It’s true – our growing season is short, and that’s what makes the fact that we’re becoming known nationally for our Garden Walk Buffalo even sweeter. Buffalo expatriot Andrew Sprung guests on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish blog, part of The Atlantic Monthly Online, to extoll the more beautiful aspects of Buffalo, which includes our outrageous zeal for gardening.
has elements of beauty dear to a few doughty hearts (e.g., my wife’s – she’s a
native). These include Olmsted-designed boulevards radiating from an Olmsted
central park (Delaware Park); a number of early twentieth-century architectural
icons; lots of big, boxy beautiful Victorian houses that can be had for a
relative song; a handful of long, graceful commercial and residential avenues
that make a vital urban enclave; a surprisingly vibrant arts community; and prices that make it almost like living in another country.
In recent
years, too, Buffalo has become a site of the triumph of imagination over
physical reality in two ways that have caught my heart. The first is the inkpool spread
of neighborhoods that have gone mad with gardening. Really. Gardening,
like happiness and obesity, is contagious, and urban pioneers on the West Side have
inspired neighbors to garden and so attracted new urban pioneers. Call it
clear, grow and build. The movement has been driven in large part by the
mind-blowing Buffalo Garden Walk, America’s best event of its kind, held the last weekend in July.