Rush boulevards.

The club also aims to plant daffodils and tulips at the base of the signs that mark Youngstown’s city limits and to plant about 800 downtown, with the assistance of Streetscape, for a burst of spring color.

The club is hoping the effort will spur businesses at major intersections encircling Youngstown to incorporate the same daffodils and tulips in their landscape designs.

The club will furnish bulbs to homeowners, neighborhood associations and Streetscape free of charge. They are premier bulbs chosen for the project by Keith Kaiser, horticulturist at Fellows Riverside Gardens, and feature the “Fellows Favorite” daffodil, developed and named for the gardens on the occasion of its 50th anniversary three years ago.

For more information, design assistance or a list of varieties of bulbs to be used, contact Ted Vagas at 330-726-8740.

The Men’s Garden Club is in its 81st year and is one of the oldest garden clubs in America. It has about 100 members who plant the downtown square and the veterans memorial at Smoky Hollow annually; grow all the plants — about 16,000 — for Streetscape; sponsor an August horticulture show and a February garden seminar; provide a scholarship for a horticultural student; are reintroducing elm trees to the area through the club’s Elm Tree Project; and teach up to 12 youths from 12 to 16 at Akron Children’s Hospital Mahoning Valley’s youth garden.

Funds for these projects are raised through a spring plant sale at Masco Greenhouse on South Avenue near Western Reserve Road, and a fall chrysanthemum sale each September at Fellows Riverside Gardens.